Google (Finally) Finds Its Voice

For people who spend a lot of time thinking about disruptive innovation, there are few companies more interesting to watch than Google. The many ad-supported online services it's been rolling out over the years have disrupted everything from libraries to snail mail to word processors, and the image it's acquired in the popular imagination as a sort of Anti-Microsoft--a young, nimble, innovative, un-evil kind of company--doesn't hurt either. Maybe now it's time to ask: What isn't Google disrupting out in Mountain View? Well, now that we've had some time to reflect on the mid-March release of Google Voice, it looks like one answer is phones.


First, some background. Back in 2007, Google ( GOOG - news - people ) acquired a small but fascinating company called GrandCentral for about $50 million, and it has reworked and expanded GrandCentral's innovative menu of features to create Google Voice. Although at the time there was some concern that GrandCentral would enter (and possibly never emerge from) what Slate's Farhad Manjoo called the "Google Black Hole," it's clear that Google has made a healthy investment creating a slick service with plenty of interesting features.

The new service, which should soon open its doors to new, non-GrandCentral users, assigns users a new, single phone number, and that number rings all of your phones at once. Google Voice offers some neat technological advances to help users manage phone calls: features available through the site include voicemail storage and computerized transcription, Gmail-like SMS storage (you can send SMS messages through the site as well), call blocking (it even plays a recording to tell persistent callers your number has been disconnected), conference calling, and the ability to place calls (although the calls are placed via your phone, so you won't save any minutes). In a nutshell, Google Voice makes managing your telephonic life a little easier.

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So what does it all mean? Google has indicated that Google Voice will be free for users (except international calls--more on those below) and won't include ads, so there is little doubt that it will attract a healthy user base, but I'm not sure how much of an impact the service will have, either for the market or for Google itself.

Big-Picture Market Implications
Internet-based telephony (VoIP) has been getting a great deal of attention in recent years, and leading services Skype and Vonage ( VG - news - people ) have certainly had more than their share of attention from the media and from other companies. (Skype was acquired by eBay ( EBAY - news - people ), of all companies, in 2005). Commentators have said that Google Voice could be threatening to both these companies and to more "traditional" telecoms, but four factors make me skeptical...

First, it's not clear that the VoIP industry is a particularly attractive industry to enter, or that incumbents are doing at all well. Since its "most successful IPO in years" in 2006, Vonage stock has done nothing but decline (from above $12 a share to less than 50 cents a share). Skype, on the other hand, is a fairly popular way to make free computer-to-computer video calls and has certainly done a fine job accumulating and pleasing users, but as a revenue generator for eBay it's been very disappointing, and persistent rumors of a sale have been floating around for more than a year.

Second, VoIP's woes aside, Google Voice's Internet-based calling features don't seem to be particularly attractive and seem designed to supplement, not replace, existing phones. Sure, you can initiate calls through the Web site, but unlike Skype, Google Voice routes those calls through your cellphone or land line, so you're still basically using your old phone company and won't save any minutes (although it's worth noting that international calls are quite cheap if begun through Google Voice). Unlike Vonage, Google Voice can't actually replace your phones; it just makes them easier to use.

Third, Google Voice's success will depend on consumers' willingness to adopt it--and the fact that Google is demanding consumers change their telephonic habits may impede that adoption. Google Voice would shift the experiences of checking voicemail, sending text messages, and even making calls from the phone itself to the computer, and unless consumers see a substantial benefit, they will not be motivated to make that change. On the other hand, many of us have demonstrated our willingness to make big changes to our communications habits (certainly, carrying phones around with us everywhere was a big change), so this obstacle may not be so problematic.

 

10 Creative Salt & Pepper Shakers

Published on Yesterday 4/14/2009 under Objects

Ants Salt & Pepper Shakers

The only ants that will get invited to every picnic this summer are this adorable Ants Salt & Pepper Shakers ($14.99). This fun salt and pepper shakers have a glossy black finish, plus wire legs and tiny antennae.

Lift and Shake Salt and Pepper Shakers

Give your meals a real workout with the Lift and Shake Salt and Pepper Set ($14.23) that's strong on practicality and heavy on the charm. The shaker at each end of the barbell opens and closes with an easy twist; the weightlifter is heavy cast metal with a rubberized coating.

Keyboard Salt and Pepper Shakers

Here's something fun to add some geeky style to your geeky apartment, these fun Keyboard Salt & Pepper Set ($12.95). They come as a set of two with the S key for salt and the P key for pepper.

