I have mixed feelings about Google. They have made billions of people’s lives easier with their search engine and they truly are an innovative company which is just so impressive for such a big organisation. On the downside, their business model works as a network effect (many searchers=more ad potential = more advertisers) so now they have critical mass, and an amazing brand to go with it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for others, both big and small to get a foot into the online information business, which in the long run is a bad thing.

On the whole though for me the name Google is bathed in an overall sense of awe. When they launch a new product, they just do such a damn good job. And this is a company that is just over 10 years old. It’s not as if we are talking about decades of corporate learning here, unlike other super performing organisation like say Toyota or Apple.

So to Chrome - their new browser. Another amazing entrance from Google. Lovely and clean. It barely takes up any screen real estate, and there are some other nice design touches like the animations on file downloading and the incognito guy. BUT the best part about it for me and in particular for Brandwatch is it’s so goddamn fast. We did some side by side tests with IE7 and Firefox3 and Chrome is 50% faster at loading our app than either of the others. And 50 is a lot of %s.

The reason, it appears, is how Chrome deals with Javascript. We use a lot of Javascript in our UI to make it as nice to use as possible and firefox in particular is not that fast at rendering it. Chrome is. It’s my new browser of choice. Google has done it again - horray! boo! horray!!

Filed under: Browsers, Search, Software development by Giles Palmer

We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work - and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.
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Filed under: Brand Matching, Quality, Research, Software development, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky

Much has been written about methods of developing software - books and books and blogs and blogs. I love the writing and thinking of Steve McConnell, although some of his observations can be a bit gloomy (top 2 mistakes almost always or often stated are 1 Overly optimistic schedules 77% and, 2 Unrealistic expectations 73%)

And I subscribe to several blogs including Jason Yip’s which has some nuggety insights.

I was at Reboot this year where Eelco Rustenburg gave a great talk on Agile, Software, Management, India collaboration in which he spoke about the benefits of a more agile approach. During his talk something crystallised in my mind.

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Filed under: Software development, Technology by Giles Palmer