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Communities waiting to hear if they’ve been selected for Google’s high-speed Internet access contest will have to wait a little longer.
In February Google said it had plans to deploy a 1 Gig per second, fiber-to-the-home network in several communities in the US. Over 1100 towns and cities responded to their request-for-information feeler, hoping to become one of the Google fiber finalists.
I’m in a neologistic, word-coining mood this morning. Like you, I have one eye on my Tweetdeck, half-consciously absorbing facts, information, memes, and other synaptic nourishment that’s flowing around me. At some point in my day, I’m inevitably walking an idea back to its source, which involves unproductively scrolling through streams of posts.
Tipping my cap to early descriptions of Twitter and microblogging, I’m calling this phenomenon ambient infomacy. Well … maybe this new word won’t happen, but you get the idea.
This is all to explain why introspectr, which demoed their Twitter and Facebook search tool at New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday, received my complete attention.
The best thing that would happen is Facebook would open up its network and we’d use that information to improve our ads and our search. …
I missed this month’s New York Tech Meetup due to a previous engagement that was scheduled over 5000 years ago. By the way, Matt Merriam has a nice summary of September’s NYTM demos. One of the startups, Kodingen, caught my attention. It is a free web development environment that encourages a community to provide support and cheering. I filed this away.
I was intrigued by the recent release of the FCC’s open APIs for accessing competitive ISP data. I had already hacked out—I am not a developer by any means— tools for graphically displaying the FCC’s “477” data on Google Maps (see references below). Could I somehow combine this all into a single project and perhaps use the amazing Google Maps Data infrastructure for sharing my results?
A tall order. That’s when I brought Kodingen back to the head of my to-do list, and so I registered on the site to see what I’d be up against. In fact, this is a delightfully simple open-source environment to work in.
Nothing against my current hosting service, Bluehost, but I was able to start working almost immediately in Kodingen without any of the usual obstacles and annoyances.Continue reading
The New York Times’ indispensable business reporter, Joe Nocera, slipped in a story about net neutrality just before the long holiday weekend. The normally dependable Nocera—he’s been completely vigilant in his reporting on the financial crisis—really lost his way in his “Struggle For What We Already Have.”
Maybe his Labor Day celebration started a little earlier or our unusually cool late summer weather in the NYC-metro area put him into a more generous state of mind. For whatever reason, his reading of Google’s recent net neutrality proposal as completely benign is not worthy of his reporting.
He got a few things really wrong. One, there was no mention of Google-Verizon’s Advanced Services— the private Internet. Two, the language for non-discrimination in the Voozle contrivance was intentionally weakly worded, and this was not, as he implied, an issue only for the idealistically pure. Three, cable television is not really the model for the Internet, and, um, there actually is non-discrimination language in the relevant Title VI statutes, forced on the cable providers by angry consumers and content providers.
I guess Nocera got me a little upset. Continue reading
While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin. There’s lots of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc. Some are calling it a larger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.
Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone. We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar. It also seems to me that the Tab will be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8, HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy. Supporting both 2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.
The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted. What struck me was that many of the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.”Continue reading
For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.
The biggest difference between the ancient branches on the email-voice evolutionary tree and the latest VoIP creations from Google, Skype and others is the Web and mobile calling, coupled with improved codecs. In other words, the overall technology has evolved in steps, not with a giant leap forward. It is slowly but surely achieving greatness.
There are already tens of million of existing Gmail users to talk and video chat with in direct computer-to-computer fashion. Google’s announcement last week to unite Google Voice (the service that rings all your phones) with Gmail and to throw in free outbound calls will probably add millions more. Most significantly, this service, is or will soon be available on Android phones as well.
Over the weekend, I tried Gmail’s existing video chat and made a free landline call. Conclusion: the new and improved Gmail service is a big deal for a number of reasons.Continue reading
You know it’s August when The New York Times makes front pages news out of five brain researchers taking a rafting trip in Glen Canyon, Utah. It was really a working vacation, as these high-powered scientists, accompanied by a Times’ reporter (great gig, Matt Richtell), pondered how our brain changes when disconnected from Google, email, and the whole darn Internet.
Leave it to brain scientists to discover that they feel different and better after three days of vacationing with nothing to do but row, chat, and drink Tecate beers in the evening. Of course, this group’s idea of hanging around the camp fire involves light banter about brain chemicals in the bloodstream, the neuroeconomic value of information, and a famous University of Michigan study showing that people are better learners after a walk in the woods than maneuvering a busy urban street.
Fortunately, Nick Carr was not on vacation and read the same article.Continue reading
Google has made two tools available for relief workers involved with Pakistan’s historic floods. It’s been a bad year for natural disasters, but Google gained valuable insights in emergency management during the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. By talking to aid workers in the field, Google discovered that up-to-date information on hospitals (available medial equipment and staffing) was crucial.
From the Haiti crisis was born Google’s Resource Finder. It’s an online, editable Web page that lets health workers update status information on medical facilities. It’s also coupled with a map for providing positioning information. Google has made an early release of Resource Finder available for the Pakistan relief efforts. Continue reading
Is this what Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg metaphorically whispered into the Google founder’s ear? I’m still reeling from the Google-Verizon non-aggression pact and what it will mean for a competitive and open Internet. Some have pointed out that the proposal is merely a regurgitation of the FCC’s six freedoms for an open Internet.
