There’s been a crap load of talk about Google Wave in recent, especially since they just invited 100,000 lucky folks to join the beta. But if you’re like me, you’ve probably paid little to no attention since the product seems far from going public and is probably just another complicated tool that is designed to simplify our lives. Well, not quite. At the core of Google Wave is good old fashioned email (ha!, who would’ve thought email would’ve been ‘old fashioned’?). But Google Wave is different. Hit the video below, but in short Google Wave offers a very succinct way of managing email communication between multiple parties and then some. There’s no public beta so I really can’t tell you more.
You’ve already read about the Hero HTC phone here back in June, but what you don’t know is we’re not the only ones interested in the phone that uses Google technology was just elected Gadget of the Year by the 2009 Stuff Gadget Awards.
The Hero, which uses the Android operating system and features a five megapixel camera and 3.2 inch screen, can make calls, take pictures, and thanks to Android, check your email. One of the judges at the annual Gadget festival declared that the HTC Hero is “as clever and as sexy as the iPhone”, which is actually pretty awesome unless you take him literally, then it just sounds like he’s hitting on it.
Further highlights of the Stuff Gadget Awards were the iPhone 3GS snagging Phone of the Year and Readers’ Gadget of the Year, Spotify for Audio Gadget, and the Sony KDL-40WE5 as Eco Gadget of the Year.
If you love surfing the websites of foreign countries but find it too much of a hassle to learn to speak their language first, then you’ll love what Google’s about to do for you. They’ve issued free software that allows website operators to automatically translate online pages into any of 51 languages.
It’s called the “translator gadget”, and it will automatically shift the language on the page to match the default browser’s language. Let’s say that I’m a guy from somewhere near Iran, and my browser’s set to Farsi. I surf on over to Craigslist to look for a job writing for a fashion magazine, and they’ve got the gadget installed, and boom! Suddenly Craigslist is coming to me live in Farsi.
Granted, the system isn’t foolproof. As everyone who’s surfed Engrish.com knows, translation isn’t always an exact science, especially for software. But still, those occasional errors should at least be entertaining!
YouTube has spent the entirety of its existence relying on user submitted content to catch traffic, but no longer is that the case. The Google purchase is now in talks with some large movie studios in regards to scoring the licenses to host motion pictures. These studios include but aren’t limited to: Sony Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., and Warner Bros. Studios.
Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Not to blatantly quote Entourage, but doesn’t it seem a little to late for this type of service? Apparently YouTube has been spending some time trying to acquire a catalog of premium content. To what avail I say.
Like Hulu, some of the content will be free as long as you watch some ads and there will then be the more premium content which will cost around $4. I have a feeling that this is going to tarnish the slogan “Broadcast Yourself” as users won’t take kindly to the notion of paid content especially when it can be found for free in other places. Thinking positive, if the regular format went unchanged, what would be the harm?
Here’s a novel approach to Google Street View: the Google Trike. Designed specifically to reach historical landmarks, the Google Trike will first appear in Genoa, Italy (yum, meat) and then make its way to the UK sometime later this summer. Google has requested that the British public provide suggestion on what historical landmarks and places to focus on. Later, a vote will determine the top 3 locations Google Trike will visit first. Now for some additional info regarding the Google Trike and Google’s Street View policy:
The trike weighs nearly 18 stone!
We will use specially trained super fit Google employees and contractors to ride the Trikes.
The “trikers” wear Google cycle helmets and clothing
There are 5 categories under which people can submit their ideas. The categories are: Castles, Coastal paths, Natural Wonders, Historic Buildings & Monuments and (Sports) Stadiums.
We will be accepting suggestions for a limited time and we’ll then work with Visit Britain to choose the most original ideas from each category. The public will then be able to cast their final votes and choose the top 3 locations we’ll try to add to Street View (pending sunny weather).
As we only collect images from public roads we’ll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of privately-owned locations.
As with all Street View imagery in the UK, we will apply our face-blurring and license plate blurring to all these images to protect people’s privacy. People will be able to report images for removal in the same way as they can now by clicking on ‘report a problem’ on the bottom left hand corner of the image. From here they complete a short form where they indicate the precise image to be removed
Rumors from unnamed sources suggest Google is considering a buyout of the popular Twitter service. Other reports suggest they’re only collaborating on a real-time search engine. Whatever the case may be, a joint ‘twoogle’ project is sure to be something very interesting.
I don’t do it often but I get a fair share of emails with the attachments missing and another email quickly following it with the attachment intact. Google Gmail has just added an “Undo” feature that allows you to retract a sent email for up to five seconds in case you forget an attachment or a CC, etc. When you see the email sending, there will a cancel button you can hit to halt the email in its tracks. This then brings the email back to draft status allowing you to make the necessary changes. What it won’t do is exhume emails that have made it past the 5 second mark. You can enable this option under the Gmail settings tab and then the labs tab in which undo will be towards the bottoms of the list. Easy enough.
A couple weeks back when I posted on some dude finding treasure on Google Earth, I faux challenged somebody to find some mythical s**t. Low and behold the UK’s Sun Tabloid just reported someone finding the Lost City of Atlantis on Google Earth. The picture you are looking at is the size of Wales and is 3.5 miles deep and 620 miles west of Morocco near the Canary Islands. Most tattered scrolls indicate Atlantis to be somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bermuda Triangle to near islands outside of the Italy and Greece areas. Here’s what a Google spokesperson had to say about it:
“What users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process.… Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor.… The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans.”
I’m so glad this happened. Here’s a link to the actual spot on Google Earth. Leave a comment on what you think the next find will be?
How much fun would knowing this dude be? Nathan Smith, a musician from Los Angeles was wandering around Google Earth and claims to have stumbled on the location of a sunken Spanish boat wreckage buried underneath some waterway near Refugio,Texas. Containing riches beyond his modest musician’s salary, the estimated 3 billion dollars was apparently enough to get his ass off the computer. So he packed a metal detector in his guitar case Desperado style and on headed down to Texas. When he got there he ran into his first roadblock. Owned land. The late Morgan Dunn O’Connor was the rightful owner of the land, and Mr. Smith was halted by an infamous Gandolfism. Unable to get at the “Dead Man’s Chest”, the scenario shifts to the courtroom. Mr. Smith’s lawyers claim that the ship is buried in a “navigable” waterway, and according to US law, would be a finder’s keepers type of situation. Texas state lawyers say that there is no waterway, and the O’Connor family wants first dibs too. This is just too awesome! So what, no one has seen the Lochness? Or BigFoot hitting the bong with Phelpsie? No Cthulhu? What about Area 51? C’mon people, get to it!
I read this decent article in Wired about GPS apps that will change the world, and I must admit that Android will have some cool stuff. The biggest selling factor for me is that applications can run in the background whereas an iPhone cannot. On an iPhone, using an GPS app like BrightKite or Twinkle requires you to manually post where ever you go, but on Android you can just go somewhere and the phone will automatically post for you. That’s a huge deterrent for me as I don’t want to be straight posting all the time.
At any rate, the Android app store hosted and operated by Google will begin selling apps this week. So far the only phone available using the open source Android OS is the T-Mobile G1. Now that developers can profit from their programs, we should see a serious bump in quality and quantity applications for the G1 and all future Android handsets.
