Google announces Google TV

 
Google TV being demonstrated at the Google conference in San Francisco, Thursday, May 20, 2010. 

 
Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt (left), with executives from companies that are helping to bring Google TV to consumers during a presentation in San Francisco on May 20, 2010. From left: Schmidt; chief executives Shantany Narayen of Adobe Systemms; Brian Dunn of Best Buy; Charlie Ergen of Dish Network; Gerry Quindlen of Logitech; Howard Stringer of Sony; and Paul Otellini of of Intel.

 
Google TV at the Google conference.

 
Google TV is being demonstrated at the Google conference.

 
Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, left,speaks to Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe Systems, during a presentation at Google's annual I/O conference in San Francisco on Thursday, May 20, 2010. Google announced that it is leading a group of companies, including Sony and Intel, in an effort called Google TV.

 
Sony CEO Howard Stringer (left), and Intel CEO Paul Otellini smiles during a Google TV announcement at the Google conference.

 
Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about Google TV at the Google conference in San Francisco, Thursday, May 20, 2010. Google Inc. believes it has come up with the technology to unite Web surfing with channel surfing on televisions.

2010 Year Of Smart Phones

will perhaps be remembered as the day on which the smartphone evolved into what Google is now calling the superphone! On Tuesday, Google unveiled the worst kept secret on Internet: a brand new cell phone, designed by Google and manufactured by HTC, called Nexus One.

Nexus One represents the next frontier in the company's $20bn core business of selling advertising through search and is its first direct foray into the handset market. It runs on the Web giant's Android OS (joining 20 other devices) and has put Google on a collision course with Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry and various other smartphones.

Currently, it is only available in the US but will be sold shortly in Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore. The wait could be a little longer for Indian enthusiasts.

Due to meltdown, the overall sales for mobile phones remained flat in Q3 2009. However, smartphone sales continued to grow by nearly 15% as they have, ever since the market was redefined by Apple's iPhone. As per estimates, smartphones have now become the new laptops and will capture 37% of the global market by 2014, a leap from 16% in 2009.

Google's emergence as a retailer is an escalation in the budding power struggle between Apple and Google, as both view the mobile market as a key to their continued success.

Analysts are expecting that Nexus One will lead to an annual 100% growth in Google's mobile ad revenue worth $75 million, because of better control over the Android and mobile search environment.

Gradually, all the market players will be willing to join hands with Google for the sake of market efficiencies. However, in order to truly transform the mobile market and achieve its ultimate goal of selling maximum ads, Google will have to find ways to innovate. It will have to play around with its marketing and manufacturing strategies.

It can bring out a smartphone-starter plan, offering a cheaper data plan to attract the I-don't-need-a-smartphone crowd. Google should mainly aim to provide low-cost, uncontrolled devices with low-cost connections, as this would mean more people using its software and seeing its ads, even if that phone is made by Motorola, Nokia or even Apple.

Google PowerMeter the next big thing?

To save money, emissions and indulge my inner geek, I’ve tested the Google Powermeter – and it has not been an entirely pleasant experience.

