Charbax.com

I just launched a new site at http://armdevices.net the design and features will be improved during the next few days.

I video-blogged from Netbook World Summit and LeWeb conferences in Paris during the past 3 days, I will publish all the videos to my http://techvideoblog.com over the next few days.

I posted a couple of articles about OLPC at:
http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/impact/olpc_netbook_impact_on_laptop.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/impact/olpc_needs_to_make_xo_laptop_b.html

Chrome OS Laptops will cost 50 dollars and run 20 hours on a battery, and come with free unlimited 3G internet data connectivity.

Chrome OS is not going to be companion to Windows/Mac, Chrome OS is destroying Microsoft/Apple and even Intel.

You will be able to run powerful and free image and video editing software using Native code and hardware accelerations functions of Chrome OS and HTML5.

Chrome OS works offline just as well as any other laptop. Want to write emails while offline and auto-send them when you find a web connection? That is possible. Want to write documents offline and sync them when you find a WiFi? That is possible. Want to watch video while offline? Just connect USB storage and that is possible. I am sure Chrome OS laptops will even come with extra storage and hard drive compartments built-in if you really want to carry a lot of stored data to do a lot of things offline. Otherwise, by that time, there will be Google Drive to store a TB of your personal files for less than 50 dollars per year, thus only slightly more expensive than buying a TB hard drive. And if you will want to store divx or mp3 files on your Google Drive that other users have stored on Google Drive already, you won’t have to actually upload it, a quick scan and a copy is on your Google Drive and storage costs will be shared by all the users who will have access to a copy of the file.

Chrome OS works on touch screens, uses whatever hardware you want. Most importantly, with a 50 dollar ARM laptop the experience will be just as good as on a 400 dollar Intel laptop.

Google announced Terrabyte storage for 256 dollars per year for Picasa web photo storage. I still think Google has a long way to go. $256 per TB per year is 8x more than the current price of buing a TB hard drive on the open market and using it for 2 years. 16x more expensive if you consider that a hard drive should work fine for 4 years at least.

Google needs to implement fully cold cloud storage. If I want to upload a TB of my personal stuff to Google cloud storage, and that I very rarely need to access that data, Google should store 2 copies at 2 separate locations (if one hard disk fails), but then Google should also be able to turn off the power to the hard drives to 0 power consumption, and the only charge for power usage to resume turning on the hard drives on demand and charge for that power consumption as part of the bandwidth costs, cheaper than $0.01 per GB transfered from and to the cloud storage.

Then for the hosting of popular files, Google would automatically host those on more expensive always on hard drive storage, though the extra bandwidth usage should pay for most of that.

For (mostly pirated) popular video and audio files, Google should do like Streamload once did, only host one copy for all the users who “beamed” it instantly to their accounts. Thus if you want cloud storage for movie and music files that in average more than 1000 other Google cloud storage users are using, th cost for that TB of cloud storage should be less than 1/1000th the TB storage cost per year, thus $0.25 per TB per year, thus free unlimited cloud storage for popular files, financed by advertising. But Google probably needs to figure out some copyright issues before this happens.

For example, if I want 1TB on Google cloud storage today, Google should let me buy about 2x 1TB drives on the open market, at about $80 per hard drive at current hard drive pricing, and have them instantly connected to the Google cloud storage. Thus the pricing should be $80 per TB per hosted unique files per year. And $0.01 or less per GB transfered which includes power consumption costs (could depend also on the bitrate and the sustained transfer rates, bandwith to transfer many small files slowly would cost more than transfering the files quickly).

I have been posting this as a feature request on Google feedback groups since May 2007, today Google is launching real feed item recommendations, which they call Magic.

My request from May 20th 2007: Backup up somewhere cause I cannot find it in the archives of the official Google Group

Subject: Personalized News Items Suggestions Actions…
From: Charbax ()
Date: May 20, 2007 7:14:39 pm
List: com.googlegroups.google-reader-past
We can star items, now all Google Reader needs to provide is a
“Recommendations” button, which would display a list of recommended
news items, based on comparing this user with the activity of all the
other Google Reader users.

There should be some settings for different kinds of Recommended news
items:

x Generate Recommendations Based on read news items

x Generate Recommendations Based on starre news items only

<------------> A slider to choose level of obscurity that news items
may be, thus only fetching the most popular other news items, or also
recommending some more obscure stories that only a few other Google
Reader users have read or have starred.

Some other algorithms and functionalities might be chosen in the
settings of this feature by the users.

And as there is a Star function now, it is important to also have a
“Discard” item button, which basically tells the Google Reader
Recommendations engine that it should please try to avoid recommending
this type of news item in the future.

