Rumor has it that Apple will be announcing the iSlate later this month. Speculation is that it will feature a 10″ touchscreen and look like an enlarged iPhone. That’s all well and good, but I’ve gotten no indication to actually what this machine will actually do.

On the other hand, The Microsoft Courier, still not a confirmed product, has some quite interesting “leaked” videos available. The feature set in this utility make it a must buy for me. That is, if Apple doesn’t beat them to the punch.

Solution to Web Fonts – More Realistically Hoeffler-Jones Foundry to Typekit

I’ve written signiciantly about the web font problem. Playing it safe, many developers will choose to use one of the 6 or 7 standard web fonts to ensure that their site renders in all browsers across all platforms. The result is mundane and ugly websites. Alternatives include capturing images of specialized fonts – but that’s not good for actual copy, using a replacement utility like sIFR or Cufon – but that results in ugly code and requires the use of javascript or flash to render, or using a commercial service like Typekit – which provides a lot of quality fonts, but you’re still limited.

I don’t see a solution coming this year, but I’d settle with the Hoeffler-Jones Foundry signing on with Typekit.

Total Decommission and Destruction of IE6

Ok, this isn’t realistic at all, but one can dream…

Chrome OS

The Cloud is sexy. The Cloud is in. The next thing to move to it is, well, the entire operating system of a computer. Imagine only needing to buy shells of computers: a display and a box with a motherboard, network card, video card, and sound card. Maybe some RAM, but drastically less than what we need now. And then being able to boot that computer up and pulling your applications, your documents, your music, everything from computers in the sky. Then go to the local library and boot up their shell computer and have it pull the exact same information to that computer as well. The possibilities seem absolutely endless, until your RoadRunner service gets bogged down with all the network traffic and opening Microsoft Word feels like pulling up The New York Times with a 56K modem…

Tethering to AT&T

I don’t care how many commercials you put up featuring Luke Wilson – and besides, the commercials aren’t convincing at all… we iPhone owners know that AT&T certainly is not the best service available. AT&T needs to pony up on promises it has long forgotten. GIVE US TETHERING!

Smart Phone Video Conferencing

Maybe with the next generation iPhone – or with the Google Nexus One – we’ll get a decent video conferencing handset. Rumors for the next iPhone say that the camera has been put on the front of the device, not the back specifically for this purpose. I would imagine that there would either need to be 2 cameras (one for photos on the back of the camera so you can see what you’re shooting) and one on the front for video conferencing, or have the camera be dual use and flippable from front to back.

WordPress 3.0

We’re up to 2.9.1 and hopefully, 3.0 takes WordPress into full bona-fide CMS as opposed to simply a blogging platform. Developers like us (because we’re smart) can make WordPress do what we want it to do anyway, but it’d be nice for most of those features to be done natively as opposed to custom developing or finding unsupported plugins to do the trick.

Timeline View for Facebook

Looking at status messages of years back – make that months back – no, days back can sometimes take forever clicking more posts over and over and over again until you find what you need… I’d like an archive view to come to Facebook if for no other reason that just because I want to be able to increase the efficiency of my Internet stalking

Google Tasks 2.0

I love Google but their Tasks service is lacking. I want tasks built into GMail and Calendars, have alerts on days that tasks are due and I want that syncable to smartphones. That’s not too much to ask!

Increased HTML5 Support

This would be nice. But I have a feeling that we’ll never fully be able to move to HTML5 until certain browsers are done away with…

Aside from being rather funny, the video shows the emotion of those on the outside are left feeling: I want an invite too! If Wave is anything like GMail, it’ll stay beta for a decade. Hold your horses…

Click to enlarge

So living life in the cloud has it’s drawbacks. But so far, it’s been better than having Outlook crash on me 10 times a day.

There is certainly power in knowing. When dealing with a website, a statement couldn’t be more true. Knowing who is visiting your website, what pages they’re clicking, the paths they’re taking to get there, and generally what they’re doing on your site can be absolutely invaluable when fine tuning to turn your virtual reality into real money.

Today, we’re going to look at the most popular website analytics package out there in Google Analytics. We’ll do a step-by-step approach to help you understand the terminology, what it means, and finally what you should do about it.

