Google acquires Motorola, in a bid to reach the top spot

Image Source: paidcontent.org

The entire world knows how Apple grabbed the smart phone market segment with its cool smart phones. Google with its Android platform has been trying really hard to grab the market, but only with partial success. With duopoly dominant in every sector in the USA, I think it is the case that Microsoft and Apple wanted to be the two big players of smart phone business. They joined hands together and attacked Google with patents. Microsoft and Apple together bought old patents of Nortel and Novell, and the technology outcome of these patents were used in most smart phones, and demanded Google to pay $15 per Android phone for using these patents. This would significantly increase the cost of Android phones, which would lead to loss of its market share. 

In their latest move, Google today made their announcement to buy Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion USD. I guess the excitement is high in Mountain View as Larry Page himself announced the news through their blog. Now Google will have strong patent portfolio, could manufacture its own handsets and could beat the shit out of its competitors. Lets wish Google the best, and hope this competition will lead to better technology from all the biggies. 

Google+ is not Facebook

I have been blogging a lot on tech things these days. Although I want to maintain my status as a mixed bag blogger by writing about anything and everything, I could not resist writing when I come across something new. And the topic of the day is Google+ with all the media attention it generated in the week. 

Did you see the day's xkcd cartoon? Google+, What is it? Not facebook. What is it like? Facebook. How true! Let us compare and contrast Google+ with Facebook later. Before that, let me walk you through a simple tutorial.

Do you know how to increase popularity to your website or product?

• First, create hype! Do your best! Blog about it, make some tech blogs write about it and let a few top shots try it and make sure they feel good about your product.
• Second, restrict access to your product. Give access to people based on invites. And then, very shortly make a big announcement that you ran out of invites. The bigger your announcement is and the sooner you do it, the greater will be the hype generated.
• Third, make sure to leave some ways so that people can get invites and call them hacks. So, the final picture is people have to hack their way to get access to your product.

And, Google followed all the three steps to make their new social networking stint "Google+" popular. And "the hack" to invite your friends is update your status message and share it with your friends through email addresses. They would get an email with a link, and clicking on it would create a Google+ account for them.

Google+ is the new Facebook. Unlike, Google's previous digs at social networking the interface is much cleaner and simpler. Remember how Orkut was filled with clutter in order to compete with Facebook's apps. And, Google Wave only saw the ebb but never raised high unlike a wave. Looking at the design of this new utility promising to connect you with your friends and family, this is here to stay.

If you have noticed the recent change in Google.com's interface, then you should understand that it is part of the big plan. Once you have created a Google+ account for your self, then the right most corner of the black bar on the top will come to life. You will have the "Share" box and notifications indicator waiting hungrily for your action.

Google+ lingo and insight tutorial (Level: Beginner)

• News Feed on Facebook is Stream on Google+.
• "What's on your mind" is Google+'s "Share what's new".
• Pages on Facebook will be called "Sparks" herewith.
• The famous Facebook "Like" button's competitor is not so well known "+1" button.
• Friends or Family are the only two categories on FB. We have the new "Circles" concept. Drag and drop your fellow Google+ members into Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Family circles. You might as well create your own circle.
• You have your Picasa photos, Google Talk and the infamous Google Buzz integrated.
• Hangouts and Huddle are the new features to watch out for. Huddle is the group messaging feature and Hangout is the polished version of video chat. I am yet to explore these features completely.

So, are +you ready for Google+ ? 

Adding keyword based site searches to browser

Have you ever wondered how typing "wiki mahatma gandhi" in your firefox browser's location bar redirects you to Gandhi's wiki page? Don't you think searching content on some sites you visit regularly by typing stuff directly in your browser without going to Google or Bing makes it lot easier? Here is a simple tutorial to add custom search engines to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Before we get started, make sure to have the following items ready. Pencil, sharpener, eraser, ruler and a sheet of paper. Lol, I'm just kidding. All you need is your computer with a browser, Firefox or Chrome. In this tutorial, I will add keyword based search feature for my blog site on the above mentioned browsers. For this I will be using the search box provided for the blog site by Blogger.

