Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Some selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away.
Showing 548 posts tagged google
Stacey Higginbotham for GigaOm:
And that’s one of the biggest repercussions of Google’s fiber roll outs. The more people who can pay $70 for gigabit service (or get 5 Mbps for free), the more pressure this puts on the existing providers to upgrade their networks and cut anticonsumer crap like data caps. But that’s exactly why more cities need these networks.
Google is very good at the do-something-to-pressure-others-to-do-it maneuver — which I appreciate.
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Some pranksters did some work on Sergey Brin’s Tesla Model S, and oh is it magic. (When clicking on the link, crank up this track at the same time.)
Cue Bruce Wayne voice: “Does it come in hot pink?”
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Nice scoop by Josh Constine of TechCrunch:
Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years.
Others have since backed this up as well.
I was a few months off, but this is basically what I had heard back in January as well.
There seems to be some disagreement over whether or not this would constitute a “fork” of Android. It would seem there is a way for Facebook to do this with Google’s blessing (just as they bless TouchWiz and other “skins”). But make no mistake, this is not stock Android. Facebook will deeply inject their own apps into the core of the OS. As long as they don’t replace Search, Maps, and a few others, Google should be okay with it — for now.
One wildcard is the Play Store. Facebook has their own App Center (which right now links to Play Store and the App Store), which they presumably could make work as a stand-alone Android app store as well. But it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t piss off Google. See: Amazon.
Another question: what will the carriers think of this? Presumably, they’ll have at least one on board with the HTC phone. Facebook has been making a lot of noise about “free calls” within their Messenger apps — this could all but destroy the notion of cellular “minutes”.
Of course, that writing has been on the wall for some time. Data phones are the way going forward. Still, the carriers must be a little scared of the post-minutes, post-SMS world that this Facebook Phone highlights. It’s a huge change. The carriers are finally becoming the dumb pipes they were meant to be.
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Clever.
[via The Loop]
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Daily Mail in the flesh
If you’re feeling sinister. (This is ridiculous.)
(via rickwebb)
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Fusion, the internal Google project that would become Google Reader, as Om Malik highlights in his talk with creator Chris Wetherell.
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Stated a bit more clearly: Samsung makes more money off of Android than Google makes from all of their businesses combined.
This simply does not seem like a tenable situation.
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John Herrman of BuzzFeed:
According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed’s data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today.
Yikes. Did Google just shut down the wrong product?
“We had a sign that said, ‘days since cancellation’ and it was there from the very beginning.”
(via chipotle)
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I’m so upset.
All things must pass.
