Replies to post #1961 on Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

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Now you can get also get frustrated on your cellphone...

Opera Software chooses Google as search partner
Reuters, Thu Dec 29, 2005 03:38 AM ET

OSLO, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Norwegian Opera Software (OPERA.OL: Quote, Profile, Research) has agreed that U.S. search technology group Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will be the default partner for its mobile Internet browsers, Opera said on Thursday.

"Google will be the default search partner for the mobile browsers: Opera Mobile and Opera Mini," Opera Software ASA said in a statement. "Under the one-year contract, Opera will make Google Search a major part of the browsers home screen."

Oslo-based Opera Software is a tiny competitor of Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) in the Internet browser market, but the fast-growing part of its business is in browsers for mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices.

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh38103_2005-12-29_08-38-46_l29....

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The Gods and Goats of 2005: Best and worst of an eventful year
By Charlie White, DigitalVideoEditing

We’ve reached the end of another tumultuous year in the world of technology, and it’s time to take stock, assessing which products, companies, services or concepts were the Gods and which were the Goats of 2005. So here they are, the ones worth remembering and those which would be best forgotten from the past year.

The Gods of 2005

Google

Google was the company from whom all blessings flowed in 2005. It was the leader, the trendsetter, the innovator, and the rich kid on the block, and in exchange for that, its stock shot up hundreds of dollars per share in value in a very short period of time. Not only does Google have the best search engine in the world, it’s developed a lot of other outstanding applications such as its desktop search capability, which indexes everything on your hard drive and spits it all back at you in a matter of seconds. The company has also ruled the roost with its unique advertising schemes, bringing ad revenue to almost anyone. Also its Google Earth and Google Local software applications have changed our world and the way we look at it. In 2005, it was hard to beat Google, the company that’s pointing the direction on the Internet for everybody else.

iPod nano

Of course, any 2005 roundup wouldn’t be complete without adding the contributions of Apple’s iPod nano. Sure, other iPods could do other tricks, such as the iPod G5 which can play video, but the nano was the true innovator. Its slim design, its solid-state flash memory storage inside, and its groundbreaking pricing changed the world of music listening as we know it—again. Hang that iPod nano around your neck with the optional Apple lanyard headphones, and you’ve reached digital music listening Nirvana. There’s no two ways about it, the nano was probably the best consumer electronics device introduced in 2005, if not ever.

HDTV

Many past years have been called “The Year of HDTV ,” however 2005 really was that year. The cost of HDTV sets plummeted, program offerings proliferated, and the general public started to understand the true value of HDTV . At the same time, low-cost HDV camcorders became more popular as their prices fell, and at the same time Panasonic ’s DVCPro HD with the P2 solid-state memory put a fire under HDV , showing users that long-GOP MPEG high definition was not the only cheap way to skin the high-definition cat. Welcome to the explosion of high-definition television , where 2005 was just the beginning. As soon as digital rights management (DRM) issues are worked out, there will be high-definition in every home and a chicken in every pot.

AMD

While Intel snoozed in its feather bed with newfound love Apple, AMD’s dual core Opteron processors brought home the honors as the fastest chips we saw here at the Midwest Test Facility in 2005. The trick here was AMD’s motherboard and chipset technology, which gave computer makers the ability to place two dual core processors on one motherboard for the first time. The result? The fastest PCs in the world, where we even saw a four-way AMD Opteron dual core machine, giving the equivalent of eight processors crunching those numbers faster than anything we’ve ever seen. Sure, Apple released a dual core machine toward the end of the year, but those are dead processors on a dead platform—look to Apple to move to the Intel platform and perhaps wish that it had chosen AMD instead.

Vonage

Vonage is a telephone system that piggybacks onto an existing broadband connection and gives you prices that are lower than the world has ever seen for long-distance and local telephone service. I’ve tested Vonage, and to be honest with you, it’s actually not that great of a service—it doesn’t sound as good as conventional telephone service, and its customer service department is pretty much clueless. However, I call it one of the best of 2005 because it was able to cut the cost of long-distance service by two-thirds without cutting its quality by that much. In the year that I’ve used Vonage, it’s actually improved by about 50%, and the company itself has grown by leaps and bounds since the beginning of 2005. Vonage and other companies like it are sounding the death knell for old-fashioned telephone service, and not a minute too soon.

Hybrid Vehicles

Just try to buy a hybrid car today. If you are able to get one, you’ll have to wait a couple of months and pay retail price or even higher. There’s good reason for that, too, because hybrid cars are just downright excellent. Sure, they’re expensive, but softening that blow was a $2000 tax credit for buying a hybrid vehicle in 2005, with some sources saying that number might even rise to an even richer tax advantage in 2006. Plus, hybrid vehicles don’t suffer much of a performance hit compared to conventional cars. Making them even more appealing are the ultra-hip and modern components included within such as GPS, Bluetooth, and more. Hybrid vehicle technology is another area in mid-explosion in 2005; it’s one of those great technological leaps that pays for itself over the life of the product.