Not content with dominating the way we send email, find information and navigate the real world, Google now hopes to manage your home’s energy use. In the spirit of saving some money, emissions and indulging my inner geek, I signed up to see whether its Powermeter really is the future. For the past two months, the software—which arrived in the UK in November—has been tracking and broadcasting to a web page how much electricity my early-20th-century, three-bedroom terraced house consumes. It’s not been an entirely pleasant experience. While I had it setup in 10 minutes —using a small hub and sensor from British company AlertMe to plug into my web connection—seeing my electricity use on an iGoogle page alongside my email, news, RSS and other widgets was sometimes a scary reminder of our profligacy. Our house typically rests at around 150 watts running a computer, fridge and a couple of lights, but it’s not uncommon for that to jump up to more like 3kW (3,000 watts) with the washing machine and dishwasher running simultaneously. In December as a whole, the Powermeter graph reminded my daily, we used a shockingly high 370 kWh – but fortunately December’s also probably our highest month for energy use, because it’s one of the darkest and the one where we’re most frequently at home. Google Powermeter makes looking at your energy consumption almost fun – at least in comparison with deciphering cryptic energy bills. While you can download the raw data of your electricity use, a quick look at the baffling spreadsheet showed the importance of a meaningful interface such as Powermeter’s graphs. Interestingly, while I was trialling the service, Google dropped Powermeter’s comparison feature —where you can see how your use compares with US regional averages—because it felt homes varied between regions to the point of making comparisons meaningless. I’m inclined to agree. Usage for our three-bedroom terrace house was regularly described as very good and akin to a one-bedroom apartment, which doesn’t tell me much, except how high US domestic energy use is. I’ve also been trying British Gas’s new EnergySmart tariff, which gives you an energy monitor gadget and makes you submit monthly meter readings. Charles Arthur has reviewed a version of the monitor—he was impressed—but the most useful part of the tariff for me has been the financial incentive to save money on a month-by-month basis, knowing that each kWh saved will be reflected on that month's bank statement. Ultimately, the really interesting stuff for this technology will come when all this data gets shared socially – and results in the sharing of advice and the application of peer pressure to make people change their habits. While iGoogle and Powermeter doesn’t let you publish your energy use direct to Twitter or Facebook, AlertMe offers a personal “Swingometer” to post a basic image of your energy use on Facebook, Twitter or your blog. Meantime, the best way for most people to try an energy monitor—without spending £69 plus an ongoing £3 monthly subscription for AlertMe and Powermeter—will be to borrow one from their local library. A trial that started in Lewisham has since spread across the country, from libraries in Leicester and Brentwood to Cardiff and York. Not for the first time, old-fashioned institutions of learning could trump new-fangled technology and gadgets.

The 100 essential websites

Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda

Andy Warhol talked of a time when everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. With hindsight, however, he might have wanted to revise that down to about five minutes. On today's web, phrases such as "here today, gone tomorrow" seem to involve ridiculously long timescales.

People who moaned that blogging represented a move to shorter attention spans – 250-to-350-word posts rather than 1,000-word stories – have now seen blog posts start to look big and, frankly, old-fashioned. Today's trendsetters are using "microblogging" sites such as Tumblr,Posterous and Soup.io, which are taking the opportunity for creative "borrowing" to new heights.

But the smash hit of 2009 has been (apologies: I know this will cause pain) Twitter, where 1,000-word stories are reduced to 140-character tweets. Short attention spans R us.

Twitter's rapid growth and open programming interface have given the site a wide impact. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of ancillary sites and services have been launched to help Twitter users post pictures, track followers, or – more usefully, from a commercial point of view – find out what the "hive mind" is thinking. Twitterfall is just one example. More recently, Listorious stepped in to make it easier to find and explore lists made using Twitter's new list feature, while The Twitter Tim.es cleverly turned selected tweets into a personalised newspaper. How many of these sites will survive is, of course, open to question. Some are less like standalone sites than parasites.

Major web players such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft also got involved. Both Google and Microsoft signed deals for Twitter searches, while Facebook paid it the ultimate compliment of more or less copying its service. Or, perhaps, copying FriendFeed, which many users link to both Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook, while far from new, was another big player in 2009, reaching more than 350 million users. And through Facebook Connect, it has extended its presence across the web. Once you have a Facebook identity – and you must have one, mustn't you? – then you can use it to access a growing number of sites and services. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The web might be a kinder, more polite place if people said things under their real names, which is what Facebook's about.

Those in search of their five minutes of fame or, more likely, five minutes of fun fun fun, headed for YouTube. Although it has been challenged by rivals such as Vimeo and Microsoft's Soapbox (RIP), its dominance has not been seriously threatened. Only the pornographers have been able to build much of a following outside YouTube.

Which is not to say that YouTube owns the web video market. The BBC has made a huge impact with its iPlayer catchup service, and in the US,Hulu has enjoyed great success with TV series and movies. Of course, both sites are showing videos that YouTube would love to offer, at a profit, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Music has been a significant player in the growth of the web sinceNapster, and its influence continues to grow. Spotify has made the biggest impact this year, gaining mindshare lost by Last.fm and Pandora. Meanwhile, Pitchfork has expanded its role as the web's authoritative music magazine, and The Hype Machine came to prominence as a source of instant erudition by tracking the music blogs.

Almost finally, it may be that we are seeing the return not just of the browser wars but of the search engine wars as well. Google still rules the world, but in Bing, it now has a competitor that does some things better and has, in Microsoft, an owner with deep pockets. Alas, Bing also does many things a lot worse.

