Tag Archives: Google

Google Apps Launches premium offerings

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Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later but it’s official. Google is launching a premium service for companies wishing to use Google’s on-line app’s as opposed to traditional desktop suites such as MS Office. The premium package includes a custom 10GB Gmail inbox, Google Calendar, Writely, Google Spreadsheet, GTalk IM, Google Pages, Google Custom Home page, and iGoogle – the price will be around $50 per Employee per year, as opposed to MS Office which costs between $500-$600 per license..

You can read more about the competitive pricing in this articly over on NY Times. It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft react, however I doubt they’re will be any immediate impact from this, it will take time for Google to take any significant market share for the simple reason that I personally don’t believe large organisations are ready to trust Google with all their corporate data … yet!
I’ve been using OpenOffice for a while now, I also have MS Office on my works laptop. My own feeling is that as much people berate Microsoft, the Office suite is actually really quite good. Open Office is catching up, but does have a fair way to go in terms of a feature by feature comparison. Google’s Writely ( word processor ) doesn’t come close to having the same number of features in it as either of the other two, but the question is … does it need to? I don’t think it does. Most users probably dont use more than 30% of the features ( if that ) in MS Word – I know I don’t! ( admittedly I’d still love to use LaTex ).

Google’s new offering is not only a threat to both OpenOffice and MS Office, it’s an excellent example of how, with today’s technologies, you can liberate people from the desktop and deliver compelling Software as a Service Solutions, that users can use … anywhere! They’re not tied down to a single machine … and that’s really cool!

In fact find out more over at the Official Google blog.

7 habits for effective text editing

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Here’s a really cool talk by Bram Moolenaar the creator of Vim. There’ some really great tips some of which are obvious others aren’t. I remember when Rob and I were paired on Cenote, we did most of our development work on Fedora Core, Rob re-introduced my to Vi and Vim and gave me loads of great tips, this talk was somewhat reminiscent of that. It’s definitly worth watching!

Google Tech Talk: Fixing Electronic Literature … with Transclusion

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Fascinating Tech Talk by Ted Nelson. For those who haven’t heard of him Nelson is the man who coined the phrase hypertext all the way back in 1963. Nelson has spent several decades trying to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. He’s been working towards finding ways to improve web structure, arguing that as it stands the web is actually very limited by browsers we use and that the one-way links that appear on pages actually limit connectivity. In part he attributes this to the fact that the web imitates paper … watch the talk to understand why I wont delve into that here.

He’s an advocate of Transclusion based hypertext, the idea of including parts of documents within other documents by reference, so you aren’t storing the same bits of information twice.

After listening to the tech talk what strikes me is that this kind of approach will work well when the transcluded sections of text are actually self contained and that the meaning and the validity of the text is independent of the context in which it is transcluded into other documents. I don’t know how well that would work since context forms an important part of any document, and its very difficult to write documents without forming some kind of context, that’s why there’s always an inherent danger when you tug in a quote that you might mis-represent it or use it in a context it was never intended to ( just ask the Pope!). I know Nelson says that you can compare the context side by side, yet this doesn’t seem intuitive to me.

I know the man is the genius who is credited for inventing hypertext so why am I not convinced, am I missing something? Any thoughts anyone?

Actually thinking about it the Xanadu document browser Nelson shows off in the tech talk, is very similar to a Document Hyper browser developed at Xerox Research that Alan once showed me. I cant find any reference to it … but I’m seeing him tomorrow so I’ll ask him.

Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

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Charles S. Knight has a compiled his list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. The article makes for an interesting read as he describes his method of analysis by comparing them to Google under a set of categories he defines.

What made me grin the most was the reference at the end of the article to Asimov’s The Last Question, an excellent short story that wonderfully suggests an answer to the question “is Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a fait accompli“. In fact for making that observation/link alone Charles gets a thumbs up from me.

Google Booksearch … now visualise places mentioned in books on maps!

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I think this is really cool:

So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you’ll find a map on the “About this book” page.

To see this in action just search for any book on http://books.google.com for example this Book on New York, when you click on the About this book page you get the places referenced in the book displayed on a map, along with the page references from the book.

Maybe i’m just a big geek … but I think its really cool!

Welcome to Google Planet? is Google building a virtual world?

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Came across this article in New Scientist. Rumours are circulating that Google is developing an online Virtual world, much like Second Life. I suspected this might be the case when they acquired SketchUp last year which allows users to contribute 3D buildings for others to see which can be overlayed on Google Earth.

