Who would have ever expected Hillary Clinton to be fielding geeky questions at a Town Hall meeting for the State Department, but that’s exactly what she did this past week. A concerned person in the audience asked her what could be done about the slow update process for the infrastructure in the Statue Department, with the question being met with rounds of laughter. After the laughter died down, Clinton announced that the State Department would be switching to Google’s Chrome to help alleviate the pain of updates.

This is a huge step forward for Chrome, as a US government organization is acknowledging the fact that Google’s painless and silent updates are a much better way to keep a browser functioning than hiding updates behind an operating system as optional.

[via TNW]

While Chromebooks haven’t taken off in the mainstream market, Google has announced that they are popular with school administrators. Schools are deploying 1-to1 programs with the Chromebooks, where each student receives one of the laptops. While this is certainly not the majority of schools, the fact that they seem to be a great way for educators to help our children is just one more reason these little laptops are great.

[via PandoDaily]

According to a research report released by Denmark’s Strand Consult, the iPhone is not the profit-generating machine that people have made it out to be…that is, unless you’re Apple. For carriers, however, gaining the exclusive rights to sell the iPhone isn’t exactly a winning situation. The report says that the hidden costs of the phone, which include things like the subsidies and the revenue share Apple demands, have actually hurt rather than helped mobile operators’ earnings.

iPhone: Bad-for-Business?

According to a Sunday article in The Guardian, the report states that the iPhone isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, at least from the carriers’ perspective. Because Apple requires carriers to pay subsidies and, in some markets they demand revenue share, the carriers don’t make as much on phone sales as you may think.

“We have not found one operator which has created shareholder value with iPhone,” notes the report.

Not only does the report state that the phone isn’t as profitable for carriers as you may think, it argues that it might actually be a hindrance. “A lot of competitors are actually doing better,” it says when referring to the carriers who don’t offer the Apple device in their lineup. An earlier press release from the company even went so far as to claim that “operators that choose not to carry iPhone products have an increased probability of serving their shareholders interests.”

Also mentioned is something called the “iPhone effect,” a coin termed by a chairman of a multinational operator. “The iPhone effect is the effect that comes from moving our management’s focus away from the 99% of our customers that generate the cash flow that pays our bills,” claims the unnamed chairman.

In addition to these issues, Strand Consult also notes that the iPhone only attracts a limited market segment and one in which customers already were heavy data users…so they’re not actually bringing in that much new revenue via their iPhone data plans. Meanwhile, flat rate data plans mean that the “high data consumption results in high production costs without the corresponding increased revenue.”

Although not mentioned in the Guardian piece, we’re currently seeing the problems AT&T has encountered here in the U.S. – thanks to it being the only network that provides the phone in this market. The company has struggled to provide coverage in heavily populated urban areas, like New York and San Francisco, where iPhone users are plenty. The issue went beyond just being hearsay to warranting a public shaming in a recent New York Times article. According to the article, the company has been working on expensive upgrades to those data-heavy networks to help ease the traffic burden which has led to dropped calls, slow speeds, and often a lack of signal. Problems like these have angered consumers and have given AT&T a bad name in many circles. The company has also had to delay the launch of new iPhone features like MMS and tethering, since their network again had to be prepared to handle the additional data traffic.

Screenshot showing full ad – this displayed above the message I’d just sent and below the previous message in the thread.

Close-up screenshot showing a bit more detail of ad placement.

Note: When I re-entered the email thread, the ad above no longer displayed inside the thread. So I’ve not been able to re-create this scenario.

So, where´s the money? Well, Twitter has shown us the way. Whatever product or service is being discussed in a Tweet, or on Facebook´s public profiles, can be targetted by ads and offers. Pretty nifty, huh?

Dozens of companies are working on real-time projects, trying to get a piece of the pie. It´s a whole new body of data from sources outside the search engines and more static sites that have dominated the Web up ´til now. That’s why real-time Web presents a big challenge to the current Internet leaders–especially to market leader Google.

Google relies on backlinks to provide its algorythms with the info to classify web links. This can take from weeks up to months. But with “real-time” Google won´t have the time to do that and it´ll need a whole new set of algorythms to deal with the new info. Google has already announced it will be launching its own much faster, new version of Google to deal with real-time.