From Good Morning Silicon Valley
blogs.siliconvalley.com
"This is huge. It's scary. They're not fooling around."
— Hunter Newby, chief strategy officer with carrier connection specialist Telx, on Google's telecom aspirations.
What does Google want with 270,000 square feet of space at the largest carrier hotel in Manhattan? If I were a betting man, I'd say the company's building its own core network and needs that kind of space to house the critical technology infrastructure for it. And according to multiple sources at carriers and equipment vendors, I'd be right. Light Reading reports the company has been leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber, and issuing large RFPs for DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment that could total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. "My understanding is they want to do remote peering and transit bypass," Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks at Canarie Inc. told Light Reading. "By building their own distribution network they don't have to pay peering costs. Remote peering and transit costs are significant for all the big Internet players. So everybody is thinking of doing this."
Here's something to fill up that fiber:
Ah, so you're a search company, a mouthwash and an oven cleaner ... The folks over at TiVo will wet themselves in fear when they catch wind of this.
Product Manager, GoogleTV
In this role, you will provide leadership on product vision and execution of projects that enable using Google's search and advertising technologies to enhance users' Television viewing experience. [...] You will identify key market trends that are shaping user behavior when watching Television. These include but not limited to the intersection of Internet and Television technologies, Video-On-Demand, Personal Video Recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google's search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits. [...]
Clearly, Google has big plans for GoogleTV. Just what they are remains to be seen, but a paper presented by the company back in 2003 offers a few clues. An excerpt:
"In this paper we study the problem of finding news articles on the web relevant to the ongoing stream of TV broadcast news. Our approach is to extract queries from the ongoing stream of closed captions, issue the queries in real time to a news search engine on the web, and postprocess the top results to determine the news articles that we show to the user. We evaluated a variety of algorithms for this problem, looking at the impact of inverse document frequency, stemming, compounds, history, and query length on the relevance and coverage of news articles returned in real time during a broadcast. We also evaluated several postprocessing techniques for improving the precision, including reranking using additional terms, reranking by document similarity, and filtering on document similarity. The best algorithm achieves a precision of 91% on one data set and 84% on a second data set and finds a relevant article for at least 70% of the topics in the data sets.
... The framework of the system is not limited to news, however; we have considered simple methods of detecting other genres (such as sports, weather, and "general" topics) and sending such queries to appropriate web information sources. The genres could be identified by using machine learning on a labelled corpus of television captions; an even simpler way would be to use television schedules and their associated metadata to categorize the current show into a genre.
Finally, as voice recognition systems improve, the same kind of topic finding and query generation algorithms described in this paper could be applied to conversations, providing relevant information immediately upon demand." |