We’re going to do a case study on the most visited site we have in our profile: StateFansNation.com

Visits

Graph: Visits

This graph shows us the number of unique visitors that hit statefansnation.com in the past month. A unique visitor counts only once per day and is a good count of the number of people who visited the site. Of course, this number does not a perfect 1:1 ratio of people to visits. A visit is technically defined as a “computer” and not a “person” therefore a person could be counted more than once on the visit scale. For example, a single person could be counted twice if he or she visited the site at work and then at home. Nonetheless, it’s a great indication of how voluminous your audience is. Over the course of this time period, statefansnation.com saw 111,892 visitors.

Pageviews

Graph: Pageviews

Pageviews are the number of times a single page was visited. Back in the hey days of the Internet, this was called “hits” and was used to gauge a popularity of a website. It’s a bit of a misleading stat because, technically, a single person could produce all of the pageviews in the graph. Therefore using pageviews as a popularity metric isn’t the right approach. Nonetheless, pageviews is a valuable metric. If, for instance, your visits graph looked exactly like your pageviews graph, that tells you that the quality of your website is not up to par with what the visitor is wanting. If that were the case, each visitor would have hit only one page and then left (more on this later) which seguays nicely into our next metric.

Pages/Visit

Graph: Pages/Visit

Using visits and pageviews together gives us a nice ratio. The graph shows us how many pages each visitor saw before exiting. This is another gauge into the relative success of your content. If you had a 7 or 8 pages/visit metric on your site, that tells us that visitors liked your site enough to click on 7 or 8 unique pages before exiting. Since statefansnation is a blog and many of the visitors are everyday users of the site, a 2.02 ratio isn’t all bad since the user will not be likely to click on previous entries that he or she may have already read.

Average Time on Site

In addition to knowing how many pages a visitor saw, it is also important to know how long they spent to get a clear picture. If a person browses to your site, clicks a few links and exits within 30 seconds, your pages/visit metric may look misleadingly good. Putting that together with average time on site will normalize your visitors behavior. As we can see here, the average visitor spent 2 minutes, 31 seconds on the site before exiting. A “good” range will vary from industry to industry and site to site. However, anything below 30 seconds is certainly in the “bad” range.

Bounce Rate

Graph: Bounce Rate

A bounce is defined as a visitor who did not offer a single click to your website. They came, they saw, they left. Again, translating this number into a tangible meaning will vary from site to site. Of course, the lower the bounce rate, the better. Here, statefansnation.com is seeing a bounce rate of 53.07%. Is this good? Probably so. Since it is a news site with newcomers only interested in the latest piece, it is quite typical for a visitor to land, read, and leave.

% New Visits

Graph: % New Visits

Knowing what percentage of your audience is “new” is important. Here,

Absolute Unique Visitors

Graph: Absolute Unique Visitors

This report asks the question “has the visitor visited the site before outside of this date range?” If yes, they are categorized as a returning visitor and if not, a new visitor. Both are counted as an absolute unique visitor.

All Traffic Sources

Graph: All Traffic Sources

Now that we know generally “who” your active audience is, it’s important now to know how they got to your site. This overview graph lets us know that 65% of the time, visitors are the result of direct traffic, or someone manually types the address in (or selects it from a bookmark) to get to the site. 16% of the time, they are referred, or sent to the site from a link somewhere else on the Internet. And 18% of the time, they are the result of appearing on a search listing.

These three measures are important independent of eachother, but one may be more important depending on your method of advertising.

There’s far more to what you can do with these metrics, especially determining what keywords yeilds the most quality visits, which sites are heavy referrals, and which search engines your site is performing best on. All of these metrics are available inside of Google Analytics.

Hi, I’m Brian, and I’m an Outlookaholic.

Today, I have good news. If you follow this easy 5 step program, you too can be rid of Outlook and all fo the headaches that come along with it.

Step 1: Sign up for Google Apps

100% free Google Apps. Google is generous enough to let you use their platform for your own purposes and with your own domain. You can use Google’s GMail, Calendar, Docs, and Chat, branded with your company and with all the features that you would get with a standard Google account.

The free moniker may be a bit misleading. Google does get a valuable advertising profile with your usage.

