Tag Archives: google

Google Rumored to Bid on San Fran Muni Wi-Fi RFP

Posted on 1 October 2005 | Leave a comment

Om Malik has on his blog an entry on his blog discussing some rumors that Google have issued a proposal in response to San Franciscos municipal Wi-Fi RFP. Now, this is something that is very, very interesting.

I may have to eat my own words about Google not being willing to deploy ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage, which is one of the recurring rumors related to Googles recent lease of dark fiber and launch of their Secure VPN for Wi-Fi software. I took some issue with the conclusion that the dark fiber network should lead one to conclude a push for Wi-Fi ubiquity from Google based on the complications and expense of deploying access points and purchasing the last mile connectivity to those access points. I stand by the supposition that this would be a pain for Google, but active participation in municipal Wi-Fi efforts really does turn this issue on its side. By getting municipalities to pony up the rights of way on lampposts and whatnot as well as effectively pay Google for the privilege of taking on the role of deploying access points and last mile connectivity, all of a sudden this is looking like a strategy Google could pursue.

The beauty part of this both for Google and municipalities is that Google can separate the ad revenue from Wi-Fi access through the VPN software offering. By making the VPN software optional to accessing the Wi-Fi network, Google frees the municipalities from being concerned about Google receiving ad revenue from a network built on a municipal contract. The great thing for consumers is that Googles network is most likely going to be required to offer non-discriminatory access to users of other security and other value-added Wi-Fi access software. I would suspect that those approving municipal contracts would look to prevent Google from getting an advantage from vertical integration with the underlying infrastructure built on a municipal contract (at leas they SHOULD). We should expect the value-added Wi-Fi software space bloom in a few years with competing companies looking to provide all kinds of functionality above and beyond simple Wi-Fi connectivity and offering customers a number of business models.

One issue that made me a big fan of Googles VPN software was the ability of this service to offer an important security function to Wi-Fi. I said something to the affect that companies offering traditional broadband (mostly the Bells and cable companies) should be kicking themselves. Google taking an active role in municipal Wi-Fi networks should keep executives at these companies awake at night. I hope the executives at the Bell and cable companies can recognize that a very savvy competitor has just entered their space. If Google succeeds with this strategy, they are going to eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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Folks in a Tizzy About Google Wi-Fi

Posted on 20 September 2005 | Leave a comment

According to this piece in the Washington Post, Google are planning a Wi-Fi service. The article itself comes to the Post from Reuters, and I think the title extrapolates a bit based on Googles offering of a Wi-Fi VPN client. I havent seen the software myself yet, so Im not entirely sure about all the details. However, offering a secure client access VPN software is a far cry away from rolling out your own Wi-Fi access service.

What I think Google might be doing is actually in-line with their business plan. The Wi-Fi user logs in (and pays, if need be) to the Wi-Fi service at the local coffee shop, airport lounge or wherever. The user then fires up the VPN software and is good to go for secure browsing over inherently insecure Wi-Fi. No doubt the security client is going to deliver localized advertising in exchange for the security service. The user gets secure connectivity and Google gets to serve up localized ads. Provided you trust Google as the secure VPN provider for your now-encrypted traffic, thats not a bad deal.

Theres also been a lot of talk, and Ive posted about it before, that Google are building a dark fiber network as the basis for their own Internet backbone. Engadget has a bit more on the topic, and some people extrapolated from that backbone build the fact that Google would build their Wi-Fi service. The two projects are actually tangential, but perhaps not entirely unrelated. One way for Google to cut expenses once their Secure VPN client goes on-line is to carry as much traffic on their own network as possible in order to avoid charges from existing Internet backbone providers. They can even make arrangements with T-Mobile and the other large Wi-Fi providers to link up directly to the Internet backbone theyre using. This saves Google a lot of cash and enables them to deliver better performance to the end users.

But Google offering up free Wi-Fi on some nationwide or global basis is a long ways away. Everybody getting hyped about Google offering free Wi-Fi access needs to keep in mind that in order to do that Google would need to install thousands upon thousands of Wi-Fi access points at venues throughout the country. They would have to deal with each individual venue owner to negotiate even plugging the thing in on their premises. They would then need to deal with DSL or cable broadband or even T-1 circuits to EACH of those locations in order to link it back to a backbone, and only then would it touch this network Google are evidently building. Having their own Internet backbone does NOT help them avoid this pain not one bit. I find it extremely hard to believe Google are going to take the time and expense to do this. More than likely well continue to get our Wi-Fi from the same companies providing Wi-Fi today.

Engadget’s screen shots seem to indicate that one actually needs to be at a Google-provided hotspot to make thr Google Secure VPN work. If that is truly the case then the utility of this offering is going to be very limited. There’s just no way Google are going to go through the pain of rolling out thousands and thousands of hotspots. Why would they with the large and growing installed base of hotspots already out there? Using JiWire’s hotspot directory I can’t find any hotspots listed as being provided by Google in the San Francisco area, which is supposedly the rollout city for the Secure VPN offering. So I’m wondering if the inability to use the software is related to the fact that the guys at Engadget are not at a “Google” hotspot or that they’re not at a public hotspot which the software is able to recognize. This recognition would be required if Google is going to be able to serve up localized ads.

