Archive for the ‘Phone’ Category
Google, a champion of internet advertising, seeks to test its hand at cell phone ads
With more and more cell phones supporting capable browsers, a logical area of expansions is the advertising market for cell phone browsers. Most ads have trouble with cell phone browsers resolutions and are not conducive for the environment. This is troublesome as the cell phone internet industry today is what the internet of yesterday was — financially unfueled.
In the early days of the internet in the 1990s, large companies sprang up promoting websites which reached massive values by only providing amorphous content and limited services. These sites made billionaires of people like Mark Cuban, but inevitably the bubble burst and the market fell apart.
Today much of the modern internet is driven heavily by advertising, similar to the offline news industry. If the internet is a vehicle, advertising is the fuel that drives much of it. And these days, cell phone internet connections provide little “fuel” to the internet. Google seeks to change that.
Google on Wednesday announced that it will be deploying small brand-image advertisements, which it is custom making. When the site detects a cell-phone browser, it will switch to displaying these ads. This, Google hopes, will help it conquer the vast new emerging market.
Google feels that its fate is inextricably tied to cell phones and other mobile devices as the industry continues to shift toward mobile sales and development. The company has heavily invested in developing an OS named Android, which it hopes will help standardize the mobile phone industry. And like most Google products, the OS will likely find a way to tie in ads for revenue.
The new system Google will be rolling out for mobile browser advertising will display images similar to those seen on PC browsers. The images will be scaled optimally to look appropriate on the small screen. Advertisers will pay on a per click basis, and are only allowed to link to pages optimized for mobile phones.
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GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.
We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.
If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.
GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.
Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.
Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:
I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.
Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker
| Website: | grandcentral.com |
| Location: | Fremont, California, United States |
| Founded: | April 1, 2006 |
| Acquired: | July 1, 2007 by Google |
The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is… Learn More
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