You’ve gotta hand it to Google: The company is never shy about throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. Over the years, it’s introduced countless projects that have gone through long beta cycles only to fail miserably — or achieve a degree of success far below what was expected. Google Docs, for example, was supposed to topple Microsoft Office, and is still predicted to do so, but if that ever happened, I missed it.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS (GigaOM Pro, subscription req’d). There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them. Continue »

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns. Continue »

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing. Continue »

Verizon Test

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one. Continue »

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant. Continue »

Telecom gear vendor ZTE will step up its game in the crowded smartphone space next year with an Android-based handset, and Google is rumored to be working on its own device. But as the smartphone market continues to heat up, manufacturers are learning the hard way that the key to success in mobile phones lies in the software — not the hardware. Continue »

The Asia-Pacific region is getting ever-closer to faster mobile broadband, with network operators in Japan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia readying their Long Term Evolution networks. Today NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, affirmed its plans to deploy LTE in 2010; it also said it would shut off its 2G network in March 2011 since most subscribers now have 3G phones. NTT DoCoMo had previously said it would keep the 2G network running until December 2012. Speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress 2009, Ryuji Yamada, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said LTE data cards will be ready in 2010 and handsets will be ready in 2011. Continue »