Here is some notes from a reading in WSJ and the Consumer Forrester blog.

Few take away (speculations, nothing is confirmed by Google)…
- The phone will be directly sold to consumer (direct sale without going through the carriers, hense unlock)
- Code name: Nexus One
- Manufactured by HTC
- Running Android
- Google designed the entire software experience (applications and “look and feel”)

Challenges ?
- The move could alienate wireless carriers and handset makers that offer Android phones and do not want to compete with Google
- The move also marks a rare foray into direct sales for Google. With the exception of an appliance it markets as a search tool to businesses, the company hasn’t sold hardware in the past.
- Will the phone be sold at full retail price, or will it be subsidized? (for instance by the ads running on the device)

Disruption ?
Google could subsidized it and they would be counting on advertising revenue to repay the cost. Mobile operators can subsidize phones because they repay the cost in service fees, locked in for one or two years. How much money do carriers make with monthly subscription ? $70 ? that’s a lot of ad revenue but on the long term it might be doable. The end user is still free to change operator for a cheaper service for instance, Google does not care.

What is the next ?
If subsidizing a phone is something you can think of when you are in Google position, the logical next step would be to apply the same strategy on another market: netbooks. Google is working on a cheap – free – operating system for netbook called Chrome OS! and hardware is even cheaper. My take: both – the phone and the netbook – could be given out for free…

UPDATE: more readings:
Reuters: Nexus One Available Directly Through Google Website January 5
Exclusive: first Google Phone / Nexus One photos, Android 2.1 on-board
Why the Google Phone is Really About Google Ads
Get Ready For The Google Branded Chrome OS Netbook

Before: One agenda that contains both work and personnal information hosted in Outlook at work. I synched it with mobile device over USB or bluetooth. Pros: one agenda with all my appointements and todo in one place, can take it with me on my phone, nothing in the cloud (no “corporate” securiy issue). Cons: Mixing both professional and private appointments, I can not share it, no access control (my management could see my personal appointment ?).

Problem when moving in the cloud: With Google Calendar my agenda will be hosted in the cloud, in the Google cloud… It is my call to decide to host my agenda on their datacenter but I can not do the same with my work agenda. Legitimately the company I am working for is not so keen of the idea of pushing sensitive information on an external service.

After: The better solution seems to be handling two calendars separately:

• Personal calendar hosted in Google Calendar: it is now accessible from anywhere and on any device through the web based interface and I can share it with my relatives. Also Google provides a Exchange server wich makes it easy to integrate this calendar into tools.
• Work agenda remains on Outlook at work and I synch it over USB/bluetooth with my phone. Nothing in the cloud.

How to:

1. Google provides a tool to synch your Outlook with Calendar (synch 1 way or 2-ways). I used it to push all my agenda to Google Calendar.

Side note: Yes, I am PC user by default, but I have no technology religion and could move to another platform anytime if needed. Actually having most of my datas in the cloud is just easing this process.

If you have a QR Code reader on your cell phone you can wave it in front of the barcode and you will be transported from the physical to the digital world.

An idea not so new… I am sure some persons have thought about it but Google just has the resources to effectively do it. They even partnered with Quickmark to distribute 40′000 pieces of their software for iPhone for free (instead of $1.99). iPhone owner go ahead and download it!

Coincidentally I have been playing around with an Android phone and it appears quite obvious now that any Google user will end up as an Android user (if it is not done yet).

Right now I am trying to find the best possible way to move and manage my agenda with Google Doc, Outlook, my phone… more on that later.

One more thought, I might be about to fully trust Google but I am still wondering if the monopol they are building up on the internet is not dangerous.

RSS Cloud

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the “cloud” element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually “cloud” has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention until the rising interest of real-time web. RSS Cloud effectively allows any client (like feed reader) to register to get notifications for stuff they have subscribed for beforehand.

How does it work ?

1. The >cloud< element in your RSS2 feed tells the clients where and how to sign up for notifications requests.
2. The publisher sends out notifications updates to the cloud when a new post is published
3. The cloud sends out notifications to all client that have subscribed to the publisher updates

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method than the polling method. But RSS Cloud is not alone and there are competing specifications like… PubSubHubbub.

Google’s PubSubHubbub

PubSubHubbub is a simple server-to-serve publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. The servers speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications when a feed URL is updated. The subscriber gets not only the notification of the update but also the new/changed content.

ReadWriteWeb: Speed in the Feed: Google Reader and PubSubHubbub

Note that the Real-time Web is the main theme of LeWeb 09 conference in Paris in December.

So ?

1. Google is also affected by the economic situation. Even “monster” like Google has to refocus when economic downturn… (note that they also laid off 100 recruiters)
2. If you were using one of those services you better prepare to move to another one, and hopefully you can export your datas in a nice and re-usable way. Remeber Richard Stallman warned us about Cloud Computing, this is a perfect example… a service is discontinue and you are stuck! In this case it happens with a notice beforehand but what if the service is shut down directly ?

Read also on Google Code Blog: Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor

[...] Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District’s 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite [...]

This news comes only a few weeks after Richard Stallman (GNU founder) warned about Cloud Computing… Guardian: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman:

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, it’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

Well an US government agency is using US company infrastructure… so far so good.

Should “cloud computing” becomes trendy, and it will, I wonder how non-gov companies are going to address that privacy issue and I wonder if Washington state would have done the same choice if Google was not an US company ?

We have been talking about Location-Based Services for quite a long time and there does not seem to be yet a killing application even though Devices have built-in GPS (like my Nokia N95) or Location API (like Androïd). It’s the “big thing” we are still waiting for and maybe the problem is that we are not “nomad” enough, just too “local” as pointed by the New York Times based on a field study:

“Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work”

Via (#) and (#)

Via Russell