Step 2: Use the GMail platform for your e-mail

No e-mail is better than GMail. The incredible search aside, GMail gives you everything you could possibly need: filters, labels, contact management (more on this), and a gigantic slew of toys known as Google Labs.

Step 3: Google Calendar, awesome

Create, send, and receive invites, schedule your life and make it remind you when your late. Google Calendar is just as formidable as Outlook’s calendar or iCal or literally any other client-based calendar. And you can access it from anywhere.

Step 4: Manage your contacts with GMail Contacts

One of the drawbacks for so long about GMail was its clunky contact management system. However, all that has changed. The contact management portion of GMail is now fantastic.

Step 5: Sync it with you iPhone

And the best part: Sync it all with the native calendar and contact apps on your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android based mobile devices. Essentially, you’re getting an enterprise level mail, calendar, and contacts service… for free.

What else?

You’re cured. You have an online, accessible, syncable e-mail platform available from everywhere without the frequent Outlook crashes. You’re cured.

Go forth and prosper.

When the big guys had all the power

Producing a TV commercial, running a full-page ad in a widely circulated newspaper, or even getting a 30 second radio spot are often out of reach for the entrepreneur. Large corporations or other companies who were simply first to the scene had incredible leverage when utilizing their cash reserves or extensive name brand recognition for marketing purposes. Thus, small car lots were run out of business, independent clothiers closed up shop, the old mom and pop general stores found themselves without a fight against Wal-Mart and Target. Large companies have the power of economies of scale on their side, but small businesses still had quality of service and product that would be formidable tools against the big guys. But cheaper prices and shiny, flashy marketing campaigns nailed the small business coffin shut.

Enter: The Internet

Around 1995, a major paradigm shift began with how people consumed information. America Online became a household name and the country was abuzz with the sound of modems connecting them with the world at-large. People began to get information in a new way. E-mail replaced the postal service, Yahoo! replaced the encyclopedia, and news websites replaced the 6:00 news broadcasts.

With the Internet’s coming-of-age, people began monetizing the Internet in shrewd ways. Jeff Bezos setup an online bookstore in 1994 while using his garage as his warehouse. 15 years later, Amazon.com is one of the most popular online retailers. His formula resulted in a huge success story of how the Internet equalizes the playing field while he destroyed competition from traditional brick and mortar stores.

The Internet Gold Rush isn’t over. While success stories such as Bezos’ are few and far between, the average entrepreneur can harness the power of the Internet for increased market share.

Your potential customers as consumers of information

Today’s Internet allows people the luxury of getting information on their own terms while allowing an advertiser the added benefit of providing information in a less obtrusive way. American Idol is on and we’re about to find out who is getting kicked of… after the commercial break. I would hate to be that first advertiser up after that. No doubt the first 5 or 10 seconds of that particular commercial is unheard through the collective cursing of millions of people. Commercials are intrusive. We DVR for a reason… to skip them. Radio ads are obtrusive. Magazine ads are obtrusive. Most advertising is unsolicited and obtrusive. We didn’t ask for it.

Fast forward to tonight. Perhaps you’re going out for a nice dinner and you want to try something new. Pull up Google and search fine dining. Right in the middle of my search results is a map listing all sorts of fine dining restaurants in my area. A few clicks later I have full menus as well as prices. If that particular restaurant is using OpenTable, make a reservation right there on the Internet.

You just made a financial decision to give someone else your money… without them having to ask for it. You knew what you wanted, found some vendors, chose the one that best suited you and gave them your money. Your information was delivered to them in a completely solicited fashion, a novel idea. The restaurant earned a customer simply by being visible.

Your potential customers are searching for what you have to sell as you read this right now. All you have to do is meet them there.

Search Engine Advertising

Meeting your customers online can happen in one of two ways: increasing your search engine ranking or bidding for an advertisement slot.

You may have noticed that your Google search queries yield a “left side” and a “right side.” The “organic” listings are on the left and paid advertisements are on the right. The organic listings are a result of Google’s ranking algorithm which is vastly complicated. The paid advertisements are a result of the market. We’re going to take a deeper look at the economic model behind the paid advertisements.

