Engadget put up an interesting story today, where it shows the Android logo seems to be inspired from a not-so-popular game on Atari, called the Gauntlet: The Third Encounter. Looks to me quite similar and definitely an inspiration when someone was thinking of an Android image. Nevertheless, I do not believe the suing game will start based on the logo alone...
This also reminds me of many other similar inspired logos from popular brands, which once came by email:
Apple is till date known as a cool gadget company, but that seems to be soon changing. Apple recently acquired $46m rebates from North Carolina to set-up a $1bn datacenter in the state. This price is more than the state-of-the art data centers owned by Google and that questions what Apple wants to do with such a powerful data center. May be OSX is going to be hosted on the cloud ??
Anyways, today eBay's Olivier Sanche will join Apple as its director of global data center operations and manage all the data centers that Apple is setting up. Olivier Sache was one of the guys who created the great E-bay and Paypal Infrastructure before web services were the “in-thing”. Apple had realized the strength of internet-services long back with iTunes and iPhone App Store, but it has also failed many times as shown with .mac and MobileMe downtimes and lack of new features. Apple has internally done many experiments, but failed in consolidating it position on the web...
With Olivier in its team, Apple surely hopes that its web services woes will end... May be Apple’s planning a Search Engine to compete with Google. Isn’t that a reason why Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked to leave the Apple board ??
All of a sudden, Google has got competition that it never has had to face before. Microsoft’s new search “Bing” was launched last month with some fanfare and why not?? It is probably Google biggest search competition till date. If that was not all, today Google released somewhat of a second thought to Wolfram Alpha called Google Squared.
If you have never heard of these new products, hold your horses. You can read about these below and then play with them.
Microsoft has always been on the loosing end of the battle on the web. Be it search or online advertising, Google has ruled the roost. With no competition on the horizon and Google incrementally improving search and ads, I was thinking Google was unbeatable. But Microsoft has other plans. A revamp of the Live search and a new name “Bing”, Microsoft’s search engine does for the first time give some serious competition to Google. Its been over a week now and I have been ‘binging’ (as googling) on Bing as my default search engine and I seem to quite like it. Its easily better than what Live Search was and as accurate as Google, if not better. And Bing’s not just plain-old search. Microsoft has presented Bing as a nice little query engine. Like Flight Search, Shopping Decisions, Fitness, Traffic and much more as you can see from “The Demo Tour” of Bing. Even Apple’s co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who is generally skeptical of Microsoft feels great about Bing!!
Now Google’s homepage is really simple, whereas Bing shows a nice little “wallpaper” as the background with some random interesting knowledge hidden in the wallpaper. And that Bing Wallpaper changes everyday with some new knowledge and interesting facts. Go try and find out for yourself!!
While the world is in love with Wikipedia and clicking on all those links in Google search results for finding relevant information about a topic, WolframAlpha is released as a semantic search to gather all that information and show you most common information on a single page. Now as simply as WolframAlpha presents the information, its a real tough computational problem to solve. Google has released Google Squared as an attempt to do a semantic search and present relevant information in a similar fashion. The output of the results do wary greatly and for me WolframAlpha has nearly every time been more relevant. As an example, I searched “India” as the keyword and WolframAlpha presented a real encyclopedia style information with the maps and the stats. Google Squared on the other hand was too generic (like Google Search) and expected me to do more reading/searching on each of the squares (as you can see from the screenshots below):
Then while a friend of mine and I were discussing about Nazi Germany and SS, I decided to do a search with “Schutzstaffel” as my keyword and below are the results:
I would surely say Google’s got some serious competition. Google’s Web is going to change after all!!
Today, Google released its open-source browser called Google Chrome to the world, after making us feel in 2006 that it was an April Fool’s Joke. Yesterday, in an announcement, it disclosed the features of Google Chrome and claimed that we require a new browser because the web has changed. As soon as it was released, I downloaded it and here are my observations after using it for the last 4 hrs.
The first thing you notice is that it’s an online installer and still requires ~450Kb (for comparisons: utorrent is half the size and can download the whole world for you!!) . It’s only released for Windows at the moment and will require sometime before its released for Linux. The online download was pretty slow for my connection, but I realized that may be half the internet users were downloading it and that can be daunting even for a biggie like Google.
Finally the downloader finished and I was ready to surf on Google Chrome. First thing you’ll notice that it occupies nearly all available screen space. No menubar with File, Edit and the like!! And there is the Opera like UI with SpeedDial for most visited websites and Search History. Also the Address Bar is pretty efficient with all the quick searching and intelligent suggestions.
I was expecting Chrome to be memory hog, but it really is pretty light on the memory usage. With less than 10 tabs open, it surely uses less memory than Opera, Safari and surely Firefox. As the tabs increase Chrome seems to take up as much memory as other browsers. The Browser TaskManager, which can be found when you right click on the open Taskbar or TitleBar is another very useful addition to the browser. But what’s interesting to note that with so many security and stability improvements like separate processes and JavaScript sandbox, Chrome has done an excellent job at keeping the memory usage low. May be if addons are introduced, it’ll screw Chrome as well, but for now it’s doing good!!