Google Chrome
To add custom search feature on Chrome, you will have to identify the search url first. You can do that by doing a dummy search. In the figure below, for search query "table" the url is identified by the box highlighted on the top (http://psychesvisage.blogspot.com/search?q=table). Replace the query string with a %s and that will be your generic search string pattern. In our case, it will be "http://psychesvisage.blogspot.com/search?q=%s". Let's call this search query url.

Now, you may either type "chrome://settings/searchEngines" in your browser address bar or right click on the address bar of your browser and hit "Edit search engines.." as shown below.

This would open a page as shown below. Under "Other Search Engines", populate an empty row with the your site name, a keyword and the search query url we talked about earlier. In my case, I filled the row with "Psyche's Visage", "blog", search query url we identified earlier. 

Now, all I have to do is type "blog gandhi" in the address bar of the browser to search for all my blog posts related to Gandhi on a Google Chrome browser.

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is a lot easier to deal with for our problem. All you have to do it right click on the search bar in your webpage, and hit on the option "Add a Keyword for this Search..." as shown below.

This would bring up a dialog box for creating Bookmark. Fill in the required details and save. In my case, I filled the values "Psyche's Visage" and "blog" for name and keyword respectively. 

Now I can search for content related to "Nehru" on my blog by typing "blog nehru" in the address bar of my Firefox browser as well.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Technology, Love and Hate!

Skype might possibly look like this later this year after it gets integrated with Microsoft Windows Office suite! Who knows if we are all made to create and use Windows Live ID if we want to continue using their services

Do you think it is a big deal when Microsoft announces to buy Skype, the free video conferencing software which became a huge hit in the recent years? I think so having been a loyal Skype user for the past few of years now! Microsoft having had this reputation to monetize their technology makes me wonder if Skype also encounters such fate. Worse if it gets integrated with their Office 2012 suite for which we have to shell out bucks and soon enough made to pay the $8.5 Billion they have invested in buying Skype. Who knows, Skype might be made to stop supporting iPhones in order to boost up Windows phone sales. But for Microsoft this is a big step in capturing the user base of the Internet and Video Communications leader. Pity the loyal Windows Live Messenger, hope it does not get shelved after all the service it has done since 1999. 

The founders of Skype had quite a bumpy ride all these years despite their product being a hit among the masses since their product is widely popular for the free services they offer. But I still am unable to comprehend if this deal with Microsoft is a fitting finish to their effort or not! Let's hope this deal at least adds the much need cool factor to Microsoft that Kinect failed to completely bring to this technology corporate. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, known for his eccentric behavior in the media and public conferences said "Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world. Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world."  

On the other hand, Google has been trying a lot of different things! Latest being their Youtube service testing its luck in movies business. Starting yesterday, Youtube is offering movies for rent at youtube.com/movies. I believe performance wise this new step does not create any major lag, as Youtube is used to seeing 35 hours of free video content uploaded to its servers every minute. Buckle up Netflix; what's your strategy now?

With all possible updates from technology giants, I wonder what Facebook is upto! All hail the "Zuck" and wait for the next big security lapse in Facebook. 

Google's Video Logo

It all started with colour doodles in 1998, and went upto animations. Later, we were all impressed with interactive doodles and games. Today, it's a video. Google inspires us all by paying respects to famous personalities and wonderful innovations with innovative doodles on the popular clutter-free search page.

Commemorating Charlie Chaplin's birthday, the search giant came up with a video as logo on their page. Their first video logo, also their second interactive logo, is a silent movie paying respects to the great comedian just the same way he entertained us all for years. The first doodle was created by Google's founders itself.

For all of you who haven't seen last year's Google logo for Indian Independence day

I hope Google comes up with many more doodles telling us their little stories and bringing back memories of great past.

