Archive for September, 2008
Google’s Tenth Birthday Portal
Earlier this month we reported on Google’s tenth birthday and some of their acheivements.
Whilst the 10th Birthday (going by the date of the company being incorporated) took place some weeks ago, it seems the event may have been overshadowed by other significant events around the world including the Olympic Games, Anniversary of September 11 and more.
Google has today released a portal site for their 10th Anniversary at http://www.google.com.au/tenthbirthday/
The site highlights many of the milestones and achievements, and some of more light-hearted moments in the company’s history, such as it’s famous April Fool’s jokes.
Their is also a Blog by the Google team which theorises on what one might expect from the Search Giant in the next 10 years ahead.
This portal is definitely worth a read for any Google-follower.
GooglePhone dubbed “Android”
Earlier this week, we announced that Google had launched it’s own mobile platform.
The name of that phone platform has been dubbed “Android”. It is an open source operating system for mobile or cellular phones which Google is pushing for free onto mobile phone distributors to get penetration in the mobile market.
Some reports suggest that Android is ready to launch, and will be sold on HTC “Dream” phone handsets as early as September 23rd.
The phone is reported to be integrated with a host of products from the Google Suit including Google Maps, Google Docs and more.
It will be interesting to follow the trends of the Google Phone and it’s user’s search habits over the months to come.
StumbleUpon
Recently, we were reviewing the website usage logs of a newly registered website, and had found that within 4 days, there had been an amazing 700 unique visitors and over 2000 hits to the site.
This is a phenomenal number of hits for such a new website with little to no exposure, and so we began to investigate just where this traffic was coming from.
Our analysis found that most of the traffic was being referred from a website called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a community-driven website that rates other webpages.
The concept is that you can use stumbleupon to find random internet pages and rate them. It compares your past ratings to that of “like minded people” who have similar usage trends to yourself to present you a page that you are likely to be interested in.
It also allows you to add and rate random pages which you quite literally stumble upon into the “stumbleupon” directory to be presented to “other like minded users”.
This has a few advantages over search results presented by SERPS, as each site is quality-rated by real humans, rather than being presented with a search result displayed by a search engine whose results may be manipulated.
This is an interesting website, and it demonstrates the power of social networking and other community driven websites that are capable of generating traffic, and also highlights that boosting traffic through search engine advertising and search engine optimisation needn’t be your exclusive focus for your online marketing strategy.
Check out stumbleupon.com or add the toolbar to your browser (support for firefox and internet explorer).
Google Creates Mobile Platform
Google is aiming to take a slice of the Iphone market by creating it’s own software for mobile phone software platforms.
Unlike the proprietary software built by Apple for it’s custom Iphone, the Google software is to be provided for free in effort to increase adoption by mobile phone vendors on various brands of phones, and thus improve market penetration and provide an alternative to the smart and sexy apple phone accessory.
This is clearly a sign of Google’s desire to occupy the mobile space which has seen dramatic increase in usage spurred on by 3G compatible handsets and other feature rich mobile phones such as the BlackBerry and Apple Iphone which have a plethora of mobile and internet applications.
This news comes less than 2 weeks after the search giant launched it’s Google Chrome Web Browser, which aims to take a slice of the browser market on desktop computers away from the dominating Microsoft and ever popular and free Firefox web browser.
It seems Google wants their presence known wherever people are browsing or searching the internet, and whereas in the past Google was associated with search, it seems Google is now aiming to be synonymous with the web in general.
It is interesting to watch as Google’s dominance of everything web-related unfolds.