Even if all Google are offering is a free VPN client this is still extremely revolutionary for the telecommunications industry. A while back I wrote about how the Bell companies needed to see the opportunity that municipal Wi-Fi represented for them to offer security services for a fee or as an add-on to their current broadband subscribers. If Google are doing what I think theyre doing, thats a big check mate to the Bell companies, because your opportunity to differentiate yourselves from a free service has just come and gone. As the Soup Nazi would say, NEXT!

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Google Buying Up Dark Fiber?

Posted on 15 August 2005 | Leave a comment

Om Malik has a story at Business 2.0 speculating on some of the reasons Google have been alleged to be buying high capacity dark fiber capacity from wholesale telecommunications providers. This comes several months after CNet published a speculative story about why Google were advertising for someone with experience negotiating with telecommunications companies. The complete list of job qualifications for said listing are as follows:

  • Negotiations for collocation space in conventional data centers; for racks, power circuits, cross connects, and remote hands services in conventional data centers; and for wholesale transactions with conventional data centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
  • Negotiation and purchasing of IP transit services in North America, Europe, Asia, and/or Latin America; negotiation of partnerships with Internet exchanges, regional peering providers, and paid peering arrangements with major carriers.
  • Identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network; contracts and negotiation for managed metropolitan services and long haul wavelength services to fulfill capacity and redundancy requirements in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
  • Identification and negotiation of contracts related to leases or purchases of data centers facilities and/or properties capable of conversion to data center purposes; experience with evaluating and assessing potential data center facilities for acquisition; experience negotiating startup, service, and maintenance contracts for data centers; experience obtaining data center infrastructure hardware including chillers, generators, UPS systems, transformers, power distribution units, etc.

My own telecom experience didn’t lead me to think too, too much of this at the time. The original job posting looks pretty standard for a company with heavy data hosting requirements that is going to need lots of hosting space and bandwidth capacity to support a data-intensive platform such as Google. Considering the volumes of information they’re dealing with, dark fiber seems like a perfectly cost-effective path to take. The per-unit cost of dark fiber is significantly less than leased capacity, but only the highest-volume customers can make it cost effective. Likewise, Google put so much information onto the Internet backbone, that they must pay a lot in interconnect charges. As Google begin to offer more and more high-bandwidth content such as audio and video, it would become a significant expense to their bottom line. Using dark fiber and effectively building their own Internet backbone would help them better control these costs.

Om speculates that one possibility is that Goolgle could build out a nationwide Wi-Fi network. This is the bit of his article which is likely to get the most attention. The business model would be a mix of subscription access and location-based advertising. I’m not sure dark fiber purchases lend themselves to this end, because there would be an awful lot of local access connectivity to individual Wi-Fi locations which would be required. However, Om may have better insider information than I: Business 2.0 has learned from telecom insiders that Google is already building such a network, though ostensibly for many reasons.

The Wi-Fi thing doesnt make sense to me. Wi-Max maybe. But I doubt Google would want to deal with all of the local access issues involved in a major Wi-Fi build out (dark fiber wont help you here) nor the negotiations with owners of the venues in which Wi-Fi would be made available.

A reason which makes much more sense to me, and that Om outlays in his article as well, is that taking a dark fiber approach helps Google eliminate the expense of putting large amounts of information onto ISP networks. Om writes:

An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month. Here’s why: Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP — say, Comcast (CMCSK) — which links up with Google’s servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase. Big networks owned by the likes of AT&T (T) get around transit fees by striking “peering” arrangements, in which the networks swap traffic and no money is exchanged. By cutting out middlemen like AboveNet, Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees.

This makes much more sense to me, and fits in better with Google’s current content-oriented strategy.

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Not The Only One Pleased with Google News RSS

Posted on 12 August 2005 | Leave a comment

I came accross this post on Research Buzz that illustrates very well that I am not the only one who suffered from pleasure overload when the Google News RSS feed feature was launched:

My husband walked in as I was in the kitchen making lunch (hummus on rye and iced tea.) As I moved around the room I did a Jules Feifferesque dance. Slow with a lot of sway-ey bendy stuff.

He watched me for a moment. “Are you all right?”

I tossed the hummus back in the fridge and pirouetted (slowly). “This is my happy dance with lunch creation. It’s a celebration of the fact that we haven’t run out of hummus and the bread isn’t moldy yet. Oh, and that Google News is now offering RSS feeds.”

I don’t think I did a happy dance, but I am certainly loving having these feeds in my RSS aggregators. I’ve got the standard Top News, Business and Sci/Tech feeds as well as a few based on my own search terms to capture the goings on in the telecommunications industry and get the latest news about what is going on in China.

I think it’s the ability to track your own Google News searches which is the real power of this feature. After you conduct your search in Google News, look to the left-hand side of the results page, under the gray boxes which contain the links to the standard Google News pages. You’ll find a link for RSS and Atom feeds. Right-click and copy-paste or whatever it is you do to add an RSS or Atom URL to your aggregator, and you’re good to go. Ci researchers can enter company names and key terms of interest to their industry and they’re well on their way to having a firehose blast of news delivered to their desktop.

