Pizza in a Flash.

Dominos Pizza in Australia have deployed a Flash-based RIA (Rich internet application) for ordering. As a fan of pizza, the internet, and not having to call in to get my fix – this is way cool.

Early on in the dotcom boom, various pizza franchises created web sites for online ordering. They sucked. I think Pizza Hut promised one, but never delivered. It has been a constant bug-bear ordering pizza has been a major hassle.

So, here’s to Dominos and a satisfied customer. Both technically, and gastronomically.

NSW State Library: National Treasures

History is a personal fascination – so I decided to call into the NSW State Library today to have a look at the “National Treasures” exhibition before it closes on 22nd October.

Various historical documents: Captain Cook’s Log book from 1770, Bank’s diary from the same journey; diaries from Australian WW2 POWs; Eddie Mabo’s papers; various pioneer diaries from turn of the century; legal documents from transported convicts.

Documents are important: they are physical evidence of our history. Go have a squiz.

library

The New Nickel-Tube: Google and YouTube

So Google purchased YouTube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard numbers: YouTube has a reported 100 million viewers per day; based on the purchase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eyeballs for a few minutes, within a year it is financially ahead.

Considering the current cost of both text-advertising and TV advertising; and the oncoming onslaught from competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Opportunity cost of not owning YouTube: a competitor would have purchased it, first. Fox had already purchased the young Myspace eyeballs; and Microsoft is serious about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vistas, Zunes to capture other eyeballs. YouTube was obviously on the block for sale, and each viewer is valued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much compared to a competitor getting the brand. YouTube maybe the “text breakout” and single product weakness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a perspective on this, too)

Looking into my crystal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advertising. Potential changes to Google Adsense:

  • Text links inside an ad (transparent text on bottom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
  • Throw more smart maths at technology to recognise the content inside video and then attach appropriate a like advertisement
  • The original publisher of youtubes (another verb coming on, here?) self-categorises, so advertisements could similarly be targeted.
  • For youtubes posted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; understanding the context would permit smarter targeted Adsense ads

Instead of crawling the internet, Google is becoming the internet. This is rather a scarily thought that crossed my mind when reading this Wired article (The Information Factories) on their new data center in Washington state, US. Ultimately, it may have been cheaper to buy YouTube than create a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or purchase, just closer ties. Apple needs the content, Google needs the hardware. Microsoft is the common competitor.

First Writely Blog Post

Having recently used Google Spreadsheets , and the better featured EditGrid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sidenote, I am continually impressed with EditGrid. The external Web data tool permits automated foreign exchange rate and stock market updating. Every minute or so, there is a flashing in your spreadsheet as the data; including Australian Stocks, are updated. Excellent for managing a portfolio online.
Back to Writely: this post is written in Writely: normally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applications: EditGrid, Writely, Google Spreadsheets: all live in their own clouds, and interchanging data is copy and paste from window to window. I also have to restart Firefox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have disabled all Firefox 2.0 extensions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applications could push/pull data in a standard way from the cloud. We are heading in that direction. Flickr is the almost the universal static image storer; Youtube the video storage “place”. Will an online virutal-file manager that references all these formats, no matter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 application?
It looks like Google is starting to grok: integration is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; certainly not XHTML compliant.