Search engines brand this advertisement service as pay-per-click advertising or PPC. Advertisers write their ad copy and bid on being displayed based on the search term entered. Going back to our fine dining example, I see Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse on the advertisement list. They placed a bid of a certain amount that they agreed to pay Google in the event that someone clicks their ad. The click cost is determined through a very natural market formula: the more you bid per click, the higher your ad will be placed (for the more experienced PPC advertisers out there, I am negating for simplicity variables such as quality score). As a result of this method, it is extremely easy to be visible on page 1 of the major search engines. A brute force method of bidding $15.00 per click will certainly get you to the top, although this isn’t the recommended (or rational) method.

What you are paying for is a solid lead. You chose the search terms you want to target and the geographic location that the ad should be shown. Your ad copy was good enough to entice a click. At that point, it is pretty certain that the searcher is looking for what you have to sell (if you did your research and ad copy writing correctly). At that point, if your website reinforces your ad copy and targeted keyword, your chances for a customer conversion is quite high. What you got for your money is a pretty warm lead.

A ton of psychology goes into choosing keywords, your ad copy, and what happens after the click. All three of these milestones must be defined and refined as the campaign goes on. The best part about this type of advertising is your ability to fine tune your campaign instantaneously with real time feedback. If a certain keyword is not performing well and resulting in lots of clicks which cost you money, and no conversions, simply negate that keyword and concentrate on what is working.

Crossing your T’s and dotting your ROI’s

The great part about utilizing the Internet for marketing purposes is the level of accuracy and precision that comes along with it. Knowing your ROI is a function of several variables, all of which can be extracted.

Let’s take a look at television advertising for a moment. Say you spend $20,000 to produce and distribute a 30 second ad to run statewide. How do you measure the success of your efforts. You may see a spike in sales but, short of depending on customer feedback, you really have no way to measure how successful your campaign was. Was the campaign worth it? Was it a net positive?

You may see some “as seen on TV” products urging you to either call a phone number or go online to buy the Amazing Carpet Cleaner 2000 or the Car Ding Begone. They measure their success by sales to that specific phone number or sales resulting from the specific website (usually, these are phone numbers and websites that are exclusively advertised with that television campaign). With these metrics in place, the seller can generally get a very specific idea of what their return on investment was with that particular campaign and thus judge its success. But what about the local car dealership commercial? Or the really funny must see Super Bowl commercial? And everything in between: how is ROI measured. Simply put, it’s more guessing than math. Guessing isn’t acceptable to the average small business owner. Knowing your ROI is vastly important when managing the day-to-day operations of a campaign.

With ROI on the mind and doing thorough analysis of how much you can afford to acquire a customer, you can wage a balanced campaign whose results can be seen in the bottom line. Further, knowing your ROI is an exact science. After 30 days, you should be able to tell if a particular campaign is working or not. Television, radio, newspaper, or the Yellow Pages can’t give you the kind of opportunity for success that search engine advertising can give you. You have very little in terms of making corrections based on feedback after undergoing a massive sunk cost of $20,000 for a television commercial. When you run that ad, cross your fingers because that’s all you have left. Using the search engines as an advertising method, your costs are minimized and your ability to evolve with the results of your campaign is maximized. Tweaking bid prices, ad copy, and website language can all happen in real time while the campaign is ongoing.

Wrapping up

I’ve spent a bit of time hating on traditional advertising methods. They all have their merits and their purposes. But for the entrepreneur, the most effective way to reach your customers is through a balanced search engine advertising campaign. You will learn about the tendencies of your market in real time and gain a deeper understanding of the psychology of what literally makes someone tick… and click.

Now, with the advent of a more robust technological core, the Internet has become more organized and more useful. Web Applications are a big part of making sense of the mess. Chances are, you use a Web Application as a part of your daily life. In the trials and tribulations of an Internet-based small business owner, I use several of them and can’t really imagine how I got along without them. Here are my top 10 favorite Web Applications.

#10 MobileMe

10 years ago, Apple was dead. The company couldn’t find a way to to chip away at Microsoft’s domination of the PC market share. Once every blue moon, a game changer enters the equation and completely changes the way people behave. Enter: the iPod. The iPod, in it’s clunky, first generation form was a sight to behold and your local Best Buy couldn’t keep them on the shelves. From there, Apple kept creating the next must-have device that had every young person scrambling to put together the $5.50/hour they made to purchase the next “big thing” from Apple.

