So, Google declares to index more than 8 billion pages. Have a look at the Google’s homepage:

Bill Coughran, VP Engineering at Google, posted on this subject:

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It’s a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you’re looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made me smile.

Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it’s invaluable for queries that only return a few results.

Now, another interesting thing: you know that one of the best way to test the Google’s index is to search the word “the”. I did that yesterday and Google showed more than 9.5 billion pages:

I did the same search for about 10 minutes and it seems that Google corrected the number of pages returned by this well-known query…It’s now exactly 8 billion!!

I just de-activated AdSense on my blog. As I mentionned here, it was a test, nothing more. This online contextual ad program is very easy to activate, to integrate and to manage. It works really very smooth. On the other hand, I have (still) no need to “finance” my blog :-) It costs time, not really money!

I don’t know how it’s by you: about 50% of my overall traffic is coming directly from accesses on my feed (atom.xml), about 20% from accesses on my webiste (www.didierbeck.net). So, all in all, about 3/4 of my traffic is not relevant for this AdSense program. Not really adapted!

Great summary from Jeff Clavier concerning two interviews (Endgadget and silicon.com) of Niklas Zennström, CEO of Skype.

New feature – SkypeIn

Amongst other things (voicemail, video-conference, etc.), Zennström mentions that Skype is going to roll-out a SkypeIn capability (at some point during the winter) allowing regular telephone users to reach a Skype user. This supposedly means that Skype users will be assigned a telephone number, and that Skype will become a full blown VOIP service.

Some little issues

[…]I have noticed recently that the quality of international calls tended to degrade compared to a few months ago (“ransom of success”).
More problematic seems to be the chronic issue that Skype is having with SkypeOut and its credit card processing function.

I have also heard a lot of complaints about their their online support: always very nice and polite, but of very limited usefulness (which is kinda problematic).

Nice conclusion from Jeff

Unlike so many other startups, their problem is that they can’t take the money people want to pay for their service ;-)

Now some facts & figures

• Skype was founded on August 29, 2003
• 70 employees (locations: London, Estonia, Luxembourg)
• 13 million users worldwide in 200 countries (!)
• 80’000 new users daily (!)
• 500’000 simultaneous users connected, peak > 1 million simultaneous users
• average call time: 6 minutes
• 295’000 SkypeOut customers
• 2.4 billion minutes with SkypeOut (Vonage has 170’000 customers, passed the biliion minutes served in 2004)
• VC financing of Skype: $19M

We are using Sype professionally very intensively since months with a lot of good experience. For example: last week, some of us had to coordinate a very complexe “move-to-production” process (2 guys in France, 1 in Switzerland) during about 5 hours. Thanks to the exclusive usage of Skype for the telephone conversations, I saved about 650 euros in one time (cell phones costs, including the roaming costs). GREAT :-)

Firefox v1.0 is out :-) As usual, some of the themes and extensions are not compatible anymore with this new version…

[via @rgumente]

1. Take action. Don’t put it off till tomorrow. Too many good ideas are lost because no one implements, no one takes action

2. Ignore “that’s a bad idea.” When you start a company, lots of people will tell you it’s a bad idea. Ignore them!

3. Never give up. Failure is good — it’s a great teacher. Better to try 10 times and only to succeed once than not to try at all.

My corollary to this, somehow #2 rephrased, is know yourself and your limitations very well, always believe stubornly in yourself and your ideas while being open to adapt to whatever makes a positive impact in your belief system.

[via MIT Technology Review]

IBM Corp.’s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

The world’s current official leader, Japan’s Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Blue Gene […] is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator’s performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

I haven’t listenned to this CD for a while, wow! And not just because of the name ;-) This album, as a very few others, is a milestone in the music history. It was interesting for me to read the different reviews you can find online: on one side, very disapointed people, on the other side, very exciting ones… The latters are usually musicians, surely also a lot of guitarists. All this to mention that this album is not a easy one.

It was released in 1989 and won the Grammy of the “Best Instrumental Rock” album the same year. Terry Bozzio as a drummer and Tony Hymas as keyboard player joined Jeff Beck on this album. Each of them is a part of Music with a big “M”: Beck was, among others, the guitarist of the Yardbirds in the 60’s. Terry was the drummer of Frank Zappa and he is one the best technician and one the more innovative drummer since years. A kind of extraterrestrial, specially in the field of coordination. Have a look at his set:

So, a very uncommon set of musicians – trio guitar, keyboard and drums – who play quite a complicated music. BUT, to my mind, it definitely rocks. Have a try.

New version 1.16 of the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack released here. And it is free!

Mega Codec Pack includes everything needed to play online and offline computer media. This pack is from the makers of the K-lite codec pack. This version includes the Full K-lite codec pack as well as Quicktime and Realplayer codecs, and BS Player. This Pack includes codecs for the most popular compressions like Divx and Xvid as well as some of the less popular but still necesary codecs. This is your one stop codec resource.

We can identify five revenue-generating components for software companies. These components have a deep impact on the business model and costs structure of this kind of companies:

• Product new license revenue: the initial fee, typically one-time charge, based on different factors: number of seats, of processors, of MIPS, of instances in memory, of granted simultaneous accesses, one-location license (eg: per data-center), company-license (eg: right-of-use within one holding, including all its subsidiaries), clustering-type, etc. The license-fee can be linked with the number of stages (integration, test, production). It works differently for the development frameworks, tools, utilities, etc. (number of developers, of simultaneous uses, etc.)
• Product update / upgrade license revenue: fee paid usually annually for having the right to install all software updates and updgrades. A percentage of the initial license fee (product update + technical support = about 15% of the initial fee). Differenciation between major and minor updates and upgrades
• Technical support revenue: usually an annual fee, also a percentage of the initial license fee. Included telephone support, access to a knowledge-base, web-based support, typically no on-site support.
• Services, training and consulting revenue: one-time charge, time & material (T&M;). Daily rates, with or without expenses and infrastructure.
• Hosting revenue (optional): for all-in-one solution where the software company proposes also the application hosting to its client (eg: salesforce.com, groove). The revenue model is typically linked with the actual usage of the application (number of business transactions) and volume discounts, which drives to a quite linear and well-known development of the costs.

There are furthermore four software licensing models, which differ from each others because of the integration or not of technical support and update/upgrade and because of the length of time for the validity of the license:

• Perpetual license: about 90% of the licensing model worldwide, usually not included updates/upgrades and technical support or just for the first year.
• Term license: also called lease license or rental license.
• Subscription license: generally two types are possible: in-house installation or hosted application (eg: salesforce.com, groove)
• Appliance license: application sold with a specific hardware (eg: firewalls)

License type matrix

Typical software business models

[via Joi Ito]

Joi said: “The people of America have failed us today”. I must correct: “52% of America have failed us today”… His analysis is *so* true, I totally agree:

[…]It’s unlikely that any sort of recount or technicality will change the fact that today, the people of the United States of America have voted for George Bush. It was close, but the Americans have chosen Bush. It’s a sad day, but in a democracy, you get the politicians you deserve/vote for. This was their chance to change their leader and they have failed. For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush – that they didn’t know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn’t equate the US policies with the people of America. We thought they had made a mistake. Now US policies = US Citizens. You Americans have my sympathies, but it’s still your fault.