Tag Archives: google

Tetuan Valley’s Chief WOWness officer featured on Radio 3 (RNE3)

Posted by fredrikhoel on 10/04/2011 None comments

On March 3rd, a familiar voice chimed through the radios across Spain as Alex, Tetuan Valley’s very own Chief WOWness officer, participated as an expert on Startups together with Emilio Julio Lorenzo, Professor at the Language and Information System department of UNED.

Did you know that a startup, by definition, has to be technology related?

A lot of us have a vague idea of what key-components a startup consist of, but the term has, as Alex explains a very specific definition.

“A startup is an interesting concept, that is used a lot in media but many people don’t know. A startup is made up by 4 concepts. The first one is, as many people are aware of, a newly started company, but what most people aren’t as aware of is that by definition it is a new company based on technology. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a computer company, it can be telecommunication, bio-technology, nano-technology, but it has to have a technological basis. The 3^rd concept is that it has to be, as the Americans call it; cutting edge. This means that one is working with a concept that implies a lot of risk. And finally, and maybe most importantly, the objective isn’t to create a business which happens with a lot of companies, the objective with a startup is to sell it, after 5-6 years. Fundamentally, the whole equation changes when you consider that in 5 to 6 years, your company will be sold because the idea isn’t to live by it. So there are those who failed. Google is a startup that failed, where they couldn’t sell it… I wish I could have failiures like that ”

Covering topics such as the amazing transformation of people that we’ve seen over the course of 6 weeks in Tetuan Valley Start Up School, the similarities and differences between being an entrepreneur in Spain vs. Europe, and University Spin-Offs, Alex delivers 30 minutes of diverse and interesting information about different aspects of the world of startups.

Check out the interview at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/uned/uned-el-mundo-de-las-startups-las-empresas-tecnologicas-del-futuro-02-03-11/1034236/

DuckDuckGone

Posted by Nathan D. Ryan on 26/03/2011 1 comments

A few days ago, José Cobian sent me and some others an interesting link to an elevator pitch from DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that promises to protect your privacy—unlike Google. The pitch begins with Herpes. Not good. Here is my initial reaction, verbatim:

Nothing here is what it seems. DuckDuckGo isn’t the plucky hero. Google isn’t some evil empire. This is not the grand arena.

The picture painted by DuckDuckGo’s story is misleading. Targeted advertising can be a boon as well as a bane. Granted, the anecdotes are valid, but they are mostly one-offs, and their relevancy is bolstered by the fact that big data is only in its infancy. As massive amounts of metadata are collected about everyone, a single person’s online history will be viewed as more mundane in the grand scheme of things, even when leaked to a third party. Ignominious searches will carry less profiling weight as they become less of an anomaly. You embarrassed because that New Year’s Eve photo of you and the neighbor’s dog had 10K YouTube views? Doesn’t matter, because now everyone has a similarly embarrassing collection of bits floating around in public view. If not, you will be *uninteresting*, which will be worse than a silly sounding medical condition. And if there is something *really* bad about you (child molestation comes to mind as the obvious example), you can’t hide that even now, anyway.

We are in the tail end of a culture that values secrets as a guard against embarrassment. In effect, a secret means that we don’t have to ask forgiveness. This attitude is shifting, with the newer tech generations exchanging secrets for measures of implicit forgiveness for the (occasional) understandable indiscretion. Privacy isn’t overrated yet, but it is becoming so, and people who are publicly willing to embrace their failures will have the advantage of authenticity.

If you run a small outfit looking to hire one of two candidates, you’re going to Google each of them (or Blekko each of them, or whatever). Suppose one has zero online presence, and the other has 300 commits on GitHub with some notoriety due to the leaked credentials of a hacked pr0n site. Who are you going to hire, Boring or Tainted? The thresholds are shifting in favor of Tainted, especially as we admit that Tainted comes from a big family.

Besides, I worry about a company that both derides advertising and claims it as their future profitability model. Good thing DuckDuckGo is self-funded at this point, because I seriously doubt their ability to raise capital. Their target audience seems to have and/or desire narrow online exposure, a diminishing group. Whether this is for better or worse is yet to be seen, but it’s the reality.

DuckDuckGo has been around for a bit, since late 2008. This puts them on the bleeding edge of the “Facebook is Evil” meme that gained traction during a Facebook overhaul that included some controversial changes to their ToU. Google was also having their own issues. It’s clear that privacy was on people’s minds. Concern led to the ignorant and unjustified media hysteria that spawned the promising Diaspora in 2010 and its disappointing launch (okay, it was a pre-alpha launch).

