Marketing Pilgrim

Six months after Google said that Apple rejected a Google Voice app for the iPhone (Apple maintained that the app was merely under review, a process which usually takes about a week), Google has finally decided to circumvent the ban. VP of mobile apps engineering Vic Gundotra told the Crunchies Voice would get on the iPhone “one way or another.”

Here’s another: they’re going for a browser-based Google Voice (like the rest of us are using). This option was formerly less viable, but now Google has improved the mobile version of their site for iPhone and Palm Pre users.

The controversy, of course, is that Google Voice allows users to make calls and now send text messages without charge, and without using the minutes in their carrier’s plan.

So you are the new unencumbered AOL that has pushed its ship away from the Time Warner dock back in January. You are underway on a new journey that is supposed to reposition the company and put new life in the once iconic running man’s engine. In order for that to happen one would suspect that having the right people on the ship who plan to stick around would be the goal. Well, if that was the goal someone needs to make some new ones.

Yesterday it was announced that AOL’s CTO (chief technology officer) was getting off the boat. Considering that this journey isn’t even two months old yet this is not the kind of sign investors and others would like to see. All Things Digital tells us more

Attend any of my presentations on the topic of competitive intelligence and you’ll hear me recommend various tools for keeping tabs on changes your competitors make to their web pages.

Now, Google Reader has entered the page monitoring business:

For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader’s "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

A quick confirmation:

And Google Reader will start alerting you to any changes it discovers on a page.

I’m going to test it out on a few of my competitors web sites and will let you know if it blows the doors of the previous tools I recommended–which I doubt, but who knows.

Now he’s an interesting discovery by Ben Edelman: disabling the Google Toolbar doesn’t actually prevent it from sending data back to Big Brother Google.

He ran some tests, with the Google Toolbar disabled and closed from view, and sure enough, the toolbar still transmitted URL information back to the search giant.

In his example, Edelman throws a little spice on his privacy concerns by visiting www.Whitehouse.gov to demonstrate the covert signal:

He notes that this only happens if you have the “Enhanced Features”–such as PageRank and Sidewiki–enabled, but he also points out just how hard it is to disable these features (you have to reinstall Google Toolbar).

As more and more layers of the Google v China spy activity and accusations continue to get peeled back this onion really is starting to stink a bit. It appears as if the victims of “Googlegate” (you like that one?) were not just those labeled as human rights activists. In fact, it has been discovered that friends of employees of many of the companies that were attacked were targeted as well.

The Financial Times Reports

Personal friends of employees at Google, Adobe and other companies were targeted by hackers in a string of recently disclosed cyberattacks, raising privacy concerns and pointing to a highly sophisticated operation, security experts said.

The folks at Apple just need to wake of in the morning to create news of all sorts that could shape the online world in many ways. First, there’s the talk about some profits in Q1 that would make any company happy (The company posted revenue of $15.68 billion and a net quarterly profit of $3.38 billion, or $3.67 per diluted share). There’s all the hubbub about the announcement of their new tablet device on Wednesday which is apparently the worst kept secret in quite some time.

Now comes the rumor that in the next 18 months the iPhone should be available on most major carriers thus breaking away from its AT&T exclusivity contract (read: stranglehold) that has been the bane of many iPhone users existence. If this is truly the case then there may be some considerable change on the Verizon, oops, I meant horizon.