Rubik's Cube Salt and Pepper Shaker

The Rubik's Cube Salt and Pepper ($18.00) will season your meat, if you're intellectually worthy. Solve the ancient riddle of seasoning, if you can!

Hugs Salt and Pepper Shakers

The Hugs Salt and Pepper Set ($19.95) is all about sentiment; we can't help but think there's some of that black-and-white, everyone-get-along implication.

Good Chemistry Salt and Pepper Shakers

Spice up your life with a little of the Good Chemistry Salt and Pepper Shakers ($19.89) This amusing set of salt and pepper shakers is anything but formulaic, although a basic knowledge of the periodic table helps the joke.

Burger & Milkshake Salt & Pepper Shaker Set

Bring back memories of eating at your favorite drive-in with the Burger & Milkshake Salt & Pepper Shaker Set ($15.95), fully crafted of ceramic.

Brain Salt and Pepper Shaker

What's for lunch? A human brain! That's the idea the Brain Salt and Pepper Shaker (£9.99) conveys. It's made of two halves just like a real brain, where one side is salt and the other is pepper. Both the halves are kept together with a couple of small magnets and the brain is intricately made out of ceramic.

Western Cowboy Boots Salt and Pepper Shakers

Get all western with these cute Cowboy Boots Salt and Pepper Shakers ($19.95); John Wayne would be proud.

Bowling Salt and Pepper Shakers

This fun Bowling Ball and Pins Kitchen Salt and Pepper Shaker Set ($7.99) stands 4.5 inches tall. The bowling pin's edges contain small magnets, which allow the bowling pins and bowling ball to be stored in an action pose.

Having failed in its attempt to sell Skype, eBay is now poised to carve off the business via an initial public offering. That could be a gamble.

Market conditions allowing, the online-auction titan will float Skype next year, eBay ( EBAY - news - people ) chief executive John Donohoe said late on Tuesday. This suggests that eBay's apparent sale talks with Skype's Scandinavian founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and three private equity groups, have broken down. The bidders had reportedly been offering eBay around $2.0 billion for the business, $600.0 million less than what the founders had sold it to eBay for in 2005. (See "Hype Over Skype.")

Donohoe's announcement could be a veiled attempt to find another bidder for the Skype; eBay has, of course, denied this. Trouble is the Internet telephony service is a tough sale. Skype might be a a popular communication tool, accounting for around 8.0% of the world's international calling according to Telegeography, but translating "eyeballs" into "revenue" has proved challenging.

Skype's customers only spend an average 11.3 cents a month on its service, compared with the typical spend of around $50 a month for a cellphone. Analysts have also doubted eBay's goal to double Skype's $551.0 million in revenue last year, to $1.0 billion. Taking Skype to the next level would require considerable capital investment, says Atlantic Equities analyst James Caldwell, and that could deter a buyer.

As if the cloudy revenue model weren't enough, Joltid, a firm which owns the intellectual property rights to the peer-to-peer technology that Skype uses, has been attempting to end its licensing deal with the firm. (Joltid is owned by none other than Zennstrom and Friis.) EBay has fought back in a London court, but the prospect of appeals and counter-appeals on an issue so core to Skype's success could be enough to put off investors already hesitant to open their purse strings.

With eBay struggling to find buyers in the technology and private equity spheres, the obvious question is whether ordinary investors will be convinced to buy shares. There are are plenty of tech IPO horror stories to put them off: back in 2000, 3Com's floatation of the hand-held computer maker Palm was so oversubscribed it sent the price soaring--and the stock has lost 98.0% of its value since.

Microsoft Corp.'s next version of its Office desktop programs will reach consumers next year, though not likely in conjunction with the Windows 7 operating system.

Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) is set to announce Wednesday that Office 2010 will be finished and ready to send to manufacturers in the first half of next year.

From there, it can take six weeks to four months or more for the programs to reach PC users, said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president in the Microsoft group that makes Office. The timing will differ for big businesses and individual consumers, and for people who buy packaged software versus those who download it.

Some industry watchers had expected a new version of Office this year, but Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer extinguished that rumor at a meeting with analysts in February.

Capossela declined to be more specific about a launch date. Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, is scheduled to reach consumers by the end of January 2010.

Office 2010 - previously known by the code name "Office 14" - will include slimmed-down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that let people create and edit documents in a Web browser. Consumers will have access to a free, ad-supported version, and Capossela said the company is still hammering out what to charge businesses that want a version without ads.

