sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I have a fairly complicated personal IT set-up. We have a Mac at home, I use Vista on my “work” computer, and I carry my Asus eee (running Ubuntu in its eeexubuntu flavour) practically wherever I go. Gradually, little by little, Google is stitching it all together for me, creating a little ecosystem of applications that mean I have my stuff wherever I happen to be.

The latest thing is Google Docs, Google’s online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, which has been developing well for a while now, but which has just rolled out offline functionality. This uses something called Google Gears to store copies of the documents I work with on Google Docs in an offline cache, with the code they need to work, so that I can edit all my Google Docs on the train, and they just get updated automatically next time I’m online.

My personal email account (for my own domain, not a gmail address) is now Google driven too. And I at last have the ability to sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, which allows me to share my free time with anyone who has a web browser, ending all those daft unsolicited meeting requests I get at a stroke.

How’s Google going to get the money back for all this? The application development might be a one-off, but the storage bill (and the electricity for the data centres is the big one nowadays) must keep going up and up. Theorists will point out that a central storage infrastructure replacing all those local ones in peoples’ personal computers is more efficient in the long run, but where’s the money going to come from? Advertising seems somehow inappropriate as a revenue stream for this kind of service. My bet is they’ll end up charging for it directly somehow, but I’m sure they have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for monetising the Google desktop.

Google have started selling print ads in the US, which is an interesting venture in its own right, but the most interesting thing in this example is the extent to which they’re using the ads to drive potential customers online.

Aside from the URLs in the ad, we’re also encouraged to search Google for specific search terms (doubtless incredibly well optimised for this advertiser). There’s also a QR code, or 2-d bar code, which is a machine readable image that contains a link or other information. The software to read these isn’t widely available yet, but the more organisations like Google support them, the more people will install the software. Next year, a large number of phones will probably have the QR code reader installed at the factory, so we can expect use of QR codes to become a lot more common.
Thanks to Blognation for the story.

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Tags: google, qr codes

No sooner did I discover that Google allow one to target ads on race & ethnicity (as do MySpace, it seems) than I read that they’re introducing contextual advertising for mobile. Aside from the obvious discussion about whether display advertising works on mobile yet (I don’t think so) it was interesting to see the list of countries they’re piloting with:

US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (shortly).

Yes, England! So the Scots, Welsh and Irish (northern or otherwise) and I presume the Channel Islanders as well, won’t be getting mobile ads from Google, but the English will.

Or perhaps they meant the United Kingdom…

I was just reading through the Google Adwords help when I came across this screengrab from their targetting application. It seems that you can target Google ads by racial or ethnic background.

I’m very interested in whether other people are surprised by this information. I’ve never heard of advertising being targetted like this, as explicitly as this. Perhaps it’s normal in the US market, but for the advertisers I work with in the UK, I’ve never heard of it.

I assume Google are profiling publisher websites rather than their users for this service.