Sony vs. Amazon: Sony has numbers on their side.

Amazon’s Kindle gets a lot of press across the Blogosphere and news boards these days, with the occasional mention of iRex, Sony, and other companies who produce, or are working on digital readers for the consumer market. Well, today is a day to talk about Sony.

In a Press release today, Sony announced its partnership with Google to provide public domain titles to their e-book shop at ebookstore.sony.com. As the press release states, a button on the shops homepage would lead users to Google’s resource of over a half million public domain titles; the best part being, those books are free.

Five hundred thousand free books; the classics from your time in school, the books you loved, the books you hated, all at your beckon-call. Google’s repository of titles alone it twice that of what Amazon is presently able to offer, that alone is enough to sway favor toward the Sony reader.

This extensive library just adds to the already standard features of text size selection, music player, and multiple file format support for personal documents. I think with all that put together, Sony can actually make me forget the joy of physically turning a page.
Read more!

Google Turns Ten

In honor of their 10th birthday, they've brought back their oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001.

They've even setup a timeline for you internet historians out there.
Read more!

Google Chrome: a Fair, Smart, Safe, and Different Web Browser

Later today, for us on the east coast, Google will launch a completely different type of browser. Chrome is an open source browser that takes a fresh approach to dealing with web page content. Based on the web as it exists today with all the apps, and interactiveity that wasn't there 10 years ago.

Google's supposed internal document explaining the product, a 38 page comic, was first leaked and is now linked to on Google's blog.


With chrome everything is confined and processes execute in their own environment, meaning any JavaScript will load externally in it's own space. Your browser will continue to load anything after the script. Even if the JavaScript process fails the page won't.

And since processes are confined they can also be easily quarantined, thus improving machine security.

The folks at Google use the web just as much, if not more, than we do. So the underlying concern here is an overall improvement in its functionality. To that end, the Gears team built its API into Chrome.

The Gears API's goal, is to improve all browsers. This means, anything that works well will be adopted by Chrome. At the same time, if deemed worthy by others, these native apps developed over web apps will become standards available for all browsers, because it's open source.



Update: it's live!
Read more!

Gmail Custom Time: April Fool's or a Real Feature

Gmail, Google's email service, last night released a new feature named "Custom Time". Made live around midnight the feature seems surprisingly unethical and would serve to undermine the whole basis of email time stamping. It supposedly allows up to 10 email time alterations a year. Allowing thoughtless jerks and procrastinators to fib about their poor time management skills by predating their email.

Google has taken this a step further by added the ability to mark the altered email read or unread. Seriously, as if you wouldn't notice an unread email dated from three days ago suddenly popping up in a sea of read messages. Is the introduction date of this feature a strange coincidence or clever April fool's prank? Considering you can't really use this feature when composing an email on gmail, I'm betting on the latter.
Read more!

Gphone Myth...Demystified

Tech News
A single ‘G’phone is too narrow-minded for the far-sighted folks at Google. Their vision is much more encompassing of all ‘smart’ phones, open source developers, and end users. Android is the love child of Google’s relations with the Open Handset Alliance. Android is the answer, apparently, to those proprietary mobile phone technology blues. Even Apple’s iphone, which was billed as breaking the binds of limited mobile browsers, is limited by Safari Mobile’s lack of Flash or Java plug-ins, not to mention the carrier contracts. Android is a platform that includes an operating system, user-interface, and applications; all the components that make a ‘smart’ phone...smart. It also has the added benefit of allowing any software developers to write and test apps. Then, submit them for super wide distribution. No web apps or hacking skills needed. This idea has crazy potential. There are 2.7 billion mobile phone users in the world. Think about that for a second…here on the planet Earth there’s 1.1 billion internet users, 800 million cars, and 1.3 million land lines phones. No numbers even come close to this staggering statistic. If Google pulls this off they will have successfully tapped into be the biggest market in the world. Just another day at the office for this global Super-corporation. If anyone can coordinate such a strategic move...it’s those crafty Californians at Google.
..Via Google Blog..
Read more!

1st Google Moon, then Sky, now X-PRIZE?

posted by: Andrew R. Harris Google is, and has been for at least a decade, licensing images and data (among others things) in huge quantities. In the process, compiling massive amounts of information from all aspects of the human experience and presenting them in apps and databases that are excruciatingly usable. Their enterprises have been lauded for there intuitive, and user friendly interfaces. Now the super corp. has a new button for that marvel of modern satellite imagery, Google Earth. It’s a sweet addition... called Google Sky featuring a stitched together compilation of space imagery from observatories all over the world. The Hubble space telescope is featured prominently here (finally it’s good for something besides eating money) it's deep space images are incredibly detailed and beautiful. Google Sky images make previously scattered information now easily accessible to anyone who wants to download the free application. A pay version, Google Earth Plus is available for map heads. The 20 dollar pack lets you connect Google Earth with your GPS for real time location display or import any geographically linked data and display it in the app.; $400 gets you pro, this upgrade allows for faster connection speeds, higher res printing, and leasing rights for business presentations and such (among other things).
I recently spoke with an astrophysicist from Columbia University who informed me that astronomers around the world will be accessing and exchanging data directly with Google making Google integral in the pursuit of a greater understanding of the universe around us. Google Sky, just as in Google Earth, will also include regular Joe's photos of the night sky, Google hopes that this open source data collection will yield astronomical discoveries from unlikely sources, mainly folks like you and I. This seems to be a doctrine of sort for the folks at Google who have made no secret of there ambitions in space extrapolation. Now Google is offering a $30 Million incentive with the Lunar X-PRIZE for the first privately funded and launched moon rocket. The rocket must carry a robot up to the moon preform some Google designated tasks and relay data back, in order for the prize to be claimed. This type of corporate sponsored innovation has the inherent benefit of incubating industry leaders through condensed prize-driven competition rather than open market driven competition. Google's initiative will result in accelerated innovation.

Official Google Blog: Fly me to the moon

Back to blog!

Read more!