Gmail 502 Server Error

Today when I try to check my gmail from FireFox, I encounter 502 Server Error. But when I try different browser like Internet Explorer 8, I was able to check it smoothly. So, there is problem in Firefox and gmail.

Further after that I realized that if you clear your Firefox browser cache and cookies than you will be able to check your email even from FF.

Analysts said that the G1 did not represent the kind of revolutionary change in design and function that Apple introduced last year with the iPhone. But the G1 is likely to further accelerate two trends that will have a lasting impact on the wireless industry: the growing use of the Internet on the go, and the ability of consumers to customize their phones with their favorite functions.

“I am not sure people are going to be lining up at stores for this device,” said Rajeev Chand, an analyst with Rutberg & Company. “The iPhone was a game changer from a consumer perspective. The Google phone may be more of game changer from an industry perspective.”

The G1, which is made by the Taiwanese electronics maker HTC, has a large color touch screen that slides out to expose a full keyboard. It also has a 3-megapixel camera, G.P.S. navigation, Wi-Fi access and an Internet browser. It will sell for $179, or $20 less than the iPhone, with a two-year voice and data plan.

“This is as good a computer as you had a few years ago,” said Google’s co-founder Larry Page, who along with co-founder Sergey Brin arrived on Rollerblades at the New York stage where Google and T-Mobile held a news conference to unveil the G1.

Although several applications, including Google’s search, maps, Gmail and YouTube, come installed on the phone, the G1 is also meant to encourage third-party developers to create programs to run on it. Like Apple, Google will include an applications store, called the Android Marketplace, where the owners of the G1 and future Android-powered phones will be able to download those programs.

Google said that developers would have virtually unfettered access to the marketplace, leaving it up to consumers – not Google or T-Mobile – to decide what they want to run on their phones.

While the G1 is expected to compete with high-end smartphones like the iPhone and the BlackBerry line of devices made by Research in Motion, Google’s aims are far different from those of its rivals.

Google makes the Android software available for free to carriers and handset makers who want to use it to power their own devices. Google hopes that many will choose to do so, populating the market with mobile phones that have easy access to Google’s services. Just as it does on the PC-based Internet, Google hopes to earn money from advertising.

“For Google, Android is a cash drain,” said James Faucette, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “They are going to lose money on Android as an operating system. They hope to make it up from the services that they are delivering through their infrastructure and servers.”

While Google is betting on the success of Android, it also stands to benefit from the success of other smartphones, as their owners tend to surf and search the Internet much more actively than users of less advanced phones. Indeed, Google said earlier this year that its mobile service received a disproportionate amount of traffic from iPhone users.

“We want people out there to use the Internet on their phones a lot,” Mr. Brin said in an interview. “It actually doesn’t matter if it is Android, the iPhone or something else.”

T-Mobile, is counting on the G1 to increase its sale of data plans and said it believed the devices would appeal to consumers and business users.

“I think frankly this device will have mass appeal,” said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer of T-Mobile USA, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

Android is unlikely to take the smartphone market by storm overnight. Despite its success, the iPhone accounted for just 2.8 percent of smartphones sold worldwide in the second quarter, according to Gartner, a market analysis firm. Windows Mobile, a seven-year-old Microsoft operating system that runs on phones sold by more than 160 carriers, has just 12 percent of the market.

“Nobody meets, falls in love and celebrates their 50th anniversary all at once,” said Scott Rockfeld, group product manager at Microsoft. “Success in this industry depends in solid relationships over time.”

Source: New York Times

Sakin Shrestha

With the acquisition of DoubleClick Inc, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) now has the leading display ad platform, which will enable them to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies, while improving the relevance of advertising for users.

According to Startup Earth, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned existing employees of Doubleclick that the search giant has not yet decided who they will fire from the online advertising firm, and has ordered doubleclickers to submit their resumes to a Google committee for immediate review. Here’s a snippet from the post:

One of the more obvious areas where Google may downsize is within the DoubleClick owned search marketing company Performics. It’s been noted that when Google acquired DoubleClick, they also acquired Performics, making them the owners of a search engine optimization and link building company.

- Sakin

With only a few clicks, just about anyone will be able to quickly set up and update a Web site featuring wide an array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.’s YouTube subsidiary, said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application.

“We are literally adding an edit button to the Web,” Girouard said.

All sites created on the service will run on one of Google’s computers.

Google acquired many of the Web-site tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.

The tools are the latest addition to a bundle of applications that Google offers to consumers and businesses as alternatives to similar products sold by Microsoft Corp., one of Google’s fiercest rivals.

Google’s latest service represents a challenge to Microsoft’s SharePoint, which charges licensing fees. Google is unveiling its alternative just a few days before Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft hosts a SharePoint conference in Seattle.

While Microsoft’s programs typically are installed on individual computers, Google keeps its application on its own machines so users can access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.

By gradually introducing free versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and calendaring programs over the past two years, Google has been threatening to siphon revenue away from Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software sales.

Microsoft, in turn, hopes to take a bite of out Google’s bread-and-butter in online search and advertising by buying Yahoo Inc. for more than $40 billion.

Google says more than 500,000 companies, government agencies and schools use at least some of its applications. The company won’t say how many of those organizations subscribe to a premium version of its software suite, but the fees haven’t made much of a dent at Google so far.