Gmail's weekend data loss

Image Source: www.worcester.org 

Few months ago I wrote about our increasing dependence on Internet here: How dependent are you on Internet?. Despite the instances of data losses from internet giants being a possibility, one such instance is the recent loss of Gmail data effecting about 0.02% of its users, I am still one of those who relies on my email servers as backup for my conversations and documents exchanged via emails. In this recent Gmail incident, the bug effected all the multiple copies of the users' data Google stores in its servers. As of now Gmail team is still unable to recover the lost data completely, as the App Status page still continues to show the scary yellow wrench. 

Data loss sucks! I know it first hand since I lost years of work sometime back when a friend mistakenly formatted my hard disk. Ever since I was a little careful in making multiple copies of data. Now that buying Tera Bytes of space has become cheaper, taking data backups should not be as costly as it was earlier.

Do you also rely on your email servers and other Internet options to store your data? What precautions do you take to secure your data and prevent its loss?

Bring out the chef in you with Google!

For all you people like me who stay away from home and crave for delicious home cooked food every time you eat the food you cooked, here is some help. What was mastered by our mommies and grand mas through intuition in dishing out wonders, was turned by us - the new generation - into calculated numbers and instructed portions of ingredients. And Google, which is under an oath to follow the quote "Make hay while the sun shines" and which makes the best of the information available to them, is here to help us out in making lip smacking food ourselves with their Google Recipe View.

Searching recipes for Mirchi Pakora using Google Recipe View. You can filter out the results based on cooking time and ingredients.

Recipe View, as they say in their official blog, is based on Rich Snippets feature Google introduced a couple of years earlier for webmasters. And it allows users like me to search recipes based on ingredients and cooking time. Isn't that cool?

But after a brief beta testing using Indian recipe search terms made me think that Google needs to work a little more in organizing the data they have. While writing a recipe for mirchi pakoras, people might use "green chillies" or "green peppers" or "hari mirch" in the list of ingredients required. And Google's engine must be very smart in identifying that all these mean the same. And it should be able to list out all the recipes when an appropriate search string for recipe is given by users. This is the reason why they have given out certain instructions to the writers of recipes, which in the long run would help them in improving this feature.

And a note to all you super cooks out there who help us all the time by posting your recipes online. If you want to make the best out of this and want their Recipe View to feature the recipes you posted on your site, please optimize your posts on recipes by following the instructions here and here. By following their instructions, you are helping us as well in making your recipes available to us in a better way.

So, what's stopping you? Start using Google Recipe View and bring out the chef in you!

Google Chrome for Blogging

We all know how the web browser from Google, Chrome, achieved huge popularity with in a very short span of its release. Chrome's popularity can be attributed to its light weight and speed apart from its friendly bookmarking feature and task manager capabilities. Now, Chrome has extended its capabilities further by introducing a Web store for apps (add-ons from third party).

Couple of days ago I have written a guest post at Latest Tech Tips maintained by Harshad, a technology blogger and Java developer. Please find my post below.

Google Chrome Apps For A Better Blogging Experience

It talks about how these apps can be used to make your blogging experience a better one. Go ahead and explore the app store.

I know you better than you do yourself!

Very recently I came across a website which offers a service to build profile of a person you want based on the information it collects from websites and social networking sites across the internet over time. Just for a nominal service fee. I really wanted to try it out and see how much it knows about me, but the money part stopped me from doing that. Although it did not stop me from digging further and trying to understand how people give out their information, knowingly and unknowingly.

I was happy to find that typing my name in search box of Google or Yahoo returned me to my web page. But I was totally annoyed when I looked up my phone number. The search results returned a map with a marker pointing at where I live and driving directions to my home.

Technology has made it easy for our information to be available to general public. The face recognition feature in Picasa, the famous photo editing software from Google, only makes me wonder about the pace at which technology is advancing. I downloaded Google image search results for Shahrukh Khan, and using Picasa tagged one photo of Shahrukh's face as SRK. And, this is what it does. All the mugshots of Shahrukh Khan were automatically identified by the software as SRK on my laptop. Can you not think of how this technology can be used to access people's information over the Internet? A simple image search with my name returns lot of images I posted over time on various sites. Only a matter of time, these profile building websites would have access to all my pictures on internet through smart use of algorithms.