A history of chronologically starred and discared news items should
also be consultable so as to maybe later make some changes in those
ratings.

Also this could be used to Suggest similar news item that is better
suited than the one that is being read. Basically, Google knows all
the related news items that talk about the same things, so using the
stats of starring, it could display a “Hey, try reading this version
of the news item on this other blog, it should be a better one and one
Google Reader thinks is of your personal taste”.

Google should contact me if they are going to steal my idea, or I have
lots of other similar visions, I’m sure they are in the works and
studied, but maybe they are not..

In December 2007: http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-feedback/browse_thread/thread/655e44352560e9ab/

And a couple of months ago: http://www.getsfn.com/google_reader/topics/feed_item_recommendations_based_on_likes

I like to speculate on Youtube’s potential for profits and revenues on my blog in those previous posts: http://charbax.com/2009/04/09/what-google-pays-for-youtube/ , http://charbax.com/2008/08/14/current-global-youtube-bandwidth-might-be-126-petabytes-per-month/ , http://charbax.com/2008/08/07/google-should-activate-overlay-youtube-ads-now/ , http://charbax.com/2008/06/28/youtube-needs-to-change/ , http://charbax.com/2008/04/30/when-google-starts-to-revolutionize-youtube-using-overlay-advertising/ and http://charbax.com/2008/01/09/i-just-interviewed-the-youtube-founders/

Today Youtube announces officially that they are serving more than 1 Billion video views per day. So here are my latest calculations posted to: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/youtubes-new-logo-shouts-from-the-rooftops-1-billion-views-per-day/#comment-3027990

Let’s calculate:

1 Billion views per day, if average 30 seconds per view, if average is 300kbit/s video bitrate = That’s “only” 1125 Terrabytes of video streaming bandwidth per day.

Let’s guess Google pays $0.01 per GB of bandwidth (because they own most of their bandwidth infrastructure caching all videos as close to viewers as possible). That would mean that Google would be paying only $11250 in bandwidth per day.

If average Youtube video view is 1 minute, that would still only cost $22500 per day at $0.01 per GB.

If Google pays as much as $0.05 per GB, and average video length is 1min and average bitrate is 300kbit/s, that’s still “only” $112500 per day to host the worlds biggest video site reaching hundreds of millions of viewers all over the world.

Now let’s consider Google may be “only” monetizing 20% of those views at a rate of “only” $10 per 1000 views with overlay advertising in partner/copyrighted/claimed videos:

If 20% of Youtube videos are monetized at $10CPM, that’s $2 Million in revenues for Google per day, for 200 million overlay and other ad impressions per day.

Overall, according to my calculations, Google may be spending between $8.2 Million and $41 Million per year on bandwidth to deliver all those video views.

And according to my calculation and speculation, if 20% of video views are monetized by overlay and other ads, Google could be making upwards $730 Million in revenues per year.

$730 Million -  $41 Million = $689 Million in profits for Google on Youtube each year. Of which they split about half to the content providers.

Youtube could still be a very huge source of profits and revenues for Google, and my calculations are probably much lower than Google’s really potential for monetization with this.

I believe even user generated content can be monetized, more and more advertisers only care if they can sell stuff to the viewers through those overlay ads.

I also posted this comment on the official Youtube blog: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/y000000000utube.html?showComment=1255103825750#c9092045352321286663

3 years, why can I still not even apply to become a Youtube partner just because I am not a resident of USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Spain, Canada, Australia? How about the hobbyists of the 200 other countries of the world, are they not allowed to turn their hobbies into a real business?

All this time, still no real way to sell things with Google Checkout or whatever directly from within the videos. Still no automatic subtitles generation and automatically translated subtitles in all languages. Still no regular video-downloading support! No Micro-payments for monetization of really high quality streaming and downloading!

The video recommendations algorithms still suck. No really good platforms to watch Youtube on a set-top-box. No desktop uploader with resume and maximum upload bandwidth features, no way to access ones originally uploaded videos!

3 years, still no way to re-upload better quality of videos, still no easy way for regular people to claim ownership of video and audio content when other users pirate your content. Still no way to edit out the music of a video with your own alternative legal music.

3 years, still no alternative to the crappy Flash format!

OK, I appreciate that the bandwidth that Youtube provides for 1 billion daily views is absolutely amazing work in terms of bandwidth management and hosting. Though seriously, you got 1.65 Billion dollars for it, Google has the best PHD engineers in the world, you are a lot of developpers who should be able to improve things even faster at Youtube. Seriously, get to work now and release these features! You actually have the responsability to make these features work now.

The EU should force all Laptop and Desktop OEMs to provide the consumer the option to save instantly the cost of the OS at the counter and not have it pre-installed on their machine.