Read the New Scientist article for more information … but I’ll definitly be keeping an eye on this. Google has made a habit out of taking on very established markets and re-defining them. I do hope though that Google, if they go down this road, improve on the metaphor, I really hope they dont end up cheesing people off like SL has 🙂

Google Tech Talk: Are there search-engine distruptive ideas?

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An excellent tech talk about what kinds of technology could be potentially disruptive to Google, and how it to understand it and how to turn these into positives.

The talk focuses around the democratization of  information and the cultural implications of this. What I found really interesting is that this talk touched on several points that Alan made during his talks to our group yesterday about providing better semantic support for users trying to find information.

It’s a truly fascinating talk and if your working with search engines do watch this talk!

Google enabled targetting of soldiers in Iraq

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I got quite annoyed when I read this sensationalist rant against Google by written by Paul McNamara. McNamara bases much of his rant on quotes from this article over at the Telegraph. Basically he would have us believe that insurgents in Iraq are using two year old satellite photos on Google Earth to pinpoint their attacks against British bases in Basra.

Now I’m no military commander, but if your enemy can rely on two year old photos to plan attacks against you then shouldn’t alarm bells be ringing in your head about your own complacency? Am I the only one that thinks that it shouldn’t really be possible for insurgents to pinpoint attacks based on two year old pictures?

By their own admission the Military Intelligence (Oxymoron anyone?) state that:

We have never had proof that they have deliberately targeted any area of the camp using these images but presumably they are of great use to them.

I’m guessing a pair of binoculars and a current roadmap might actually be more useful to them. Unless the images were very recent they aren’t going to show the correct positions of tents, or ordinance or even buildings. I admit they might be useful in the wider context of planning to provide information about surrounding terrain but its not as though that information isn’t already available elsewhere.

McNamara’s opening salvo is hardly objective:

Sooner or later Google is going to have to start doing a better job of coming to grips with the collateral damage created by the ever-expanding array of wiz-bang applications that have made it a worldwide phenomenon.

There are always social implications for any new technology most people love Google Earth in fact there’s an entire sub-culture thats developed around people trying to identify buildings, boats, interesting bits of terrain etc. and posting what they have discovered up just visit here to see what I mean. Stating that by not censoring their service Google is somehow colluding with terrorists to kill soldiers is to my mind offensive, I’d agree with him if the images were real time or current but they aren’t. All this is, is scaremongering of the worst kind and I dont like it … in fact I find it quite distasteful.

C’mon the last time I tried to use Google Earth to look at my home there was a huge camper van parked outside it owned by one of the neighbours … but she sold it three years ago!

Anyway found this article over at The Register whilst its a tad irreverent it makes a great read, one of the individuals quoted (Brigadier Daya Ratnayake – Sri Lanka) makes an excellent point:

“In this era of technology, you have to live with the fact that almost everything is on the internet – from bomb-making instructions to assembling aircraft. So it’s something the military has to learn to live with and adapt.”

However what worries me the most is that doing a quick google for the search “google earth insurgents terrorists” leads me to a list of articles that regurgitate the kinds flawed views echoed by McNamara and fail to point out how woefully out of date the images are. Take this quote from Fox News’s coverage of the story:

The officer said he believes insurgents use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas of bases, such as tents. The tool can get as detailed as showing specific vehicles in a desired region and has no limits to who can sign up and use it

What happened to journalistic integrity? or actually using common sense? I guess scaring the shit out of people sells newspapers a damn sight quicker than telling them the truth.

For those in any doubt here’s John Pike’s view on the issue over at GlobalSecurity.org:

“If I was going to be going through all the trouble to conduct a well-planned assault on a nuclear power plant, I’m not going to trust some Web site to do my intelligence collection, If evildoers were wanting to get imagery of say, a nuclear power plant, there’s simply so many different ways that they can do it, the fact that it’s available on an Internet Web site really doesn’t alter their attack planning requirements.”

You can also read this article written by Barry Levine which offers a more balanced view, in fact Paul I recommend that you do read it you might actually learn something useful to report back to your readers.

btw: heres Bruce Schneier’s take on it.

Google removes its Tips feature

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Google has removed its tips feature. In the past when you searched for “photo sharing” for example it would have presented you with the tip “Want to share pictures? Try Google’s Picasa Web Albums”.

This feature got some bad press recently, most notably Blake Ross blog entry entitled: Tip:Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, in which Blake argued that this feature which points users to Google only services that arent necessarily the best of breed. It bumps to the top of the page an advert for a Google product that would not have appeared as a top entry in a search result.

Google haven’t offered a reason for removing this controversial feature, im hoping that they chose to do so because of the negative feedback they have received from advertisers as well as bloggers like Blake, and for me thats a good sign … that they’re still an organisation that is willing to listen to others.