Aside from the iPod, my first forray into the world of Apple came vis-a-vis the iPhone 3G. I was late to jump on the bandwagon, but I say that now typing on my new 24″ iMac. I’ve been converted.

One of the not-so-visible things that Apple offers is MobileMe. MobileMe is the everyday person’s Microsoft Exchange. With MobileMe, you can keep all of your important information synced across various mediums. I purchased the $99/year MobileMe when I bought my iPhone and it was a great way to keep my desktop PC, my laptop, and my iPhone synced with all of my calendar and contact data. I easily added my iMac to that loop. Not only does MobileMe sync contacts and calendars, it also syncs photos, bookmarks, and files as well. For $99/year, it’s a must-have.

www.me.com

#9 Wikipedia

Aside from the occasional content vandalism, Wikipedia is a surprisingly accurate compilation of knowledge. Wikipedia is, in fact, found to be as accurate or more accurate than other online encyclopedias such as Britannica and Encarta. These studies, however, drew hostile reaction from Britannica who questioned the survey’s validity. Want to know more about these studies? Google “wikipedia accuracy” and guess who’s at the top? You guessed it, a Wikipedia entry on Wikipeida’s accuracy. I actually find this kind of funny.

If Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica are the large ships of their industry, Wikipedia is the dingy. Large ships can’t correct course very quickly and takes a lot of time to steer in another direction. Wikipedia can turn on a dime. The knowledge base is updated much quicker than other online encyclopedias due to Wikipedia’s policy of user authoring. For current events, Wikipedia is the first to know.

A famous vandalism incident occurred at the behest of Stephen Colbert, who urged his audience to create their own reality (wikiality). He insisted that the population of elephants had tripled in the last 6-months (while text on the side of the screen captioned: it hasn’t). Lo and behold, entries on elephants were changed to reflect the new reality. Stephen Colbert triumphantly announced that elephants were no longer endangered.

Aside from hoaxes, Wikipedia still serves as point whenever I’m looking up information of fact online.

www.wikipedia.org

#8 WordPress

What would I do without WordPress? I guess we could ask what an author would do without a pen, a politician without tax money, or Alex Rodriquez without sterroids. I’d be in a heap of trouble.

WordPress has transformed the way we do business at O3 Strategies. Starting as a blogging platform, WordPress and it’s massive developer base evolved the platform into an everyday content management system. We provide a WordPress installation with nearly every client we come across. It empowers our clients to take control of their own Internet presence. No longer do they have to send an e-mail or make a telephone call to update their site. They can do it all in an easy way that has been unmatched by its pricey competitors. Best part? It’s free. WordPress will make citizen journalists of us all.

WordPress is also a developer’s dream. Well built and easily extendable, WordPress makes it possible to do almost anything regarding Internet copy.

www.wordpress.com

#7 eBay

First man on the scene and the Goliath in its industry, eBay came and crashed the Internet party in September of 1995 known first as AuctionWeb. eBay has been helping grandma sell an attic full of junk and has provided an avenue for others to make mini fortunes. If you’re looking for a discontinued DVD, a mountain bike, a car, or even a house, eBay probably has it.

www.ebay.com

#6 Mint

Mint has made Microsoft Money obsolete. With a slick, very Web 2.0 interface, Mint provides money management tools with a surprisingly low learning curve. And it does it with pizazz to boot.

Simply enter your online banking account credentials, a vehicle loan credentials, or even your mortgage credentials and Mint gets to work downloading all of your transactions, sorting them, categorizing them and giving you great little views to see what kind of junk you’re spending your money on. Kind of a rude awakening.

Mint also tracks your stocks and other investments and gives you histories and ROIs all on the fly, updated that day. If you’re up to trusting an application with literally all of your money account credentials, Mint will certainly surprise you with its functionality.

www.mint.com

#5 YouTube

Being first with a service is often a recipe for big bucks. That’s certainly what Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim found out when Google gobbled up the video sharing service for $1.65b in 2005. Even with the enormous stature and incredible thinkers of Google, the company found out that Google Video wouldn’t hold a match to the ever popular YouTube.