Possibly the most contentious part of this year's list is celebrity gossip. The argument against would be summed up by a Wikipedian in two words: "not notable". The argument for is that sites such as Perez Hiltonand AOL's TMZ are now helping to drive the news agenda. Even if you aren't interested in Michael Jackson's death, Tiger Woods's affairs or whatever, this stuff has become impossible to avoid. This is one case where many people would prefer the web's short attention span to be even shorter.

Blogging/microblogging

Now easier than falling off a log.

Tumblr Multimedia microblogging plus Twitter-style following.

Posterous Goes from instant microblogging into lifestreaming.

Soup A "super-easy" tumblelog for scrapbook keeping and lifestreaming.

Blogger Fast way to start blogging; training wheels for Wordpress.

Bloglines For reading web feeds. Smart and clean.

Wordpress Free, and most importantly spam-free, blogging.

Browsers

Do we all need five browsers nowadays?

Chrome Now here for Mac, and anticipating future world domination via Chrome OS.

Firefox  Everyone's favourite is under attack from all sides.

Maxthon Based on IE code. If it stays "hip in China" it could reach a large global audience.

Cartoons

Everyone needs some relaxation. This is a visual one.

Dilbert It wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't so true.

XKCD Stick-figure strip poking fun at geek topics and relationships.

Celebrity gossip

No one needs this stuff, but it's starting to drive world news and web traffic.

TMZ Rose to fame when it broke news of Michael Jackson's death.

Perez Hilton Among the bitchiest of goss sites and often involved in 'interesting' celeb baiting.

Gawker New York-based media alert and gossip blog network, with fingers in many pies.

Create/collaborate

With all of us now living more of our lives online, these sites just scratch the surface.

Netvibes Your to-do lists, news, weather and photos on one page.

Scribd Shares 35bn words online: they can't all be wrong.

Slideshare Like YouTube for PowerPoint decks.

Zamzar Useful: converts files from one format to another.

Film

Sites to see before heading for the latest blockbuster at your local multiplex.

IMDb The most authoritative site about all things film and TV, which is why Amazon bought it.

Rotten Tomatoes Collects online film reviews, aggregates a score out of 100 and rates the film "fresh" or "rotten".

/Film Said to be the favourite film blog of directors Jason Reitman and Darren Aronofsky, /Film features news, reviews, interviews and a special UK update each Friday.

Cinematical Terrific film blog with a Hollywood focus.

Gaming

A field where handheld, bedroom and Flash games are becoming mainstream

Eurogamer Reportage, with breadth, if not always depth.

The Independent Gaming Source  A great place to pick up on tomorrow's breakthrough Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and PSN hits.

Pocket Gamer Still by far the best site on handheld gaming.

Gamasutra  Where professional games creators hang out, and sometimes get jobs

Geek squad

Here be programmers …

Stack Overflow Where programmers gather to try to solve their problems.

The Daily WTF Daily dispatches from the coding warzone.

Joel On Software Essays by a former Microsoftie, now head of Fog Creek Software.

Government/public services/politics

Recycle Now Winner after a slight false start of the government'sShow Us A Better Way competition. What can you recycle close by?

British and Irish Legal Information Institute A database of laws. Only survives hand-to-mouth on voluntary donations; where's yours?

What Do They Know? Makes filing a Freedom Of Information request as easy as sending an email. Too easy, some in power think.

Upmystreet All the detail on your area you could ever want.

They Work For You A site set up by volunteers to keep tabs on our elected members of parliament – and our unelected peers.

Link economy

With millions of links on the web, we all need sites for sharing the best ones.

Digg Still the reigning champion of where the latest internet memes are though not always polite.

Delicious The thinking person's link aggregation site. We use it.

Popurls Aggregating the aggregators: the web in a window.

Metafilter Living if isolated proof that a site can be successful without pictures or video, and can also host thoughtful conversations.

Slashdot Now looking venerable and old, but "News for nerds" site with a jokey name (/.) still attracts a big, and often knowledgable, audience.

Techmeme Technology news chosen by computer, though it's now refined by human editors.

Location, location

Services like these blossom with a mobile phone that can access the internet.

Dopplr "Share your future travel plans with friends and colleagues", then find out if others will be there too.

Qype Localised search for pubs, restaurants, etc; also a bit of a social network.

Loopt "Transforms your mobile phone into a social compass".

Brightkite A "location-based social network".

Maps

The flipside of location-based services: seeing where you are.

