Tag Archives: google

What’s Google doing: Castles and Moats

April 2, 2011 Sean Dague Leave a comment

There was a really great piece this week on the freight train that is Android:

So here is the kicker. Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own “economic castles.” Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive “moats,” funded by the height and magnitude of Google’s castle. Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy.

His final comment is spot on:

In Silicon Valley we like to make light of industries that are facing digital disruption such as newspapers, the record industry, and the movie industry, suggesting that their executives “just don’t get it.” Perhaps now we are witnessing the disruption of not just analog businesses, but also formerly interesting digital businesses as well.

Uncategorized

Google Font API

March 23, 2011 Sean Dague Leave a comment

One of my favorite new tools in doing websites is the new Google Font API. Using various hooks that exist in modern browsers, as well as really ancient versions of IE, Google is building a huge library of Open Licensed fonts. With a single css include, you can use any of these on your site, and be assured that the bulk of the internet will see what you see.

My current favorite of the new fonts is Cabin, which I’ve found works incredibly well on headers. There are now many dozen fonts in their API, and it is growing all the time.

In addition to using them on the web, you can download these fonts for local use. There is also a donate button when you download so you can give some money to the font creator, which will ensure more fonts under open licenses get released. I did this for the author of Cabin, as I love his eye for typography and want to see more of that out there.

With technology like this, HTML 5, brand new releases of Firefox and Internet Explore, the promise of the web a good as native, or even better than native, is really starting to take form. Very cool stuff.

Uncategorized

Android 2.3, all about gaming

December 7, 2010 Sean Dague Leave a comment

The Android 2.3 SDK dropped yesterday, and if you look through the api changes you can see the entire release is about gaming. There are new sensors, that are pretty much only good for gaming, new hardware buttons, and a pretty substantially openning up of what you can do from native (C/C++) code.

I think Google came to terms with the fact that Game developers are held to their ways, if they don’t have a compiler in their workflow they feel naked and exposed. If you can get on an OpenGL ES surface you can pretty much skip any java activities now. It actually makes me wonder if you could port stellarium whole sale to the platform, which may be something worth looking into.

For people that are less interested in gaming 2.3 was kind of a snooze. Strict mode looks interesting, where you can monitor yourself for aberrant behavior, but other than that nothing much juicy in there.

Uncategorized

A is for Amazon

September 19, 2010 Sean Dague 3 Comments

Now that google instant search has be released on the world I was curious what my internet alphabet is, so I typed each letter one at a time to see what came up. Here are the results.

A is for Amazon

B is for Best Buy

C is for Craigslist

D is for Dictionary

E is for Ebay

F is for Facebook

G is for GMail

H is for Hotmail (really… is that still around?)

I is for Ikea

J is for Jet Blue

K is for Kolhs

L is for Lowes

M is for Mapquest

N is for Netflix

O is for Orbitz

P is for Pandora

Q is for Quotes

R is for REI

S is for Sears

T is for Target

U is for USPS

V is for Verizon

W is for Weather

X is for Xbox

Y is for Yahoo

Z is for Zillow

Results may vary per individual. If you find something dramatically different, I’d be curious what it was.

Uncategorized

Google App Inventor

August 21, 2010 Sean Dague Leave a comment

Google did something pretty brilliant last month, and created a visual programing environment for Android devices. Google App Inventor is a combination web application for app layout, and java application for building programming logic with java blocks. If you are familiar with etoys at all, it is very similar.

For those that are already developers, this approach to developing is going to be tedious. We are not the target audience. This is really designed to open up the world of mobile development to a much wider set of people, especially as an introductory computer science course.

Uncategorized

A Java primer for Oracle v Google

August 17, 2010 Sean Dague Leave a comment

Oracle was the opening keynote for Linuxcon this year, where they talked about how much they did for Linux and open source. The moment everyone had checked out of their hotel in Boston, they filed a massive patent suit against Google’s open source java like implementation in Android. Oracle, you can suck it.