YouTube has given a creative outlet for many who probably wished they didn’t have that outlet such as the Leave Britney Alone video featuring a rather disturbed young man (?) wondering why Britney is being given a hard time. Others like the Obama Girls got their 15 minutes of quick fame. One of my personal, all-time favorites features a little rabid Wolfpack fan, Locke, who can’t bear to hear that the Wolfpack lost the 2006 ACC Championship at the hands of their hated rival. Shown below.

[youtube width="300" height="243"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pGusFXhWyY[/youtube]

www.youtube.com

#4 Facebook

What would I do with all of my spare time if it weren’t for Facebook? One of the rare cases of being late to the scene but quickly catching up and slaying the beast (mySpace), Facebook has become an ever popular medium to live your life online. CEO Mark Zuckerberg crafted Facebook while sitting in his college dorm room. His first version was a network for Harvard students. It quickly turned to Ivy League students and to all colleges. Remaining as a mostly collegiate application for the first few years of its life, Zuckerberg turned on the faucets and released it to the public at-large in September of 2006. Facebook now has over 200 million active users obliterating its closest rivals. I have an account. You have an account. My parents even have accounts.

I was in college in 2004 when Facbeook hit the scene. Everyone had an account and the first version was rather primitive. The infamous Wall was just a text box and anyone could write or delete anything in it. My how that’s changed.

What makes me mad about Facebook is that the application, in its early form, wasn’t rocket science. I could’ve done it. If only I hadn’t been out chasing the ladies instead. Then I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it. So I guess all of our lives are better for it, right?

Facebook has yet to turn a profit even though the service is perhaps the only other entity that compiles a more complete advertising profile on an individual than Google. Facebook has yet to figure it out, but I’m sure that’s going to change soon. Which leads us to number 3…

www.facebook.com

#3 Google

Coming in at number 3 is Google. Some may question why Google is ranked so low on the countdown. You’ll see later.

Not much for an explanation of Google as everyone knows who they are and what they do. I had written about some newcomers to the scene just last month and concluded that Google has nothing to worry about in the short or long term. Perhaps the forever term.

Google has done an amazing job of first building a fantastic search engine and then compiling search habits on its users to create an advertising profile on each one of its users. It has easily been able to monetize the search industry and is now a multi-billion dollar company. The best part about Google is that they are certainly not resting on their laurels. It seems everyday Google pumps out another fantastic service for the masses, all of them either cheap or free. I guess free is a loose term given that you are giving them mounds of data worth more than gold with every new search.

www.google.com

#2 Online Banking

I hate checks. I hate writing them. I hate standing in line at the grocery store while someone writes one. Everything about them I hate with the lone exception of getting them. Nothing’s better than that.

But what is close is online banking who has largely slayed the check beast. For this article, I am using online banking as a generic term for any company offering your financial profile online. Without these precious little gems, I would be wasting time (and paper) writing those stupid checks instead of clicking around and paying everyone who demands money from me. It has drastically simplified my life and with electronic records on everything, I don’t even keep a check register anymore.

Think of all the baby birds we’ve saved. But not the dodo bird. If only people had online banking in the 1600s.

#1 GMail

No Google didn’t get #1 but one of its products did. The only reason GMail takes the reign over Google is because it has literally sorted my own personal mess into a nice neat pile as opposed to Google which is more concerned with sorting out the world’s mess. And I don’t care about the world. I’m worried about me.

Like you, I still have my Hotmail account laying around. I don’t check it. It’s there only because Hotmail still has me in the system from 1996. GMail is the smartest e-mail application to date, bar none. No more keeping folders. No more losing track of e-mails in the black hole of everyday communication. Applying what Google does best to its e-mail platform, GMail offers a search capability that makes Outlook want to crash (again). And with the introduction of Google Apps, now anyone can craft their own e-mail address and let Google handle the rest. In fact, O3′s e-mail is based on the GMail platform. It’s reliable, it’s searchable, it’s free, it’s everything e-mail should be. And more.

www.gmail.com

And that’s a wrap

These are the Top 10 Web Apps that I can’t live without. If you don’t mind giving up some personal information, the Internet can make life a little more fun and a little more productive.