OpenStreetMap A rights-free map created by people like you. Remarkably detailed and precise.

Google Maps Street View Virtual tourism with practical applications, too.

Money/finance/consumer fightback

We all need someone on our side.

Money Saving Expert Does what it says on the tin.

Say No to 0870 Direct-dial numbers, not expensive national-rate ones.

Consumer Direct Government site for consumers.

Music

Last.fm British-made, now CBS-owned, music recommendation station.

Amazon Now has its own MP3 store in the UK as well as the US.

Hype Machine Picks up the latest news by tracking the music blogs.

Pitchfork The magazine of the music web, now with video, and lots of great lists.

Offbeat

The Onion Still the satirical newspaper of record. If it's not in the Onion, it's probably happened.

B3TA Beyond classification; its forum has spawned many memes … and more than its fair share of trolls.

Lolcats respite from stress with daft cCaptioned cats and other animals.

News Lite respite from stress with daft cGreat source of news that's much too trivial to print.

Oddee Setting an internet standard for sets of curious and mildly amusing pictures, not cats.

PostSecret Notes of secrets sent by people who want them posted. So they are.

Passive-Aggressive Notes Would it be too much trouble for you to have a look?

Photography

Flickr The granddaddy of photo-sharing sites.

Picnik Photo editing in your browser.

Picasa Google's photo organisation and editing tool.

DPreview The web's best guide to cameras. Now Amazon owned.

Reference

CIA Factbook All the data you need on pretty much anywhere.

Wikipedia en.wikipedia.com the gradually growing user-edited encyclopaedia is Still a first port of call on most topics.

Internet Archive/Wayback Machine The web in aspic. Useful for research into how the web used to look.

Metacritic Aggregates reviews of movies and DVDs, TV programmes, music and games

Wikileaks Anonymous source of a huge range ofleaked documents. If you dig, there's something important there

Search

Google dominates but Bing is challenging, and Yahoo and Microsoft are left in the dust.

Google So good it's become almost synonymous with search.

Bing  Microsoft would like you to bing it, but its "decision engine" still has a long way to go.

Wolfram Alpha An "answer engine"that delivers when it has the data, but not that easy to use.

Social software

Two years ago it was nascent; now it's embedded in our culture. Chances are high you're a member of at least one, and perhaps all, of these sites.

Facebook Still changing and growing to become not just your home on the web, but your ID provider.

LinkedIn Contact sports for business users.

Ning One place to start your own social network – just as Madonna did – though it has yet to really take off.

Travel

Expedia Still the daddy when it comes to travel sites, and particularly good if you can bundle a flight with a hotel and other services.

TripAdvisor Essential reading for the user reviews of hotels, but it now covers much more.

Laterooms Specialises in hotel discounts.

Twitter, and associated

Twitter has proved itself over and over this year, from the Chinese earthquke to the Mumbai attacks to the Madoff fraud as a vector for news.

Twitter The ur-site, where you can create an identity (or several).

Twitter Tim.es Creates your personal newspaper based on your friend's tweets.

Twitterfeed Posts blog contents to Twitter.

TwitterCounter Graphs the growth in your followers.

Twitterfall Tracks trending topics; enables custom searches.

Listorious Twitter lists make it simple to follow large groups of Twitter users, and Listorious makes it easy to find the best lists.

Video

YouTube Dominant provider of video content online.

Vimeo Better rights control than YouTube and a cleaner interface

BBC iPlayer The king of the online catchup services.

Hulu The networks fight back with their own video site, which may make the UK in 2010. We hope.

Videojug The motherlode of instructional videos, all in one place.

Virtual worlds

Second Life Continues to exist and is, apparently, still popular, but not the media darling it was.

Entropia Universe Set in a distant future on the untamed planet of Calypso.

Club Penguin Minigame-tastic virtual world for youngkids.

Moshi Monsters "Educational" virtual world for kids.

Visual arts

Saatchi Gallery Gallery, listings and artworks for sale.

Art Daily The first "art newspaper" on the net.

Culture 24 Everything about UK galleries and museums.

Visualisation

Information is Beautiful Creating effective infographics is one of today's key skills, and on this site, it's also an art.

Infosthetics.com An archive of some of the finest examples of "information aesthetics".

DabbleDB Create online databases and analyse them.

• Which essential sites have I missed? Tell us below........