Microsoft plans to let hundreds of thousands of people test a technical preview of the new Office portfolio starting in the third quarter of 2009, Capossela said. The company did not say whether average PC users will have a chance to test a more polished beta version.

Microsoft also said a new version of its Exchange e-mail server will be available for purchase in the second half of 2009. When paired with the next version of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program, Exchange 2010 aims to prevent e-mail faux pas and would warn people against trying to "reply all" to a huge distribution list. Microsoft said it can also be tweaked to stop people from sending e-mail outside the organization, helping businesses cut down on unnecessary e-mail and prevent leaks.

Will Apple's wonder gadget get more memory? Will it come in different colors? Who cares. A new processor is what it really needs.

Will the iPhone get more flash memory? Will it get new features, like a compass?

Who cares. What the iPhone really needs is a new processor. And there is no sign, yet, that it will get one.

Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) alluded to the problem in March, when it introduced new software for its smart phones. The reason it doesn't run more than one third-party application at a time, Scott Forstall, Apple's vice president for iPhone software development explained, is because such work will drain the battery too quickly.

It's more than just a power-management problem, however. "One of the drawbacks of the iPhone right now is it can only [run] one application at a time," says Will Strauss, president of wireless market research firm Forward Concepts. With a more powerful processor, he adds, the iPhone could run several applications concurrently.

Apple's rivals are already heading down that path. Palm is pushing out a new phone based around Texas Instrument's ( TXN - news - people ) OMAP3430 processor. One of the Pre's key features: the ability to show the user information from more than one application at a time. The software makes it slick, but TI's hardware makes that possible.

Apple, meanwhile, relies on an application processor from Samsung. There are two problems there. For starters, Samsung also sells smart phones, allowing it to give its phones the same capabilities, on paper, as Apple's iPhone. The bigger problem, however, is just about muscle. The relatively dinky processor can't match the TI model's power.

There are several possible solutions. Samsung could build a new processor around the same ARM Cortex-A8 architecture TI uses, or Apple could switch to TI, Strauss suggests. Alternatively, Apple could build a processor of its own, presumably one based on the ARM-architecture, with the chip designers it picked up last year with its acquisition of PA Semi (see "Apple Buys Chip Designer").

There are no signs that Apple is doing that--yet. Then again, if Apple were, it would likely keep such a move a very tightly guarded secret, because it would be the only information about its new phone that would really matter.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the last six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems, military leaders said Tuesday.

Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, said the military is only beginning to track the costs, which are triggered by constant daily attacks against military networks ranging from the Pentagon to bases around the country.

"The important thing is that we recognize that we are under assault from the least sophisticated -- what I would say the bored teenager -- all the way up to the sophisticated nation-state, with some pretty criminal elements sandwiched in-between," said Chilton, adding that the motivations include everything from vandalism to espionage. "This is indeed our big challenge, as we think about how to defend it."

According to Army Brig. Gen. John Davis, deputy commander for network operations, the money was spent on manpower, computer technology and contractors hired to clean up after both external probes and internal mistakes. Strategic Command is responsible for protecting and monitoring the military's information grid, as well as coordinating any offensive cyber warfare on behalf of the U.S.

Officials would not say how much of the $100 million cost was due to outside attacks against the system, versus viruses and other problems triggered accidentally by Defense Department employees. And they declined to reveal any details about suspected cyber attacks against the Pentagon by other countries, such as China.

Speaking to reporters from a cyberspace conference in Omaha, Neb., the military leaders said the U.S. needs to invest more money in the military's computer capabilities, rather than pouring millions into repairs.

"You can either pay me now or you can pay me later," said Davis. "It would be nice to spend that money proactively ... rather than fixing things after the fact."

Officials said that while there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence on the spending estimate, they only began tracking it last year and are still not sure they are identifying all the costs related to taking computer networks down after a problem is noticed.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that its vast computer network is scanned or probed by outsiders millions of times each day. Last year a cyber attack forced the Defense Department to take up to 1,500 computers off line. And last fall the Defense Department banned the use of external computer flash drives because of a virus threat officials detected on the Pentagon networks.

The cost updates come as the Obama administration is completing a broad government-wide review of the nation's cybersecurity.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

LAS VEGAS--Realizing that cellphone sales will eventually slow in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon are racing to connect everything from netbooks to electronic readers to their networks.