With the advent of 3G and smart phones, giving out information has become lot easier. Every application I use on my smart phone wants to know more about me. They reason saying that we can take better advantage of the application by providing our personal information, our interest and our tastes to it. And we buy their reason. Some applications would even access my location and geo tags all my activity. This way I make it easier for the profile building websites to chronologically arrange my activity, travel, pictures and what not. How does a graph indicating how our preferences changed over time sound?

The day is not far when we find our profiles from those websites to be better than our personal diaries. Doesn't that sound scary?

Is Google Now Into Medicine?

Google which rules our life with access to our data through various services it provide is now into the field of Medicine. Are they planning to make it big with their internet services in the field of medicine? We don't have any answers now, but only time will tell. This application matches with my area of interest as it deals with how the power of graphics can be leveraged to improve the field of medicine. And I am one of the happiest person to see this tool live and working. But I don't think my boss will be a happy man since we were working on the exact same idea for many days.

As an initial step, Google today launched an application called Google Body Browser. Body Browser is a browser based tool for human anatomy which lets you navigate through various anatomical structures of human body. Developed using WebGL, a technology based on OpenGL for browsers, you can now have a detailed look of your body's functionality in 3D right down to the muscles, bone structures, nervous system, and even vital organs. The application starts with a fully clothed human model, and as you select various modes the details increase with transparent rendering of outer layers. There is also the labeling feature which is very important for these educational applications to tell you exact scientific names of the anatomical geometries. And how can you not have a search feature in a Google product? There is this ever friendly search bar that lets you look for anatomy you know.

Google Body Browser

To get it working you will have to enable WebGL on your browser.

For Google Chrome, download the latest stable Beta version and install it. Type "about:flags" in the address bar, search for WebGL in that page, and double-click on the "Enable" and restart your browser.

For Firefox, download version 4 Beta and install it. Type "about:config" in the address bar, search for "WebGl" in that page, and double-click "webgl.enabled_for_all_sites" to set it to true. And restart your browser.

Happy learning!

Google Instant Bollywood

Have you ever tried to kill time by looking for random stuff on Google? I do it all the time, and the whole experience was completely enhanced after Google Instant was released. Here is how I burned an evening looking for Bollywood on Google.

And here is how you can get an idea on the mentality of people in general. The kind of terms they attribute to Bollywood and its stars are quite obvious from the search terms used.

 

Now, this is kind of the impression I've on Aishwarya Rai. And Google Instant summarized it for me appropriately. 

This left me wondering why so many people are concerned about Kajol expecting a baby or getting pregnant again and again.

I was hoping to see something on how Kareena sucks at acting or on her size zero. But apparently people are lot more concerned and confused about her virginity.

Now, it's the complexion of Deepika Padukone that they are confused about.

And Priyanka Chopra's as well, but looks like people are always concerned about the virginity of Bollywood female stars.

I'm sorry Preity. :P

This is exactly the same question most of us must be having, about the sexuality of Rakhi Sawanth. I don't differ either.

LMAO! I couldn't stop laughing when I came across this. How on earth can people even come up with this Search Query? This made my day!  

I hope you will also waste some of your time looking for your favorite personalities after going through this post.

Instant Search Previews

Recently in their blog, Google mentioned how their instant previews feature, which will soon be released officially, will improve users satisfaction. But, isn't this idea already implemented by Microsoft in their search engine Bing. The only difference will be, Bing shows only textual content in their preview with information like contacts or other relevant text/links from the web page.  Where as, Google plans on rolling out previews with graphical content (images) as well. I wonder why Microsoft didn't try this out in their Bing. One reason that comes to my mind is the goals they've set. Bing, which is good at answering users' questions, tries to give out relevant content in the preview itself. On the other hand, Google is good at directing you to right web pages. By showing graphical content in the preview for search terms, the users can identify quickly if they already know the page or the icon that shows up and reach their page of interest. Although I'm not sure if their goals will play a big role in deciding the features of their products in this competitive tech business which requires to attract as many users as possible.