True, but up to a point.Continue reading
So there wasn’t an agreement between Google and Verizon, as reported by The New York Times, on price tiers. Instead the two companies released a modest proposal and legislative framework for an open Internet. I like the boldness of their end-run around that puny regulatory agency, the FCC, by directing their demands, oops I mean request, to Congress.
Google-Verizon has more advice for the FCC after the jump.Continue reading
Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry. So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.
Google has been offering the ability to translate Web pages into 53 different languages for some time. So I’m assuming some Google engineer finally got around to adding the right Web service hook into their office software.
Language translation has been a long standing problem for computer science, and Google has not solved this by any means. There are still complexities with idiomatic expressions, verb moods ( subjunctive), modal verbs, etc. that won’t be untangled with a series of rules coded in software.
So for kicks, I cut and pasted a small section of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables into my Document and then let Google have at it. Conclusion: Star Trek’s Universal Translator has not yet been reached, but Google Translate does a good job of making everything sound like Borat.
Results after the jump.Continue reading
There actually was some significant news last week in the technoverse, and it didn’t involve another episode from Mark Zuckerberg’s reality show: on July 16, Google purchased Metaweb, the semantic database company and the force behind the freewheeling Freebase.
No doubt, the semantic web has entered into your own knowledgebase during the last year.
If it hasn’t, quick go to Google: enter empire state building height in the search box. Notice that the numeric height “1250 ft. ( 380 m.)” is highlighted in the search results. Google knew to answer this query with an actual number, instead of merely returning text snippets in which those search keywords were found. This flavor of artificial intelligence comes courtesy of an analysis of the knowledge space.
In a way, Google comprehended that “empire state building” is a structure, which has an attribute or property known as height, which itself has a numeric value associated with it measured in distance units.
Impressive.Continue reading
Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures (Foursquare), recently called Apple an evil company. The reason? “They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.”
It’s a definition of evil I think most of us would not agree with. On the other side of Wilson’s argument, you’ll find a few light-weight thinkers such as Socrates (see Plato’s Republic). So … doctors are evil because they claim to know what’s best for us. Add to the list accountants, plumbers, carpenters, and architects.
I think Wilson has a different gripe with Apple. Apple has successfully shown that the America consumer has an appetite for quality products, even though they’re based on walled-off hardware and software. While passing Wilson’s test for goodness, Google’s open-source Android platform is not necessarily a path to quality and may actually do some evil.Continue reading
The FCC just posted an ex parte filing from Google in which the search giant makes it feelings on net neutrality and Title II reclassification crystal clear. Here’s the money quote:
After tuning into parts of Google’s IO conference last month, news about version 3 of the Maps API slowly made its way into my waking consciousness. I had some time last week to explore this newer, cleaner Map interface as part of a project I’ve been thinking about. I wanted to get a handle on competition in the broadband sector, a topic I’ve been covering since the start of this blog, and was hoping to use visualization tools to get answers and also generate new questions.
While trolling the FCC’s Gov 2.0 sitelet, I came across files containing service provider competitive data. I then learned about the extensive data the FCC captures from carriers on a per zip code basis as part of its “Form 477” database. Some of the 477 statistics are publicly available, but much is still closed off, (Hey, FCC open those files!)
I just needed a way to render zip codes into geo data suitable for mapping. A few more Google searches led me to state-by-state files of zip code polygon paths at the US Census Bureau’s page of cartographic boundary data.
I had enough to get started.Continue reading
Congress announced on Monday that they will start the process of revising the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The key committee players (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Henry Waxman, and Rep. John Boucher) will bring together “stakeholders” in a “series of bi-partisan, issue focused meetings beginning in June.”
As you may vaguely remember, the ’96 legislation was intended to spur innovation and competition by forcing the incumbents to unbundle parts of their networks and make them available to competitive carriers at wholesales prices.
The incumbents resisted mightily both in the trenches and in the courts, and the competitive carriers that have survived to this day are just holding on.
There is a big difference this time around as Congress rolls out 2.0 of the Act. Continue reading
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out a few of the collaborative recommendation sites that are currently on the scene. My interest was initially piqued by an NYC startup or two, then I learned about Aardvark, now part of Google and one of the most successful of the purely crowdsourced Q&A sites.
You ask a question and one of Aardvark subscribers is likely to have an answer. I was quite impressed that I got a quick and meaningful response about a good Spanish white wine to match with seafood.
Not all of the cloud-based oracles work this way. Many instead rely on machine-learning techniques (decision trees, Bayesian classifiers, clustering, …) in which the mileage of your answers will vary based on the terrain of the data.
Then I learned about a mega success story from MetaFilter, a community weblog, in which two young Russian women were saved from entering the sex trade by MetaFilter members. Continue reading
I’m waiting for the assigned Google scribe to start generating notes for the session on BigQuery and Prediction APIs. Am I in the wrong virtual …
About two weeks ago I became one of the small group of users who are currently trialing the new Google look. I was vaguely aware of a shift in the left margin, which I decided at first was a glitch in my browser. Then my search results jumped to life when I came across a box of automatically scrolling tweets.
Deep thought: will timeliness trump PageRank-ness?