Both companies insist they are receptive to any idea as long as it doesn't harm their networks. Judging from two possible future products--a wireless-enabled dog collar and an automatic cow milking system--the telcos truly are thinking outside the box. (See "AT&T And Verizon's Start-Up Mentality." )

Glenn Lurie, president of AT&T's ( T - news - people ) emerging-devices unit, would like to support dog collars on his company's network. Lurie imagines the collars would incorporate small wireless modules that beam data to a Web site so owners could track the dog's location if it got lost or loose.

"Think how many people have pets that they treat like children," Lurie says. "People laugh about the idea, but it really is a viable application." He estimates that consumers would pay up to $100 a year for such a service.

Verizon ( VZ - news - people ) is considering supporting an application that would manage a dairy farm's automatic milking system, says Tony Lewis, head of the company's open development unit. The application would use Verizon's cellular network to collect status updates on the milking machines.

The company has already approved a device that tracks the whereabouts of prison inmates and several top-secret products for the government.

UC San Diego -- a school for the smart ones, supposedly -- mistakenly congratulated nearly 29,000 applicants on their acceptance, according to university officials.

Earlier this month, about 17,000 students were offered admission for the fall, leaving nearly 29,000 hopefuls out in the cold.

But on Tuesday, the school's communications office said an e-mail was sent Monday afternoon to all 46,377 students who applied for admission -- including the 29,000 rejects -- welcoming them to the campus.

A half-hour later, school officials said, they realized their mistake. Almost two hours after the first note went out, a second e-mail was sent, apologizing to 28,889 freshmen applicants for the mistake.

"No member of this department is more acutely aware of the emotional roller-coaster that this could cause for our applicants," Assistant Vice Chancellor Mae W. Brown said.

An anonymous parent told the Los Angeles Times it was a "colossal screw-up."

Similar incidents have happened at other schools -- including Cornell in the recent past, the paper reported -- but the UCSD incident was the biggest "screw-up."

Google Inc. and major music companies launched a free Internet music download service for China on Monday in a bid to help turn a field dominated by pirates into a profitable, legitimate business.

The advertising-supported service will offer 1.1 million tracks, including the full catalogs of Chinese and Western music for Warner Music Group Corp. (nyse: WMG - news - people ), EMI Group Ltd., Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) Music Entertainment and Universal Music and 14 independent labels, the companies said. It will be limited to use by computers whose Internet protocol, or IP, addresses show they are in mainland China.

"This is the first really serious attempt to start monetizing online music in China," said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia and regional head of the global recording industry group, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Chinese pirate Web sites offer downloads of unauthorized copies of music despite repeated lawsuits and government crackdowns. Legitimate producers have no estimate of lost potential sales, but some Chinese performers have announced they were no longer recording because piracy made it unprofitable.

The venture gives Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) a new way to compete in a market where its research shows 84 percent of people say finding music is their main reason to use search engines, said Kai-Fu Lee, Google's president for Greater China.

"With today's offering, we complete the puzzle and offer a complete set of services that are fully integrated," he said.

China has the world's biggest online population, with some 300 million Internet users, according to the government. Online commerce is still modest in China and most Web surfers are looking for music, games and other entertainment.


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Parties settle dispute after more than a year

* Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) says TomTom to make payments

* Financial details of settlement not disclosed

(Adds background on dispute, share prices)

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Dutch navigation device maker TomTom NV said Monday they had reached a settlement after more than a year of squabbling over software patents.

In the last few weeks, both companies had sued the other, claiming patent infringement.

Under the terms of a five-year agreement, Microsoft said TomTom will pay Microsoft for use of the eight car navigation and file management system patents in the case Microsoft brought against TomTom, while Microsoft will be able to use the four patents included in the TomTom countersuit without any payment to TomTom.

TomTom confirmed there was a settlement but declined further comment.

Specific financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The world's largest software company in February sued in federal court in its home state of Washington and petitioned the U.S. International Trade Commission claiming TomTom -- which makes portable navigation devices for cars and mapping software for handheld computers -- breached eight of its patents.

Microsoft said the patents involved in the case related to innovations in car navigation technology and other computing functionality that Microsoft has licensed to other companies, such as TomTom's rival Garmin Ltd. (nasdaq: GRMN - news - people )

TomTom countersued in the U.S. District Court for the eastern district of Virginia, earlier this month, claiming Microsoft violated a number of its patents.

Microsoft shares slightly pared losses after the announcement, down 3.9 percent at $17.43 in a broad market decline. Ahead of the settlement announcement, TomTom shares closed at 3.413 euros in Amsterdam, down 7.2 percent. (Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Copyright 2009 Reuters, Click for Restriction