And any consumer purchasing a laptop or desktop with an OS pre-installed should be able to get an INSTANT rebate at the counter equivalent to the cost of the OS even if the OS is pre-installed on the computer. The reseller must provide a special software on a USB key that uninstalls automatically that OS on first bootup.

Then all Resellers must provide free or paid alternative OS choices. Chrome, Ubuntu or Linpus Linux could be available right there on a USB key available for free with any new computer purchase.

What this proposition means, is that if you enter a store and it only has Windows computer for sale, you must be able to demand Windows removed and they should give you an instant rebate between $40 and $100 depending on the actual price that they are paying to Microsoft. Many consumers will prefer to buy the computer without the Windows option either without it even being pre-installed or with a USB key function that erases Windows on first bootup. Erasing Windows can be done in the store while you wait, or if they don’t have time, you can get the “Delete Windows” USB key and delete it yourself at home the first time you boot it up.

Problem Google needs to fix is that people will use it to store DivX and Mp3 files, so Google needs to make sure corporations won’t sue Google for facilitating piracy. So it should have a focus on monetizing video and music.

Google won’t have to store more than 1 copy of each DivX and mp3 file, so storage should be free for unlimited amounts of “public” files.

Features such as sending files to friends need to filter out copyrighted stuff obviously. Unless the copyright holders agree with Google to monetize it.

Youtube stores the original uploaded video files, so one should instantly be able to re-access them on Gdrive as well as instantly publish uploaded videos to Youtube. Again Google can filter out copyrighted material automatically by doing digital and analog fingerprinting technology and by knowing and verifying users real identities.

What I am proposing is an extra layer of p2p distribution. Why can’t you for example volunteer to store a bunch of products in your garage which people can come and pick up 24 hours a day. For that you get paid, or you can limit the “opening hours” to any amount of time any time you want.

What then happens, if when people buy stuff online, they instantly can go and pick it up 24 hours a day at p2p storage facilities. For a 2AM pickup, it’d obviously cost extra for the nightly service.

Everything would be secure, you don’t get name adress information of people that can provide you the goods until you paid for it, and there is no information if that person has more or less than 1 item in stock. Not even the need to disturb that person ringing on his door bell, the Android application would ring as soon as the customer is approaching the door, thus to be a p2p storage and delivery person, you don’t need to stop everything else that you do at home to be part of that, just store a bunch of things close to your door.

No transaction of money is done ever, the money is spent online, the commission is paid online. What people would do is eventually be able to rate the p2p kiosk experience as well as the buyer. Like ebay ratings but much more relevant and real.

Now add to that a layer of actual transportation of goods. The higher quality goods need to be transported in the absolute most efficient way, to both save on costs and save on pollution. There would be large storage facilities for goods where trains, trucks, airplanes drop the goods, from there the goods are spread out to the thousands of “p2p kiosks” at totally regular people’s homes or any participating consumer storage facility.

P2p delivery can also happen by any person volunteering to pickup goods and deliver them at specific places, could be on your bicycle, in your car, using your little transport truck. Basically you just tell your in-car Android GPS device where you are going, and it will tell you if you can make a few bucks by picking something up and dropping it off on your way.

Same thing as p2p taxi where if you want to carry other people on your backseat, simply tell the Android system, and you are transformed into a p2p taxi. Which will greatly save on pollution as well, since most cars are only driven by 1 person. Putting more people on the backseats of cars is a very easy way to save 50% car pollution and improve traffic conditions greatly. And it would cost about the same as taking public transportation, thus much cheaper than real taxis.

Now Google could organize all this if you want. Or some other huge private corporation. I think though it makes much more sense that the state is regulating all this, in terms of making sure there is interoperability across the whole infrastructure, especially when you start involving normal citizen in the making of this new type of optimized p2p infrastructure. You want safety, quality, trust systems, compatibility. If you leave this new type of organisation of the infrastructure only up to private corporations, there may be collusion of interests, monopolies, illegal trade, all sorts of other things that corrupts the system.

I would link to the Masterful John C Dvorak for some very clever guessing: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-googles-new-os-more-than-just-a-bluff?siteid=

I do not believe John C Dvorak is 100% right in his funny column, though I do believe he is right when he says that this is all a super clever public relations trick put on by Google and that all of it is just the Google OS coming up. John C Dvorak is mostly right about most things that he says.

I believe it will be released open sourced in a couple of months, with the first ARM Cortex A8 and Tegra based laptops.

Android 2.0 and Chrome OS is the same thing. It doesn’t matter what Google says and what bloggers think. There is only one way Google is working towards:

- Making full Chrome browser work on ARM embedded laptops even better than on x86 based laptops.