Microsoft’s goal is to challenge Google in its search dominance. Google has become an international household name and Microsoft badly wants that. Microsoft has happily sat on their success for the better part of the 90s and 2000s. But with market share shrinking, its competitors popularity increasing, and Vista crashing, Microsoft needs a crutch and it hopes that… Bing… will be it.

We will see. But like our test of Wolfram Alpha, I don’t see anything that Microsoft can do to drive a wedge into Google’s market. It’s almost an ironic dose of its own medicine: Microsoft dominated the personal computer market for almost two decades with little that could be done to stop it. Apple came up with an ingenious little device called the iPod that was a complete game changer for the company. The iPod single handedly thrust the company back into relevance and it hasn’t stopped since.

Although Microsoft is in no danger of going under, they are looking for that “game changer” that will set the company back into technological relevance. A dominating search engine could be the way, but that hill is very, very steep.

We will see.

New York Post article: http://www.nypost.com/seven/05262009/business/microsoft_bing_ing_it_on_google_171003.htm

Wolfram Alpha was launched this past Friday to huge pomp and circumstance, and like Bill Gates’ release of Windows 98, the application failed almost immediately. Nonetheless, Wolfram Alpha was back up by the weekend and rebranded as a test release. This isn’t completely uncommon nor does it affect my first impression of it… yet. So let’s get to work.

What can you ask a computer? Anything I guess. As many of my close friends know, I’m quite privy in the kitchen and one thing I’m always doing with a laptop in the kitchen is conversions. So I asked Wolfram Alpha the following question: “How many ounces are in 14 gallons?” This probably isn’t a question I would ever ask it, but why not.

Wolfram Alpha first interpreted my input with some pretty advanced regular expressions I’m guessing.

Convert 14 gallons to fluid ounces

So far so good. It has correctly determined what I’m looking for.

1792 fluid ounces

There we have it. It correctly did the conversion for me. Here’s where I got really impressed. Not only did it give me what I’m looking for, it also gave me some other important ancillary information.

56 quarts

112 pints

224 cups

53 liters

0.053 cubic meters

52,996 cubic centimeters

Very nice. The first 3 or 4 could be applicable before delving into information that may be useful to scientists or researches, certainly not to the amateur chef. It quickly devolves from usable everyday information into more scientific babble as it presents comparisons as volume.

(6 x 10^-4 to 0.0014) x forty-foot equivalent unit (2TEU)

(0.001 to 0.002) x twenty-foot equivalent unit (680 to 1520ft³)

(0.0024 = 1/423) x standard volume (1000 mol molar volume constants)

Wolfram Alpha gives a few more tables of information that I’m not going to share because I didn’t understand what the last one meant and I imagine it gets deeper from there. Overall, I would say that Wolfram Alpha did its job and presented my question with more than appropriate answers.

Now let’s have some fun with Wolfram Alpha. I asked it a question without a clear answer because of bias. A computer is supposed to be unbiased, right? Go.

What is the best college in North Carolina?

This review hangs on the answer to this question. If it answers North Carolina State University, I’ll be happy. Any other, I’ll claim it to be junk. What did Wolfram Alpha say?

Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.

Fair enough. It gave me some suggestions on “good input” and provided links to things I may have meant, one of which is “college in North Carolina.” That term was a link, so I clicked it. The result? Wolfram still couldn’t understand what to do with my new input that it provided. I don’t see a real problem with this since the question wasn’t a great one to begin with.

I tested a few more searches with Wolfram and found that it is actually really well done when asking questions of fact. Who was the 17th President of the United States. Andrew Johnson came up and gave me some good information on Johnson, including biographical information, his successors and predecessors, even his Vice President (which was blank because he didn’t have one). Wolfram Alpha handles this type of question extraordinarily well.

As a first impression, I don’t see Wolfram Alpha as being much of a competitor to Google. Google doesn’t try to answer questions as much as it gives you a place to go to find the information you are looking for. Wolfram isn’t going to tell you where to get the best pizza in town or deliver a blog about the best colleges in the area. Google will. If Wolfram Alpha is a competitor to anyone, it would be Wikipedia but it would need several more evolutions from here to rise to that.