Google Preview Feature

Bing Preview Feature

This thing interested me since I was also doing some work on incorporating previews while interacting with 3D  data in virtual reality environments. You may try the real thing here until Google releases this feature in their search page officially. And, for someone like me who tries to get maximum amount of work done with minimum use of mouse, their keyboard controls come handy too. I wonder how many iterations of design Google came up with to identify and understand what makes a good preview. 

Speaking of design, I'm tempted to talk about Windows 7 phone. If you own one which is an event of very little probability given that it was released only 2 days ago or if you have seen one of those demo videos, it clearly indicates the care and effort that went into its design. I heard from a senior employee at Microsoft about how designers of Nike shoes were roped into this project. Thinking out of the box really works!

P.S. Re-edited on 11/11/2010 since the pictures I uploaded earlier got deleted automatically.

Socialize for Caffeine

I'm not writing about attending meetings and events for free coffee. I know there are quite some grad students among the readers of the blog, and I know it's totally worthwhile writing about free food event experiences. :D

But now, if you want to read more about Heisenberg Food Uncertainty Principle or Opponent-process theory of Free Food or the pros and cons of different types of free foods, then you are redirected to this hilariously written article.

Coming back to what I wanted to write is how socializing will be important for your blog. Socializing in the context of our blogs is social bookmarking your articles by posting the links on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Stumble Upon and what not! Phew! By doing all this we in a way do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For those of us who want to be known, published and read by more people than ever before, doing this now is more important since Google has changed its crawling technique. And they call their new page indexing method Caffeine, at least that is their code name which the general public are expected not to care about. If you still wonder about the reason for that name, I can say that it's the outcome of Google techies after lots of caffeine consumption during meetings and coding times. Well, may be every product of theirs is but with this they might want to show their gratitude to coffee.

With Facebook's huge investment in Hadoop targeting real time analytics with a latency of few seconds, Google now tries to optimize their multi-layered architecture of their indexing mechanism. Caffeine is said to work better for blogs and media content, in finding relevant search results from social media for the search queries to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and other social websites. And this makes our blog entries show up better if the links to our webpages are updated on social media and book marking websites. Here is an excerpt from Google's blog post announcing this new technique:

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.

Now, this change sure comes with some things to remember:

• Earlier indexing method used "meta keyword" HTML tag in the web pages while looking for relevant content. With Caffeine, it's the density of the words.
• High quality inbound links, original content and uniqueness, as always, has their share of importance with Caffeine too.
• The speed at which your page loads is an important factor for Google Caffeine. This is something I need to work on for my blog page also.
• Age of your site or blog also plays an important role with this new technique.

On the concluding note, Google Caffeine works better for bloggers since it is faster in indexing our content. But, with the increasing content it gets difficult for your page to be among the results of a search query unless you write with more focus on content. Carving a niche for your self become more important than ever before.

Adios,

Vee...

Google Command Line

Looks like some geek has coded up this new command line feature GoogleCL - http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/, where google users can use their popular services (picasa, blogger, docs etc) from Command Line. Its a sure joy for many geeks out there. Right now, I'm composing this post from my command line. Haven't yet figured out how to post a picturefrom command line, but for now I'll take a screen shot and post the picture later from the browser. Atleast, its fun doing all this!

Edit: Attaching this screenshot for personal satisfaction using the browser UI  :D
Introducing the Google Command Line Tool - Google Open Source Blog

Yet another change in Gmail

Looks like Google has loads of updates planned for Gmail. It all started as a simple email client. Slowly, the look and feel of the UI were changed a couple of times, and later Google Talk was integrated into Gmail. A few days back video chat was also introduced into the google talk integrated in the gmail. And now its the themes. 

While some changes made me comfortable, some others were very hard for me to take. I love gmail for its simplicity - plain colors with no jazzy effects, cool and simple interface. And this themes thingy is hard for me accept. Loved the very first version of gmail. I somehow feel its losing its charming effect with each of these new features. 

Is anyone else with me, feeling the same? 

P.S. : Apparently, Google Labs is coming up with a new feature for Gmail with which we will be able to send text messages from our IM to mobile phones. Guess, this will be a  bit hit among the youth!