Thursday, April 13, 2006

Google, Yahoo and beyond..

Like a breath of fresh air – they keep coming at you. Un-relentlessly, without any remorse, with simple punches, from the right and left. Keep you wanting for more… and more.. Yes you are right – I am talking about Google. Today they released their calendar. Its so simple and elegant – that the only word that came out of my mouth was ‘wow’.

The world of Google started with – of course, Google. Then they hit us with gmail – and then again with Google talk, Google videos, yada yada. One thing that’s common with all these applications is that they are ALL simple to use – but powerful nonetheless.

The calendar is no different. Here is another suggestion to make it even better. Make use of the ‘tab’ phenomena more. In the calendar, on the left hand side, there are some tabs for news, gmail etc – make them open in the same window – not a new one.

BTW I used the phone out feature from yahoo yesterday – ooooooh.. sweet as honey. At 12 cents to India – it’s the best deal yet from any good company. (Reliance comes up to be about 14.4 cents if you do the math). The quality is great considering its VOIP and the ease of setup etc is virtually .. I’m confusing myself now – I should just say – it was easy to set it up.

I think Skype is history.

One thing I cannot get is that it charges all of 1 cent to Canada, 1.5 cents to Australia – but 2 cents to calls made to a phone in the US! Hmm..

Here’s a prediction. In another 6 months – we are going to see google talk do this VOIP thingy as well – I mean PC to phone (they already do VOIP for their talk program), anyway, so they will come up with their own phone out thing – only difference – it will be of course – FREE. Yup. Let me say that again – you can make a call to a phone from your PC for FREE. How they are going to do this – you will no doubt ask? Well - They would provide a ‘premium’ service where users can pay for a phone call – just like what yahoo is doing it – but they will also have a free service – for cheepos like us. All we would have to do before making a call would be to see (or see and listen to) an ad on our computer for maybe 30 sec or so. I think they will get tons of ads for this kinda stuff – don’t you? You can bypass their ads using their premium service.

So there you go – Google stock jumped another 30 bucks :) . If only I had 10 of those.

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