Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

Flickr has recently added support for videos.  Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it.  Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were.  The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites?  Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it.  There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it.  There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled.  Flickr went for a very nice definition - “a long photo“.  They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now.  That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr.  I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now.  I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely.  Most of my videos are very short and rather personal.  For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers.  But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos?  What do you think?

Today is the last day of The Mobile World Congress which takes place in Barcelona.  Makers of everything mobile (as in phones, not as in real estates opposite) are showing off their stuff at this event.  Also, there are many announcements, news, and releases tied to the dates of the congress.

It seems like a good time to revisit the Android story.  Is it moving it all?  What’s happening there?  Will we see any of it any time soon?

It appears that the Android is moving along as planned.  There were a few pre-production prototypes at The Mobile World Congress, and people were pretty much impressed with them.

The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices.

In other news, Google released a new version of Android SDK.  This new version brought a few major changes and improvements, fixed many things that developers complained about.

The upgrade also takes to heart developer complaints about the software and includes several major but less visible upgrades: in addition to easier development of layouts, any app can now translate addresses to map coordinates and back. Audio formats such as MIDI and OGG are now also built-in, according to Google.

The same source suggests that we will indeed see some phones in the second half of 2008, as it was planned and announced last year.

Android’s upgrade brings the Linux-based platform much closer to production quality for its expected release, which should start with handsets in the second half of the year from companies such as HTC, Motorola, LG, and Samsung. Most of these devices are understood to focus heavily on Internet access and are expected to include some models with GPS and touchscreens.

The big news of last week were of yet another attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo.  If you missed all the buzz, Web Worker Daily has a really nice round-up with separate links to facts (read: press releases) and opinions (read: speculations).  If that’s not enough for you, you can always find more with Google, Slashdot, and Digg.

Many online news sources continue to be completely dominated by discussion of Microsoft’s hostile bid to acquire Yahoo! And no wonder: a deal of this magnitude has the potential to touch the lives of pretty much everyone living and working online. It’s a rare web worker indeed who doesn’t use something from one or another of those two companies in their daily lives.

So, first, can it affect me personally?  Yes.  I don’t use any Microsoft/MSN/Live services, but I can’t live without Flickr and del.icio.us, both of which belong to Yahoo now.  Also, I do occasionally use Upcoming.

Now, what do I think about this whole thing?  Well, I think it shows how desperate Microsoft is.  The general trend is towards the web, not the desktop, where they still rule.  Most of their own web services turned out to be pretty lousy.  They want to get online, and they are willing to pay a lot of money to get their fast.  Mostly, of course, this is a war for a place under the advertising sun.

From the Microsoft view point (I think), Yahoo looks to be online.  More than so.  Yahoo is the second most important company online after Google.  And Google is giving Yahoo some rough time.  And Microsoft realizes it clearly, that Google is partially to blame for this whole trend towards the web.  And it also realizes that if it is serious about moving online, it’ll have to compete with Google in one area or another.  So it makes even more sense to acquire Yahoo.  From the Microsoft point of view (again, I think), Yahoo appears to know what they are doing.

And that’s where I see their biggest mistake.  Yahoo is indeed the second most important company on the web after Google.  But it struggles to be there, and it struggles even more to keep Google in sight.  Because it is falling pretty far behind.

A little side note: I think there is a war of concepts between Google and Yahoo. It’s bigger than just advertising space or anything else.

• Yahoo started off with a directory of links, which was better than many at a time because it was moderated by humans.  Google started off with bringing huge improvements to machine based indexing and searching.  Yahoo:Google - 0:1.
• Google brought this whole concept of clean user interfaces and simplicity for the end user.  Yahoo stayed and expanded on the old idea of portals, which bring all possible and impossible to the front page of the site.  Yahoo:Google - 0:2.
• Google made a stake on the brilliance of its people - if the service is properly done, it’ll grow by itself and bring in more users.  Yahoo played it safe, trying to purchase web services that already have momentum.  Yahoo:Google - 1:2.

End of side note.

Overall, I think that this is a bad move on Microsoft part.  If the acquisition will happen, I think, it’ll damage both companies, and, maybe even, drive at least one of them into the ground (eventually, not immediately).  Yahoo, being at the position it is now, needs more flexibility.  The online space is getting more and more competitive.  That’s where you need to move fast.  Yahoo made some really good acquisitions before, and I’d say that they have some sense in this area, but they need more speed with integration of their acquisitions into their backbone.  With Microsoft on board, I’m afraid, everything will get a lot slower.

Also, I think that Yahoo won’t win much from this acquisition.  Surely, some money will come their way, but it’s not always a good thing.  And I don’t think that it’s good in this particular case and at this particular time.   I believe it would do much more good for Yahoo to get smaller, faster, and “hungrier”.  Hunger (think: limited resources) makes one’s mind sharper.  That’s exactly what they need now.  Not more “fat”.

As for Microsoft, I think there strategy should be more directed towards entertainment.  If they really want to buy something, they should buy some entertainment companies.  Those that produce content.  Disney studios maybe? Or some sort of a deal with AOL/Time Warner (they had a few frictions in the past, but they seem to managed to work out a solution together).  With more and easily accessible content they can reinforce end users interest in their Windows desktop, as well as their gaming platform (Xbox thing), and their mobile platform (Windows Mobile).  And, entertainment content by itself is a rather popular thing among the end users, which makes advertising much easier.  And rich advertising too - not just text-based relevant web ads, but audio and video media.

What do you think about all this?

Now, here is another reason to love WordPress.com folks:

 Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free.
Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.