November 8, 2005

Sony Ericsson S710a vs Motorolla Razr v3

Posted in Category: Work — Amr Awadallah @ 7:36 am | link | | comment (0)

My Cingular plan was due for a phone upgrade which I did this week. I had to choose between two offers they had:

Sony Ericsson S710a for $149.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate

Motorolla Razr v3 for $199.99

After a lot of reading and research I picked the Sony Ericsson S710a which I think beats the Motorolla Razr v3 with all hands and legs down !

This is why I choose the SE-S710a:

— SE-S710a screen size is 240×320 (Razr is 176×220)

— SE-S710a memory is 32MB on phone 32MB MemoryStick Duo (Razr is just 5MB total).

— SE-S710a has a 1.5 Megapixel camera (Razr is only 0.5 Megapixel)

— SE-S710a records video (Razr only plays back video)

— SE-S710a camera has 8x Zoom (Razr is only 4x zoom)

— SE-S710a has a builtin flash light (Razr got none)

— SE-S710a comes with a head set for no extra charge

— SE-S710a comes with a very nice memory-stick/compact-flash USB reader device.

— All the PC Connectivity Software for the SE-S710a is free, while you have to pay $29.99 for the Razr PC software called “mobile PhoneTools”

The only advantages of the Razr over SE s710a are:

— The Razr is quad-band and hence supports the 900MHz band (while s710 is tri-band and does not support 900MHz)

— The Razr is a little bit lighter and thinner (though its wider)

Other than the features listed above both devices were a tie.

So in summary, if you absolutely need a quad-band phone (i.e. supports the 900MHz frequency) then get the Razr, otherwise you should definitely get the SE s710a.

— amr

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October 21, 2005

Wall Street is buying the Google Growth Lie.

Posted in Category: Work — Amr Awadallah @ 8:30 pm | link | | comment (0)

The revenue increase Google saw yesterday is not natural growth, and frankly I am totally surprised at how Wall Street re-acted. I am even more puzzled that Eric Schmidt said that he also was surprised at how well Google did in this typically slow advertising quarter.

Well, I know, and he knows, that the revenue increase is primarily due to two things that Google launched in Q3:

1. Three sponsored results above the web results (instead of their historical 2). I blogged about this here:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-zwwMZhwwdrSyXD8-?p=121

2. Variable-Term-Pricing (VTP). This is a very evil (but clever) change that Google made last Quarter. Instead of letting keyword pricing be a free market and allow the bidders to decide the CPCs, they now are pricing their inventory, and enforcing a minimum-bid to participate in the market for each individual keyword (if you do not pay that minimum, they will not even show your ad). You can read about that one here:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050922.html

Specially the quote:

“It’s like Vegas,” said my friend. “They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs.”

That said, unless Google launches any new tricks in Q4 (and I did not see any yet), I expect their Q4 growth to be inline with the overall market (i.e. more natural than super-natural). For now, let them celebrate, but come January, I predict a big disappointment (unless they launch any new tricks, e.g. show sponsored ads at bottom of results page, show up to 4 ads above the web-results, increase the min-bids for keywords, etc)
— amr

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October 7, 2005

Biting the hands that fed you…

Posted in Category: Work — Amr Awadallah @ 1:35 am | link | | comment (0)

Interesting quote by Bradley Horowitz in a Forbes article:

Google “crawled up on our backs,” says Horowitz. Yahoo! helped give Google its legs by incorporating the search engine into its portal. “About two and a half years ago, we realized we made a mistake” by not recognizing the value of the search market sooner. So Yahoo! “bought up all of the remaining relevant companies” in the search market in order to catch up.

I feel that Google “bit the hand that fed them”. Yahoo helped them a lot, gave them funding, used them as backend for yahoo search and featured their logo strongly (a big mistake in retrospect); and gave them the traffic that allowed them to grow their marketshare and fine-tune their search algorithms. Then after all this help, Google comes and competes with Yahoo in every other product, and trys to hire Yahoo’s brightest brains.

Its like a parasite that feeds on top of a host but grows so much and wants to eat the whole host. However, the host now woke up, and it will fight back the evil parasite Image

— amr

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