Google: South Africa Market Share
July 31, 2008
MoneyWeb reported on July 31, 2008 about “Google’s Search Dominance.” You can read Rudolph Muller’s article here. The points about Google that I found interesting were:
- Google’s South African office is headed up by a former Novell wizard, Stafford Masie
- Google traffic dwarfs that of Ananzi and Aardvark. “Ananzi currently attracts 221,436 unique monthly visitors, down from 314,132”, reports Mr. Muller. Aardvark “received 88 774 unique monthly visitors, down from 106 102 during the same period in 2007.”
- “Mobile remains the leading telecommunications medium in the country,” Mr. Muller reports. Google offers universal search for mobile in South Africa.
- YouTube.com is popular in South Africa.
Africa is quickly becoming the next “big thing”. Google appears to be poised for growth.
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
Autonomy Bites into the Juicy BlackBerry
July 31, 2008
Autonomy has rolled out software and services for BlackBerry email. The two-pronged product/service makes it possible to archive email, which is proliferating despite the advent of Twitter-like mini-messages. In addition, Autonomy has added a dollop of the Zantaz eDiscovery functionality to the new service. Autonomy has lashed to the new product/service the filters that can handle more than 1,000 formats. These include multimedia, images, BlackBerry’s proprietary device-to-device messages, and, of course, text. You can read more about the service here. One interesting point is that Autonomy is using the descriptive phrase “infrastructure software for the enterprise” for its wide array of products, services, and technologies.
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
More about Mobile Search
July 31, 2008
On July 30, 2008, Ryan Spoon wrote “Sergey Brin: iPhone Users Conduct 30x More Mobile Searches (and Other Fascinating Stats) on the Ryan Spoon Web log here. The title of the article is a bit off center. The increase in mobile searches is information that I have known for a couple of months. Mr. Spoon does nail two pieces of information that I found most suggestive:
- The soon-to-be really interesting Pandora service “had 350,000 downloads in the iPhone’s first week”
- Mr. Spoon makes the point that “every additional iPhone search is opportunity for Google… not for Apple”.
I thought partners were in win-win relationships. Maybe not if Mr. Spoon is correct.
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
iPhone BI
July 20, 2008
Business intelligence is coming to the iPhone, the mobile device that delights those with tiny fingers and a youthful love of multi-function gizmos. Cliff Saran’s “Oracle and Salesforce Develop iPhone Business Apps”, published on July 11, 2008, pulled two announcements together that I had overlooked. One of my engineers has an iPhone, and I watch him surf the Web, make the occasional call, and send misspelled SMS messages to me about projects’ status. You can read Mr. Saran’s interesting article here.
Mr. Saran identifies two companies pushing into what is for me a territory near the BlackBerry frontier. First, he describes Oracle’s Business Indictors. The id4ea is that a hip CFO will use her iPhone to “to view the latest company financial trends and enables sales managers to receive alerts on sales performance and customer satisfaction issues.” You can learn more about Business Indicators here but the Oracle Web site is a sometimes snail-like machine. Be patient.
He also describes Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone. This application “allows Salesforce users to view and edit records (accounts, opportunities), log sales or service activities such as e-mails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, and assign tasks and events to colleagues.” More about SMiP is here.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, it is too soon for me to make a call about the iPhone’s ability to gain a foothold in the enterprise. But my engineer is, as he says, “likin’ it”. Also, I want to see how the Apple and Google mobile initiatives interact. Could a showdown be coming between Apple and Google with Research in Motion relegated to the scrub team?
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2008
Symbian: Simpatico toward Google
July 17, 2008
Symbian [http://www.symbian.com/] makes open source operating systems for mobile phones and has been building reference designs for telecommunications companies for years. Nokia, its major stakeholder, recently announced that it’s going to buy the rest of Symbian’s shares and turn it over in its entirety to the Symbian Foundation, a new group backed by several mobile phone companies that have pooled their knowledge and resources to create one big, happy, open-source, royalty-free, customizable Symbian platform.
Enter the Googlemeister. It’s about to launch a new product: Android [http://code.google.com/android/]. Android is (drum roll) “the first complete, open, and free mobile platform” and was developed by a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies.
Symbian’s CEO said in a July 16 article here [http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080716/tc_pcworld/148477] that the company has a good relationship with Google and cooperation between the two companies is possible. But he also defends Symbian and basically questions why Google is pitching Android as if Symbian didn’t exist.
Perhaps Symbian sees the hammer about to fall.
Google has grown far beyond just being an Internet portal and is a serious player in the telecommunications industry. You know the “walk softly and carry a big stick” credo? There isn’t a big enough stick for Symbian to carry to ward off Google. It might not be a bad idea to embrace the GOOG’s services and functions.
Jessica Bratcher, July 17, 2008
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