Internet Shopping

After all the big talk and overblown promises of the dot-bomb era, many had given up Internet shopping for dead. Not any more. Just ask the 33% of American households who made an online purchase this holiday season, or the Internet commerce sites that saw an overall 30% increase in Web purchases over the same period of the year before, totaling $30.1 billion for November and December of 2005. People aren’t afraid to buy things over the Internet any more, and online sites have lured them there with promotions such as free shipping, cut rate prices, and easier-to-use Web sites. 2005 was the year when Internet shopping finally, really arrived, and it was just the beginning of the all-too-real Internet revolution that we heard so much about at the beginning of this century.

The Goats of 2005

Movie Studios

As movie studios and copyright holders of major motion pictures wring their hands and hold their breath until they turn blue, pirate ships are on the horizon. Unless these greedmeisters can figure out a way to offer high-definition movies for download, there are plenty of digital buccaneers who will be more than happy to figure out a highly efficient way to make that happen. That’s right, the movie studios are the next goats that will be taking the place of the record companies, their heads firmly entrenched in the sand, and their greed taking the place of common sense. The old business model is dead, guys, get over it. Listen up, dinosaurs: Adapt or die.

Blue Disc Combatants

Meanwhile, the Blu-ray and HD- DVD camps fight it out, where both types of blue laser discs are at least two years later to market than they should have been. By the time they’re offered for sale to consumers, the train will have already left the station. Downloading is the way to go, not moving around physical disks, and certainly not on a medium whose players cost $1000 and its discs may contain oppressive digital rights management schemes that no one will want. For the rest of the less-techno-proficient users, DVDs will do the job well enough. How shall we choose between Blu-ray and HD- DVD ? Who cares? It’s too little, too late.

Sony

Here’s the clueless company whose consumer division has dropped the ball so many times in its history I’m wondering why it’s still even bothering to walk out onto the court. In a courtroom may be where it ends up, because there's gotta be a law saying that a gigantic international corporation can’t put spyware on its customers’ computers. Topping off this fiasco was the numbskull Sony executive who said that people didn’t really know what root kits were anyway, so what difference did it make? It made a lot of difference, you moron, when you sneaked a piece of hard-to-remove scumware onto your paying customers' computers. Are you trying to keep music buyers from stealing your products? The sneakware victims actually paid for the privilege of being violated, but they probably won't get fooled again. Come to think of it, Sony paranoia practically locked it out of the portable music player market, too, handing the gift of 85% market share to Apple. It would serve Sony right if the company turned out to be a big loser in all the other emerging consumer markets as well. Sony ’s consumer division, especially whoever it is inside that corporate giant responsible for locking up its audio and video content, is exhibiting nothing but greed and stupidity all rolled into one, certainly qualifying the company as the über goat of the year.

in:sync

If you follow what happens in the content creation market, you undoubtedly heard of the software company called in:sync. No, I’m not talking about the boy band—it was a software company that created a nonlinear editing application called Speed Razor. The application gained considerable popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s, but suddenly early in 2005, the head of the company, Jamie Carr, decided to abandon all of his customers and dedicated users, and disappear. Meanwhile, users were left with no way to unlock their products if they decided to re-install them and no support for any of their in:sync software. When I caught up with Carr in a telephone conversation early in 2005, he wouldn’t tell me any reason why this had happened, and had no further comment. It was a pathetic excuse for an explanation, from a CEO whose company in the last five years innovated nothing and did nothing but take its customers’ money for meaningless upgrades and non-existent support. in:sync—certainly the winner of the booby prize for customer service and loyalty for 2005.

TiVo

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a big fan of TiVo, but I think the company qualifies as one of the goats of 2005 because it wasn’t able to capitalize on the most spectacular personal video recorder software yet invented. With such a magnificent product, the company had to make a special effort to make sure it wasn’t a huge hit. It lost ground with DirecTV, it still hasn’t come to market with a high-definition stand-alone personal video recorder , and it’s even starting to almost give away its products. The company is poorly managed, and it’s a perfect example of what happens to great ideas when there are idiots at the helm. I just wish a coherent company such as Apple would scoop up this gem and give it the attention and investment it so richly deserves. If that doesn’t happen, TiVo will go the way of the dodo. For 2005, it’s a great product with “goat” written all over it.

Television News Industry

Here’s the biggest goat of them all, perhaps in the history of technology—an entire industry that’s the epitome of wasted potential, and that’s doing a tremendous disservice to those of us who own the broadcast airwaves, the citizens of United States. The equivalent of shyster ambulance chasers, the television news industry creates crisis, scares viewers with dire warnings of harmless rainstorms, and hypes up anything it can find, however trivial, as long as it will garner ratings. Celebrity worship, death watches, and even made-up stories are the order of the day with these pathetic pretend journalists. There is even one entire network which functions as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and by extension, the US government, with around-the-clock broadcasts featuring its loudmouth pundits spouting nothing but pig-headed claptrap. More than ever, I agree with Newton Minow, the FCC Chairman from years ago who called television a “vast wasteland.” On the top this slime heap of detritus sits the television news industry, a mere shadow of its former self. What would Edward R. Murrow say? Good night and good luck, indeed.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=36481

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GOOG's taking off again... http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=GOOG&t=1d&q=l&l=off&z=m&a=v&p=s