Friday Flashbacks: where do GPay, Dopplr, Cuil and Silverlight stand now?

Written on 5th September 2008 3 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.

So where does last year’s buzz stand now?

September 2, 2007 – Google was rumored to launch a mobile payment service (”GPay”) after it filed a patent that suggested something like that. Nothing has come from it yet, but then again, Android is just now making its way to the mobile industry so there may still be a killer mobile app just waiting to be released into the wild.

September 4, 2007 – Dopplr, an online service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, hadn’t launched publicly yet, but it raised early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. Meanwhile, Dopplr opened to the public and keeps on adding nice features, but we’re not sure if it’s getting massive adoption in the world of frequent travellers or not, since it’s been a while since they’ve shared numbers.

September 4, 2007 – Cuill (with double L back then) was still in super stealth mode but rumors were swirling: Google was said to have already made a buy-out offer, and the company would well be acquired before launching etc. Well, Cuil launched with much fanfare and little acclaim. Supposedly a Google killer, users went on to mock the new service for days on end for not returning the right search results and pictures of other people when doing name searches. The buzz swiftly went away, and the latest report on the company says that its indexing bot kills websites. Ouch.

September 5, 2007 – Microsoft launched Silverlight, its browser-plugin / Flash rival. Silverlight is evidently still trailing Adobe by a long shot, but the Redmond giant has time to sit this one out, and some cool stuff is being built with it. Meanwhile, some go as far as saying it’s actually evil and MS is returning to its wicked ways from the past. The recently launched Google browser Chrome / Javascript could pose somewhat of a threat to its future, according to some. To be continued!

Cuil, Cuill, Dopplr, Friday Flashbacks, google, GPay, Microsoft, Silverlight

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The World Wide Web is growing a billion pages per day

Written on 29th July 2008 1 COMMENT
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

The growth rate of the Internet is accelerating in such a degree that a rather amazing related milestone was passed; Google’s spiders discovered the trillionth URL. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 WebPages indexed, Cuil reported to have indexed almost 122 billion pages with the help of the Internet Archive. According to Google, the World Wide Web is growing at a speed of a billion pages per day.

Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj tell explain how Google downloads the web, and reprocess the web-link graphs continuously, a Good example of how complex Indexing actually is:

“To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.”

Developing countries are logging in

As of March 2008, the Internet is estimated to have 1.458 billion users according to the Internet world stats. Most Internet users reside in Asia, followed by Europe and then North America. And the amount of Internet users in Asia are just increasing: India has over four million Internet users as of June 2008. Also this week, BDA reported that China became the country with most Internet users, surpassing the US with 210 million users. According to the report, over 70 million users updated their blogs/spaces in the blogosphere in the last six months.

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Cuil, Developing Countries, google, history, internet

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Ex-Google engineers launch ‘Cuil’, the first results

Written on 28th July 2008 10 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Search engine Cuil launched this Monday. Cuil is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who sold her last internet search technology to Google in 2004. This time, she believes that the technology is more valuable and she is not planning to sell it. We wonder, is this a Google competing internet revolution, or just another search engine?

Yet another search engine?

Not really. Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), is backed with VC investments of $33 million dollars (€21 million). The search engine not only applies link analysis and traffic ranking, but analyzes context and displays similar results in groups and categories. With help of The Internet Archive, Cuil is supposed to have the biggest index of the web. “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”
Ex Google engineers launch Cuil, the first results (more…)