Do you want more TV advertising, even if it’s Google?

Mid-May, Google announced a whole bunch of new products and services at its Google I/O event in San Francisco. The biggest surprise of the bunch was Google TV, a platform that Google’s developing to bring the richness of the Web to your TV.

This has of course been tried before for a vast number of years, but when Google talks, people tend to listen. The company is packed with clever and committed developers, and more than a small quantity of spare change to throw at its projects. It also doesn’t hurt that Google has a lot of goodwill amongst all of its clients. For the average consumer, Google’s products work well and are mostly free.

Free’s a nice price to pay, but it ignored a key element of how Google makes money and pays for that “free”, and that’s through targeted advertising. Every Google search is logged and analysed, and if you’re a user of Google’s excellent mail client, gmail, you’ll notice more specific ads turning up next to your mail as well. This does worry some privacy advocates, but it’s clearly the price one pays for free services. If you want it free, you pay with ads. It’s the model (more or less) that television (with the exception of state-run services such as the ABC) has worked on for more than half a century.

Bringing more ads to TV, though? That’s an interesting prospect, given one of the first things that most buyers of personal video recorders do is work out the best way to enable ad-skipping, whether that’s just fast-forwarding through the ads (a limitation of any “Freeview” branded PVR) or skipping them entirely. GoogleTV will be a combination of a hardware product and a software platform. At first in the US this year Google will launch a set top box built by Logitech, and Blu-Ray player and TV built by Sony with inbuilt Google TV. As yet, international plans (including Australia) point to 2011 as the earliest we might see GoogleTV here.

Google’s main product is still of course search, and the ability to search for TV-specific content easily from your sofa is pretty compelling. I put the question around ad-skipping and how to sell consumers on getting yet another box to chuck under the TV that’ll serve ads to them to Google’s product manager for Google TV, Rishi Chandra at a recent Google event. His response was rather telling about where Google’s priorities actually are.

Chandra’s take on advertising for end users (that’s you and me and everyone else presumably watching a Google TV) is that we’d prefer targeted advertising specific to our searches and our profiles. They’re more useful, he told me, and if the economics are right and they’re particularly targeted we may end up with less of them.

On the other side of the coin, while it’s possible to strip ads out of Web pages if you’re so inclined or fast forward the ads on the TV if you’ve pre-recorded it, don’t look for that kind of feature in Google TV. One of the benefits (to the advertisers) that Chandra highlighted was that users couldn’t skip the ads. They could ensure that the ads were played and were trackable. Google can help the advertising community with lots more specific data via Google TV. At the end of the day, Google’s actual clients are the advertisers that give the company cash by the barrowload.

It’s a difficult line that Google has to tread. Its money comes from advertising, and even online there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It still leaves me wondering if it’s going to be worth investing in a TV with inbuilt Google (or a set top box, Blu-Ray player or whatever) in order to be served even more advertising that I can’t easily ignore.

Google Wave

There has been a lot of buzz in recent months about Google Wave and the large array of team-based tasks that can be completed with it. Google Wave is basically a collection of online tools that allow the members of a team/group to work together collaboratively on documents. The tool is web-based which provides team members the freedom to be located anywhere in the world. All types of preferences can be established, however, at it’s most basic level, no matter which member of a team comes up with an idea, all team members can be required to sign off on the idea as a condition for moving to the next level of development. Google Wave is often used by team leaders. They often set up a document and then invite people into the project, giving them the ability to ask every team member to input ideas. It is a great way to stimulate discussion. Google Wave makes teamwork via the Internet a reality.

Wave is a term that is used often in the Google Wave system. A Wave is defined as a discussion that has several participants in it. Wave participants are invited into a project, or added by a Wave admin and are given permission to participate in the development of documents or in whatever collaborative effort is taking place. There is no limit to the number of participants that can be added to a Wave. One particular feature that makes Google Wave especially exciting is the option for new participants to playback any interactions that took place among the team before they actually joined the project.

Google Wave functions are in real-time and therefore any communication at all, can be seen instantly by other team members. This allows team members on the same project to work together on a document while holding a real-time discussion at the same time. There are no limitations on the quality of documents that users work with. Google Wave allows for rich text formatting, uploading photos, video uploads and the placement of maps in documents as well. All of this eliminates the need for email messages being sent to the group and eliminates a need for attachments in those emails.

Project managers, business owners and business planning departments can all benefit greatly from the features offered by Google Wave, as can companies that require the co-operation of multiple departments placed in different offices and cities. Often traditional businesses hesitate to adopt new technology and wait to see how things fair with other companies. Google Wave is one development in technology that definitely improves the way that things are done in the best of ways.

The Google Story

Google Inc. is the company that runs the highly successful search engine Google.com. Company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met at Stanford University as computer science students. After many late night discussions, they put their heads together to develop a new idea in search engine technology. They experimented with developing their idea and ran it on their university network. Very soon though, their search engine became too big for the school network and needed a new place to grow. This was the beginnings of the web site that we now know as Google.com.

Google.com is a web site that is known for its simplicity and ease of use. When you visit the Google home page, you will experience a lot of white space, with a simple search box in the middle of the page. With such simplicity, it is quite hard to get lost when using the Google site.

With a quick rise in popularity, Google became a force to reckon with for the then number one search engine, Yahoo.com. Right from the beginning, Google was extremely popular and it very quickly became the number one search engine. Even today, its popularity has not waned.

Google Inc. was incorporated and became a formal company in 1998. Google Inc. needed ways to earn money. From very early on, Google has earned its profits through paid advertisements. It is a web site that has always been popular and it is this popularity that gave advertisers the confidence to pay for advertisements on their site; a fairly new idea at the time.

In 2004, Google Inc. went public and celebrated their Initial Public Offering (IPO) after just six, short years in business. This allowed them to grow even further as a business and to offer more helpful web services to their users and fans.

What has made Google.com successful? Not only does Google.com do what it does well, it is also a trail blazer when it comes to innovative services on the Internet. It has allowed many web site owners to make a profit through its pay-per-click advertising scheme, its been strategic in buying smaller companies for products that would raise the standard of the services it offers and it has an extremely loyal following of online users.