Last year, Google’s software licensing and other products generated $181 million in revenue while $16.4 billion poured in from advertising.

Quick Facts about Google’s Sites
Single-click page creation
Creating a new page for your Google Site just takes the click of a button.

No HTML required
Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there’s no markup language for you to learn — just get started.

Make it your own
Our customization options let you give your Google Site your own look and feel

Get started with templates
We offer a growing list of page types — web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list — to help you get started with your Google Sites pages.

Upload files and attachments
Use the file cabinet to upload files up to 10MB in size. Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites. Google Apps Premier and Education editions get an additional 500MB for each user account.

Embed rich content
Google Sites is integrated with other Google products, so you can insert videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slide shows, and calendars directly onto your Google Sites pages.

Work together and share
Our permission settings let you designate owners, viewers and collaborators (meaning they can edit pages) for your site. And you can make your Google Sites available to just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Search with Google
You can search across Google Sites pages and content using powerful Google search technology. You’ll find specific pages and documents instantly, the same way you would on Google.com.

On The Web:

http://sites.google.com

The depth of Microsoft’s online problem became clear 18 months ago, when Google trumped its bid to handle search advertising for MySpace, the popular social networking site.

MySpace owner News Corp. (NWS) liked Microsoft (MSFT) well enough. But it had to go with the money. Because Google (GOOG), the top search engine, could guarantee a larger audience and thus more revenue in a search deal, it won the MySpace account. “They said to Microsoft, ‘Look, if you can get there in revenue we’d prefer to go with you,’ ” said a source familiar with Microsoft’s side of the negotiations. “It came down to a pure economic decision.”

Technology battles often unfold like sumo matches, where the biggest companies win by pushing opponents around – and Microsoft, the world’s largest technology company by market value, has dominated the wrestling ring for years. But in the online world, Microsoft finds itself in the unusual position of small fry, getting shoved aside by Google.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has cited Microsoft’s online size disadvantage as the reason he is pushing ahead with a hostile bid of more than $40 billion for Yahoo (YHOO). To get the deal done, he is prepared to break two unspoken rules that have guided Microsoft purchases in the past: Microsoft never buys mega-companies, and it never forces itself on folks who don’t want to be bought.

The reason why Ballmer is willing to take drastic measures? Google is doing to the online advertising market what Wal-Mart (WMT) did to small-town retailers. Much as Wal-Mart turned its huge selection and crowds of customers to out-sell competitors, Google has used its search engine’s popularity to pull in advertisers and get them more bang for their marketing buck. Just as many manufacturers feel they must sell their products through Wal-Mart to reach consumers, advertisers feel they must deal with Google to get results. As Microsoft has lost ad deals time and again, it has become clear to executives that they need to take a bold step.

“Microsoft has been slow to gain critical mass in an area where this is the key to success,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note earlier this year. “The online advertising industry has the growth and market potential to move the needle, even for a company of Microsoft’s size.” A combination with Yahoo would arguably give Microsoft a greater share of the online audience, which should drive more searches, attract more advertisers, and bring in more money.

Back to the wrestling metaphor, there is more at stake for Microsoft than just the embarrassment of losing. The software giant, which rakes in billions of dollars in cash every quarter from sales of its Windows operating system and Office productivity software, is used to getting occasionally manhandled by opponents when it enters new markets. But in the past, Microsoft has always been able to use its juggernaut size and financial resources to gradually wear down opponents. But with Google, that old wrestling technique just isn’t working in online advertising.

By itself, Google’s advertising dominance might not be such a big problem – except that the online company is using its advertising bulk to wrestle its way into markets that Microsoft has long dominated. Google’s online-based software for documents and spreadsheets offers an alternative to Microsoft Office, and its relationship with the organization behind the Firefox web browser threatens Internet Explorer. Perhaps most alarming to Microsoft, Google has aggressively supported non-Microsoft cell phone software through its promotion of its own Android phone software and its services for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Microsoft has pooh-poohed Google’s software efforts, pointing out that Google’s software lacks the features and polish of more mature offerings, and that Google’s software efforts aren’t profitable. But even as it downplays Google’s efforts, there’s clear cause for worry: These are the same put downs Microsoft competitors like Apple, Netscape and Palm (PALM) once aimed at Microsoft when it challenged their products with Windows, Internet Explorer and Pocket PC. Tech historians know how those battles turned out; because Microsoft’s core businesses allowed it to keep improving its new products, it eventually surpassed its rivals.

To keep Google from accomplishing the same trick, Microsoft needs to mount a convincing challenge in online advertising. And to do that, Microsoft has to get big, fast. That’s why, even though Yahoo is resisting a deal, Microsoft will likely move quickly to get a deal done as soon as the end of 2008. A source with knowledge of Microsoft’s legal strategy says that once Microsoft makes shareholders an official offer to buy out their shares, federal regulators can begin reviewing the deal – a process that Microsoft believes could be wrapped up in six to nine months.

Why the need for speed? Google gets stronger by the day. And once Google gets international approval for its purchase of ad powerhouse DoubleClick — a development that could happen soon — its Internet empire will begin to gather so much momentum, and size, that it might shove Microsoft out of the online advertising ring for good.

(Source: Fortune Magazine)

- Sakin