This has led to a lot of virtual ink in the blogosphere on the subject, and you can see that for the most part, we all sit inside our tech valleys, unable to see the wider world over the hills. This is especially true for folks that have worked in the same kind of tech for a long time. Charles Nutter provides a really good background on what the Java space looks like, and gives his own thoughts on the matter. Much like Linux, Java is really just about everywhere, some times in surprising places.

The Java platform is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. And by big, I mean it’s everywhere.

There are three mainstream JVMs people know about: JRockit (WebLogic’s first and then Oracle’s after it acquired them), Hotspot (Which came to Sun through an acquisition and eventually became OpenJDK), and J9 (IBM’s own JVM, fully-licensed and with all its shots). Upon those three JVMs lives a gigantic world. If you want the details, there’s numerous studies and reports about the use of Java in all manner of business, from the hippest new startups (Twitter recently switched much of their stack to the JVM) to the oldest of the old financial concerns. It’s the favored choice for government server applications, the strongest not-quite-completely-Free managed runtime for open-source libraries and applications, and now with Android it’s rapidly becoming one of the strongest (if not the strongest) mobile OS platform (even though Android isn’t *really* Java, as I’ll get into later). You may love or hate Java, but I guarantee it’s part of your life in some way or another.

It’s a long read, but well worth your time. The why people hate Java section is particularly useful for people that hate Java. It may or may not change your mind, but it will at least give you a broader view.

Uncategorized

Isn’t this what we were afraid Microsoft would do?

August 13, 2010 Sean Dague Leave a comment

There is one main reason people in the open source community get so violent over Mono (the open source .NET implementation): the fear that Microsoft could shut everything. There is long standing fear that MS has patents on core parts of the system. People were afraid their investments in software written on top of it would be at risk. Java was always held up as the much safer choice, with a longer legacy, being more open source friendly, with a company behind it that everyone trusted. Of course, companies change hands some times….

Oracle sues Google for patent, copyright infringement

Oracle filed a complaint in federal court in California, alleging the infringement of seven patents and copyrights by Google’s Android mobile operating system software.

I was once told that Sun actually made money off Java, and one of the big sources of revenue was the J2ME market, which is what all those dumb little snake games are written in. Google has undercut that by making a really popular cell phone platform with a version of Java they wrote themselves.

It’s still not a good world to be in, where innovation comes with a 10% patent tax.

Uncategorized

Why I’m excited for Google TV

May 31, 2010 Sean Dague Leave a comment

One of the things that most excited me out the Google I/O event a couple weeks back was Google TV. It’s a set top box that brings a lot of web content to the TV. But what really excites me about it is that it’s an Android platform, that will have access to the market place. Having this announce come out a couple days after I pushed my first Android app out got me even more excited about the platform.

In my house I’ve got the following devices: a thermostat that’s attached to my home network, with a web interface that lets me adjust the temperature and programs; a TED 5000 energy monitor which is on my home network; a set of weather station sensors that I’m collecting data from on my home server. Each of these have some web interfaces, non consolidated, to get data, and small little screens on the respective devices to go and see what’s going on. And in my living room I’ve got a 42″ TV, with brilliant color.

I want all these various home sensors and actuators to show up on my TV, and for me to be able to control them from there. I keep looking at my logitech harmony remote and really thinking that I should be able to use channel up / down to adjust the temperature in my house when we’re hanging out on the couch watching TV. Not that many months ago, intrigued by how the Netflix Instant Bluray disc worked, I started looking into the Bluray Java spec, and realized that if I had to I could probably build a disc for my PS3 that would do most of this, but it would be pretty custom, and the dev / test cycle would burn through a lot of bluray media. I tried to download the Popbox SDK to see if they’d give me what I want, but they’ve made it impossible for me to actually do that.

Google TV is going to give me a set top box in my living room that will let me get access to a wide range of content, which will be great, but also let me publish my own code to it. As a creator of software, having that application channel, even for only my own use, is just incredible. The fact that it will share a lot of characteristics with my phone makes it all the better.

I really can’t wait until Logitech gets it’s box out there, and I’ve got something to experiment with. Having my livingroom TV be the nerve center of my home is a concept that seems so natural, and I’m surprised has taken this long to bring us this kind of tech.