I’m now eager to find other expressions I can include in my emails that suggest I have attached something. Do phrases like “here’s the file” or “please find enclosed” also trigger the code?

How many “and here’s the email again, only with the attachment this time” emails will this clever bit of software eliminate?

First of all, it’s a great device in its own right. Very fast, a great screen, the on screen keyboard is great, and the music player works really well with my itunes collection.

The fact that it has desktop widgets rather than an application launcher like the iPhone means it’s very easy to personalize in a useful and attractive way. My homepage currently contain links to my favourite applications (as with the iPhone) but also buttons for calling people, a dynamic weather feed, news feed etc, and a tiny music player. It makes the things I do all the time much easier than they are on the iPhone.

The app store (called android market) is useful, with lots of free and commercial apps. I’ve installed WordPress (with which I’m writing this post), Ocado and a program that reads business cards and converts them to contacts automatically. There doesn’t seem to be the same breadth of apps as you see on iTunes, but there are many, and the range is growing daily. There’s no Apple police to delay launch of new apps, so I expect there will be a lot more innovation long-term than there is on the iPhone: the presence of Flash, Python and a great scripting environment on the phone all argue for this. We won’t see debates like there were about Skype and spotify on the iPhone. By the way: Skype and LinkedIn, please release an android applications soon.

It syncs perfectly with Zimbra, our work email system, and with Google mail, and even links up your Facebook and Twitter contacts with your address book, though there could be privacy concerns with this.

So all in all this is a very useful and impressive device, personally I would say much better than the iPhone, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens as it evolves. The location based features, using gps and cell mast triangulation are the next area of exploration for me.

1. I visit Google.com and search for “cheap flight”
2. I get directed to cheapflights.co.uk, which uses Google Analytics
3. Later I visit experiencewa.com (which uses Google Analytics) to look at some of the interesting things I could do in Washington State
4. I return to Google and search for something new, say “groceries”

Because Google knows I’ve searched for cheap flights, I’ve visited cheapflights.co.uk, and I’ve visited a site about Washington State, it could infer that I’m planning a trip to Washington, and serve a really targeted ad alongside my groceries search results.

The more websites use Google Analytics, the more complete picture Google will have of where I go online, and the more targeted its advertising could be, assuming they take the opportunity.

But it gets better, because most of the time Google knows who is doing the surfing, at least it does if you use Gmail or a personalised Google home page. So not only does it know about activity on a particular computer, it knows about your activity across multiple computers.

The more people use Google Analytics (a free product, I guess we know why now) the more complete their picture, and the greater their advantage over their advertising competitors.

Anxiety about online tracking is generally overdone, and I’m not particularly concerned that Google knows so much about my surfing habits, but it makes all the concern about Phorm look quite disproportionate, at least it does to me.

Sadly for Twitter, the money stays with Google for the ad sale from the look of things, so they still don’t have a revenue stream.

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.

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

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.