by Ray Valdes | January 17, 2010 | 8 Comments
It is the wrong headline because it frames the issue in a certain way — one that leads to misunderstanding what is really going on. However, I won’t deny that “Google vs China” is a great headline for capturing reader’s attention (which is why I embed the phrase in the headline above, even as I [...]
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by Ray Valdes | November 12, 2009 | 6 Comments
Yesterday, Google announced a new open-source programming language called Go, a systems implementation language that is a blend of Python and C++. Thus far, the reaction from developers has been mixed. Most geeks are not so much agog, as perplexed: Why a new language? Why now? For many, their initial reflex is to question or [...]
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by Ray Valdes | October 6, 2009 | 3 Comments
At the Adobe Max conference in LA today, Adobe announced a side-door way to get Flash applications onto the iPhone platform. This Flash-on-iPhone question has been a vexing issue for years, ever since the iPhone was first introduced, because both Apple and Adobe have strong loyal user communities with a high degree of overlap. At [...]
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by Ray Valdes | September 24, 2009 | 1 Comment
According to various reports in the financial press today, there is a $100M investment in Twitter at a valuation of $1B. Over the past few months, an entertaining parlor game in certain circles has been the Twitter Valuation Game: how to value a social site that has no revenues and no business model. The beauty [...]
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by Ray Valdes | August 11, 2009 | 4 Comments
Got some interesting press calls today about the FriendFeed acquisition. Obviously, everyone knows what Facebook is. Your grandma. My aunt in the old country. They all have Facebook accounts. Twitter is white-hot in some circles, perhaps not your grandma or my aunt. But daily fodder for those that know or care who Ashton Kutcher is [...]
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by Ray Valdes | July 8, 2009 | 13 Comments
Perhaps prodded by a news story in today’s New York Times, Google announced, via a blog post a few hours ago, an operating system called Chrome OS. Key points in the announcement: the OS is designed for Web apps and cloud computing it combines the Chrome browser plus a lightweight windowing environment on top of [...]
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by Ray Valdes | May 31, 2009 | 17 Comments
Apologies for the provocative headline, but I just couldn’t resist. Actually, there is no single secret sauce, but rather multiple key ingredients of varying degrees of obscurity. Google Wave is a fascinating melange of audacity and hope. Google has blended multiple, powerful, sauces into this melange, some secret and other less so. One in particular [...]
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by Ray Valdes | May 28, 2009 | 9 Comments
At the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google just finished a demo of Wave, an early preview of a product that they hope will change how people collaborate on the Web. Lots of people, including my colleagues at Gartner, likely will have an opinion on Google Wave, because of its breadth. As the saying [...]
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by Ray Valdes | May 10, 2009 | 3 Comments
A debate that was taking place last month in blogs and in cafes around San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood has spilled over into the mainstream, with an article by Miguel Helft in today’s New York Times. The article is about two differing perspectives on the design process, one exemplified by Doug Bowman, a visual designer [...]
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by Ray Valdes | April 8, 2009 | 9 Comments
On the one-year anniversary of Google AppEngine (GAE), Google has released, in preview form, support for Java. This adds to the Python support already in place. Last year, when the Python version GAE was first announced, it was open to the first 10,000 developers starting at 9 pm Pacific time. I signed up about 5 [...]
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