The problem is that the protection of online privacy is a billion-way prisoner’s dilemma. Trends away from casual anonymity are inevitable, as people associate value with visibility. You publish or you lose. Maybe everyone will lose bigger in the end as a result, but that remains to be seen. Regardless, people have a growing awareness of their online activity being amassed as part of their respective amorphous, public profiles, which are amalgamated and traded among the power players to be mined by anyone with an interest and a dime. What this means for DuckDuckGo is that people will use Google for searches they want others to see, and they will use DuckDuckGo for searches they don’t want others to see. That does not bode well for revenue growth from ads and affiliate sales.

Luckily, DuckDuckGo has some other tricks up their sleeve. Search relevancy, for one. If the Internet was Baskin-Robbins, complaints about search spam would probably have been the flavor of the month in January. And despite some recent changes by Google, this is still a problem. (Don’t believe me? Try searching for the user manual for a printer.) This is an area open for anyone with the smarts to own it. But DuckDuckGo will lose if they continue to beat the privacy drum.

Differences between Android and iPhone development

Posted by betonsofa on 10/11/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the betonsofa team, formed by Luis Aguilar, Ernesto Arredondo and José A. Gil.

We are going to compare Android vs iPhone development, as a continuation of a first article about the differences between Google and Apple TV. This post is mainly based on two papers wroten by David Green and Eneko Knorr, developers in Android and iPhone platforms.

Language
The Android development language is Java.
The iPhone language is Objective-C.

Objective-C:
- The IDE doesn’t help much.
- You need to do many things to declare a property: declare in the class definition, again to declare getter/settter, initialize in the init method, @synthesize in the implementation, release in dealloc. In general, you have to type way to much to express a simple concept.
- Pointers in Objective-C, though powerful, are also another time-waster.
- The patterns that must be followed (p.i: implementing correct init and dealloc methods) are non-trivial.
- Objective-C’s imports and forward-declarations are a pain

Java:
- The Eclipse IDE helps you define properties
- Java really shines with its garbage collection.
- Imports and forward-declarations exists in java, but Eclipse’s JDT is so good that you can almost forgotten them.

API Libraries
- On Android many Java libraries are available (Java IO, Java IO, network and regex). It make development easy. In general, the layout, organization, and naming conventions of Android platform classes are more consistent and predictable.
- On iPhone, classes and methods are poorly organized. Depending on the framework used, naming conventions and code organization would differ.
- Android has the benefit of being open source. You can see how things were implemented in the Android platform and learn by example.
- On the iPhone when things didn’t work as expected you had to resort to Google and hope that others had encountered the same problem.

GUI Model
- The iPhone platform does a great job of encouraging an MVC design pattern.
- With Android’s support for multiple processes and component reuse, it does introduce some complexity for the developer
- Both Android and iPhone provide a way of declaring user preferences in XML. Both platforms provide a default UI for editing those preferences.

Resources
- Apple does an excellent job of providing lots of resources for developers. Apple provides lots of sample applications and code to demonstrate API usage.
- Android developers also have access to loads of resources. The guide and API reference are installed with the SDK, so everything is available when offline. You also can download many open source Android projects for ideas on architecture and API usage.

IDE
- Android development leverages the excellent JDT tools. JDT is its incremental compiler, which provides immediate feedback with errors and warnings as you type.
- In Objective-C in XCode, waiting for compiler feedback break the flow of programming.
- Eclipse is better than XCode in content assist and editor management system.

UI Builder
- iPhone app developers are given a pretty good UI builder. It does a great job of showing the UI as it will actually appear. It’s flexible and can model some pretty sophisticated UIs.
- The Android UI builder is pretty useless: it can’t display UIs how they’ll actually appear, and it’s UI is way too inefficient.

Debugger
- XCode debugger UI extremely difficult to use.

Profiler and Heap Analysis
- An area where Apple development tools excel is in profiling and heap analysis. These tools seemed mature and easy to use.

App Store and Google Market
- The iPhone app store is excellent in that you can sell into many countries worldwide with a single setup. Getting an app into the store however is frustrating to say the least. Apple must approve every app before it is accepted into the store. Mine got rejected multiple times without any explanation. The delate is similar for patches resolving bugs of your own applicattions.

- The Google market by comparison to the Apple app store is terrible in that you can only sell into a handful of countries. On the other hand when you upload your app to the app store it’s available within minutes, so you don’t have to worry about an approval process.
In Google market, people is more reluctant to pay than in iPhone app store.

Without a doubt, Google TV

Posted by betonsofa on 27/10/2010 1 comments

Apple and Google have recently launched their new TV products: Apple TV and Google TV. Apple TV works as an online shop whereas Google TV wants simulate a computer experience. Apple has recently said “[people] don’t want computers on their TV”. The battle has begun.