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Google News RSS Feeds

Posted on 9 August 2005 | Leave a comment

I haven’t written a whole lot about RSS and it’s functionality for newshounds and researchers alike, but suffice it to say I think it’s the best thing since fried chicken. Also, despite the company’s issues with having their own tool used against them by a reporter, Google is pretty sexy, too. So when you combine the two together I start to go into you’ve-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter pleasure overload.

You can now add Google News RSS feeds to your aggreagator. You can also (give me a second to catch my breath) create RSS feeds of specific Google news searches. This is all very, very cool.

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What’s Good for the Google is Good for the… uh… Gander?

Posted on 8 August 2005 | Leave a comment

It seems that journalists from C|Net are prohibited from conducting interviews with Google. The alleged reason for this ban is that a C|Net journalist used Google to find out information about Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt. The New York Times article can be found here.

The article, by Elinor Mills, a CNET staff writer, gave several examples of information about Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, that could be gleaned from the search engine. These included that his shares in the company were worth $1.5 billion, that he lived in Atherton, Calif., that he was the host of a $10,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Al Gore’s presidential campaign and that he was a pilot.

I’ll leave the irony and the prospective hypocrisy of this whole situation aside for a moment to suggest that CI professionals interested in conducting a bit of counterintelligence to the benefit of their own firms would do well to use Google and other search engines to conduct searches on their own executives. Search for their names, especially combined with their current and past titles and employers. Run searches for their e-mail address. Search publicly available databases, such as those that track political campaign contributions if this could create some sort of issues for your company. Exercises like this can help a firm’s PR team know what is publicly available and anticipate potential issues which could arise.

It’s interesting that Google are seeing the power of this thing that they’ve created. Overall it’s awesome, but from time to time it can definitely be annoying.

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Using Google to Find Spreadsheets

Posted on 25 July 2005 | Leave a comment

Research Buzz today has a good bit of advice for Internet researchers on how to use Google to find spreadsheets posted on the web. The primary focus of the piece is to use the filetype: operator the search for Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets. For those not familiar with the filetype operator, it tells Google to look for pages in which the URL ends in “XLS” but does not validate the filetype.

From Research Buzz:

filetype:weatherwax inurl:weatherwax
filetype:feathers inurl:feathers
filetype:hamburger inurl:hamburger
filetype:montypython inurl:montypython

(You can’t use the filetype: syntax alone in a search, but you can work around that by teaming it with the inurl: syntax.)

They left out my favorite companion to the filetype: operator, and that is the site: operator. By combining these two, you can search for all of a particular filetypes on a given web site. For example, the following entry into the Google command bar will search for all of the Microsot Excel documents in the att.com domain which is owned by AT&T.

filetype:xls source:att.com

I have found a TON of great intelligence doing this. It surprises me how careless people can be sometimes making sensitive corporate information available to the public Internet audience. Competitive intelligence professionals would do well to proactively run this and related searches on their competitor pages. Look primarily for Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents for fun and profit. Conversely, an exercise in counterintelligence would be to run these searches on your own domain to make sure no documents are posted to the public Internet which shouldn’t be.

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Google Acquires Dodgeball

Posted on 13 May 2005 | Leave a comment

So I’ve been busy at work the past few days, and I missed this when it showed up on Slashdot. Many thanks to Andy from Slashdot Review for keeping me up-to-date when work wont let me troll my RSS feeds and web sites as often as I would like.

A few days back I wrote about some potential applications of social networking. It seems the guys at Google are way ahead of me on this, and have this week snapped up the start-up social networking operations of Dodgeball. Im sure theres some potential for Google to combine the mobile element with their social network site Orkut. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

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Google via SMS

Posted on 7 October 2004 | Leave a comment

Anybody of a certain age who knows me well knows that I have a love of mobile text messaging matched only by Japanese teenage girls. So it’s only inevitable that I should love this new feature from Google.

Google have rolled out a new feature that allows users to submit queeries using SMS messaging on their phone. Examples include lookups of telephone numbers in specific cities either by city and state or zip code, measurement conversions, product pricing from Froogle, mathematical calculations and snippets from web sites. The list goes on and on. Sweet sweet sweet!

Three thouhgts that come immediately to mind as great additions to this functionality could be hotspot locations in a given locality, a movie listings feature and perhaps some snippets of the very latest news stories on a given topic.

This is a longshot from the systems integration side of the house, but if the wireless carrier could also send along some location information in case the customer doesn’t know where they’re located that would be sweet and perhaps even make a functionality like directions a possibility. Now, the downside to that could be if you can send the location along with an SMS to Google, significant others could somehow turn that around to discover they’re better half’s text message from a boys’ or girls’ night out is really a cover from a clandestine booty call on the side. I know AT&T Wireless already have a “find your friends” option for GSM customers who can get a general view of where other AT&T Wireless customers are located… I wonder how many people have signed up for this.

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