Now, you might know me as the contiunous x86 basher, I kind of am. But what I believe Google wants is more competition in both hardware and software space for PCs and laptops. This is what Google OS is all about.

The reasons Google might caution Google OS on ARM fans to wait for are a few technological breakthroughs which Google might need before the worldwide availability of perfect $100 Google laptops can happen:

1. ARM Cortex A8 needs to be fast enough for a full browser. If it’s not, then Google needs to wait for broad availability of ARM Cortex A9 starting early next year.

2. Google and the whole ARM community needs to optimize browsers, flash, HTML5 features on DSP and GPU cores of laptops, especially ARM laptops, so that $100 laptops can run a FULL browser and cloud computing experience. Nvidia, Qualcomm, Freescale, Texas Instruments were promising hardware acceleration for the browser, Flash and HTML5 at Computex, but they didn’t really show it yet. I believe they can make it work as a 2003 X86 based browser (something like a 512MB RAM or less system), though that may not be enough for the full mass market to adopt the first version, thus Google might prefer to wait for full launch for it to work better than 2009 x86 browsers.

3. Google wants better connectivity. Google is strongly hoping to start implementing White Spaces worldwide as soon as possible, this will enable free unlimited wireless Internet for all (and destroy all ISPs and telcos in the process). Optimized Connected standby features for ARM devices might only really start working perfectly early next year. First generation ARM Google OS laptops might not have LED lights that turn on instantly on incoming emails, feeds, pings, IMs, VOIP calls and other such crucial presence and social networking web apps which Google needs on the Google laptops for it to really feel like revolutionary products compared to the established systems.

4. Political aspects of this might start being put into places early next year as well such as real competition on HSDPA connectivity, maximum prices of $20 per month pre-paid data-only plans for most of the world and no more contract-plans and other voice and SMS plans forced onto consumers by monopolistic telcos. Also political decision on net neutrality, white spaces, sustainable energy consumption of consumer electronics and servers and crucial for Google to succeed on this global cloud computing plan.

I see it as inevitable, that Google will create Google OS, a super tiny embedded Linux open source OS less than 50 Megabytes for the whole highly optimized OS, and that in a couple of months we will start seeing it ship on $150 ARM based laptops with all types of screen sizes (large screens and keyboards aren’t much more expensive than small ones, consider $50 upgrade for 15″ and full keyboard instead of 10″ and tiny netbook keyboard).

Those $150 Google laptops will be running ARM chips by half a dozen competing ARM processor manufacturers and manufactured by all the major laptop manufacturers in the world. Effectively putting out of business all of Microsoft, Intel and Apple. Together with most of Silicon Valley. That is for the better. For the first time billions more people will have access to this technology very quickly and we will all for the first time really find amazing new ways to use the technology.

As for technical details on Native versus Cloud apps. I believe natively you will have everything needed for a full computing experience. Basically it’s not just the browser, it’s not just flash support, it’s not just HTML5 including native code plugins for the browser and 3D in the browser, it’s like providing you the hypervisors, user interface APIs, clever caching and seamless interface optimizations, which will enable you to not only have a full 2009 x86 style computing experience, it will plug you into the full cloud, in fact giving you infinately more computing power for all the most processor intensive tasks that the biggest professionals would want to use. You can definitely encode videos using grid server encoding, I have been doing that for over 2 years for all my HD video encoding needs, just have a fast enough upload to upload your source files from your camcorders. Google Gears type database and web application caching not only lets you do things while offline, it can turn all web applications into feeling exactly like native applications, they respond instantly without having to wait for any online service to stream the user interfaces back at you. The user interfaces will be locally cached on the machine, only processed data is streamed from the cloud, and clever pre-loading algorithms mostly will not make you feel any difference than processing everything using a local X86 processor. In fact, things will feel much faster cause you will be able to have the power of an unlimited amount of cloud servers to render, process and encode any of your media intensive tasks.

Ryanair and Easyjet are full of Corporate World types, who just enjoy that they can save money on flight tickets. Sales of Business class tickets on any airline company are tanking. Saving money and getting smaller, better, cheaper laptops is absolutely a universal thing, not only for the mass market, also for corporate types.

You will get £100 Google OS Laptops, running 15-20 hours on a 3-cell battery, fully sunlight readable with the Pixel Qi screen, highly optimized with built-in HSDPA always-on connectivity, connected standby features (rings or blinks an alert light from full standby on incoming emails or calendar alerts), all Google OS laptops will be based on ARM Processors.

Basically Chrome OS = Android 2.0 optimized for Laptops. It will absolutely take over the world, as the absolute best OS for ARM Laptops, instantly putting Microsoft, Apple and Intel out of business.

I posted this as a comment on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/15/google_chrome_os/comments/