Both companies follow with their business model. Google TV offers: the same Android mobile applications, channels and applications searches and compatibility with all your gadgets (“works with your TV, your satellite, your cable, your Internet “). Apple offers on television, what iTunes and iPod offer for the music: buy or rent TV shows and movies more easily. Apple also offers integration with music and video libraries of iTunes accounts by its Airplay system.

We propose you to valorate them by means of a detailed comparison and to decide which is better for you (A=Apple TV, G=Google TV):

Content
A: Renting and buying movies and series. YouTube videos and Flickr photos for free.
B: TV channels and online video streaming free (provided platforms: Hulu and Netflix). Direct access to Android Market where applications and games can be downloaded.
Result: 0-1
User Interface
A: Very careful, organized in six groups: Movies, TV Shows, Music, YouTube, Podcasts and Photos.
G: Personalized via the home screen.
Result: 1-0
Web browser
A: No.
G: Google Chrome.
Result: 0-1
Video Resolution
A: Max resolution is 720p at 24 frames per second or MPEG-4 at 432p and 30 frames/sec.
G: Fully HD compatible
Result: 0-1
Video recording
A: No
G: Yes
Result: 0-1
Program searching
A: Movie browsing by actor and director rented or purchased via iTunes.
G: Searchs for TV channels and web
Result: 0-1
Non-video content
A: Audio in AIFF or WAV, Photos (JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG)
G: Photos, music, websites, games, flash and Google Android Apps
Result: 0-1
Subtitles
A: Close captioning is supported but not subtitles for most Apple TV content
G: Subtitles, closed captioning and closed caption Google Translations
Result: Not relevant to us
Video Output
A: HDMI and component video
G: HDMI and other options to be available when necessary.
Result: 1-1
Flash Compatibility
A: No
G: Yes
Result: Not relevant to us
Remote Control
A: Standard or Wi-fi-based on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad.
G: Standard or remote Android Smartphone (can push web page from phone to TV), IP remote control protocol will be open sourced for apps on multiple platforms
Result: 1-1
Software
A: iTunes and iPhone Remote app.
G: Android 2.1, Google Chrome, Flash 10.1 plugin, Android Apps from Android market, Google TV SDK and web and TV APIs.
Result: 0-1
Audio
A: 7.1 Surround and some Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. Digital optical audio, RCA analog.
G: Depends on your home equipament.
Result: 1-0
Developer Friendliness
A: XCode (closed).
G: Android (open).
Result: 0-1
Performance
A: A4 chip, used by iPhone 4 and iPad. It guarantees a total fluidity of the interface.
G: New Intel Atom (unknown performance).
Result: 1-0
Hardware Specifications
A: 802.11 b/g/n, Airport, 10/100 Ethernet.
G: Wi-Fi,Ethernet, HDMI from cable/satellite box, special DishTV integration, Strong CPU and separate GPU and dedicated DSP, keyboard and pointing device.
Result: 0-1
Device
A: A settop box from Apple.
G: A settop box (Logitech) or pre-installed on some new Sony TV, both with an Intel CPU.
Result: 1-1
Hardware prize
A: 99€
G: 299 €, 399€, …
Result: 1-0
Contents prize
A: HD films rented at 3.99$ HD, SD films at 2.99$ and TV series chapters (FOX and ABC) at 0.99c. Youtube and Flickr free.
Google TV: Free
Result: 0-1
Total result: Apple TV: 7 – Google TV: 13

This is our opinion. What’s yours?

Bet On Sofa Team <betsofa@gmail.com>

Google decalogue

Posted by Dapedro on 18/10/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the ControlAd team, formed by David Pedroche and Pablo Cosias.

In 2007 Uncle Sam Google gave us their decalogue and even today it’s current.

Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Democracy on the web works.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There’s always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You can be serious without a suit.
Great just isn’t good enough.

I have to recognise that big G likes and scare me at the same time, but i have no doubts that they will accomplish their plan to conquer the Universe. These days there are a lot of people writing about Facebook’s decade, because the 90′s was Microsoft’s and 00′s was Google’s. I dont agree with them.
I don’t see Facebook trying to be more than a social network, everyday you see Google developing a crazy idea like creating an automated car. Some of these ideas wont make any direct profit but they only need one in a hundred because crazy ideas can convert one million into a billion dollars if you have the potential that Google has right now. Anyway, we will have so much fun just looking a what Google wants to develop.

But you can’t make a post only from a copy and paste of Google’s ideas. I would like to give you some of mine:

Clients come in and Clients come out but your biggest asset has to be your team.
Don’t make promises you can not keep.
Make a business plan. If you don’t know where to go you will never know if you have arrived or not.
Say “Good morning” loudly everyday.