There aren’t many things to be set in the Options that other browsers don’t have, but the search management was interesting. Since, I am from India, it showed me the popular Indian search engines. Yahoo India, MSN India, Rediff, Guruji were the available search engines and that was interesting because it’s always efficient to have a localized search.
This in my opinion is the most important part for a web browser. Like a phone should be best at voice transmission and quality, a browser should be best at displaying websites accurately and swiftly. Chrome uses Webkit (aka Apple Safari’s Engine) for rendering web pages and I wasn’t expecting many differences from Safari. But I found a few changes between the released version of Safari and Chrome. May be Chrome uses a newer version or something. Chrome scores 76/100 on the ACID3 Web Standards test which isn’t really bad, but I was still expecting 100% as Webkit and Opera have already reached 100% in their development products.
JavaScript performance is super fast. You can look at the benchmarks here. The team from Denmark has done an awesome job and Chrome's JavaScript performance is the best among all the browsers.
I'll write more about it later... but you can read what other people at GigaOm, TechCrunch, TheInq and Gizmodo are saying. Its all over the web and no kidding Google OS is really here to stay!!
With Google Chrome released, one of its most awesome features is the excellent JavaScript performance. It is a complete new re-write of the JavaScript VM and uses what is called the V8 Engine by the Google developers who worked on the new JavaScript engine. Here is a JavaScript Performance Analysis for developers to look at comparing different browsers.
Google uses a lot of AJAX and the new V8 engine is the king in JavaScript performance done using Dromaeo :
| Browser | Time (lower the better) |
| Chrome 0.2.149.27 | 488.80ms |
| Firefox 3.0.1 | 1775.00ms |
| Opera 9.52 | 1767.60ms |
| Safari 3.1.2 | 2075.00ms |
The memory usage of Chrome is also pretty good and the built-in task manager for looking at the memory/CPU usage of tabs is interesting and useful. It can also help in analyzing which tab is creating some kind of menace or using more memory. You can close that tab and get some free memory. This is just an initial preview, but the JavaScript performance is top-notch!!
The iPhone App Store's success for Apple has changed the way Google is thinking content-distribution for the Android platform. According to an announcement yesterday, Google is ready to have an App Store for the Android platform called the Android Market.
Google has been working on the Android platform for over an year now and is about to give a final release by the end of the year. Different handset manufacturers have already vouched their support for the platform and Android is seen as the biggest competitor to Apple's iPhone in the smartphone market. With the roaring initial success of the AppStore for Apple, it makes obvious sense for Google to have a similar content-distribution system for their platform.
Google also has an expertise on web infrastructure and it can surely avoid the mistakes that Apple has done with the reliability and availability of its web services. The details on exact model of operation of Android Market are still unknown, but Google surely will make it open and stable!! They are the "do-no-evil" company!!
Orkut is the most popular social networking website in India and it has a really huge market share. But that hasn’t made them sit on their laurels and do nothing. Orkut has been improving each day and the newest improvement to Orkut comes for Symbian 60 users. Today, I happened to use Orkut on a Nokia N81 and it really rocks.
It’s been a few days that Google launched a new Orkut for the S60 users and I heard the news earlier, but today I really played with it. And I was blown by the simplicity and usability of the interface. Its simple, intuitive and fast. Even with the slow GPRS connections that we have in India, it was as fast as anything you would be using on a desktop. The photo upload obviously very slow, but having an upload interface on a mobile device is pretty cool. You can update your album with the photograph you just clicked and show off your fun-trips to your social network while you are having fun...
The following are some new features:
1.) Photo uploads (Upload photos as soon as you took them from your mobile)
2.) Picture galleries (Look at orkut albums in a more streamlined and cell-like resolution)
3.) Click-to-call (Call friends from Orkut page)
4.) Quick friend searches.
If you have a Symbian 60 phone, what are you waiting for?? Enjoy your social network by going to http://m.orkut.com
While India is celebrating its 61st Independence Day today, among other problems, Gender Inequality and Gender Imbalance is a major problem for the future of India. And somewhere between the lines of the so-called non-intrusive ads that you see on web pages, techniques for sex-selection for an unborn child is being promoted. Or so thinks Sabu Mathew George, the petitioner in a case filed in Supreme Court of India against web advertising and search companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Gender Imbalance is a major problem that faces India in the next few decades. Although the Indian society at large is still unaware of the problem, from the 
statistics and ground work that I’ve seen while working with Men Against Violence & Abuse, the problem is a severe one and could become adverse in the coming decades. Gender Imbalance is a man-made phenomenon in India where an unborn child’s sex is determined before birth and if the child is a female, the pregnancy is aborted. It is this ruthless murder of unborn females that in some states the sex ratio for males to females is less than 0.7
But that is not what we are here to talk. Sabu Mathew George has filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India that certain ads displayed on search results and web advertise the process of sex-selection. The Supreme Court has sent notices in this regard to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in this regard and would like to hear their side of the story. The Indian law’s on Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act. states that advertisement of products and techniques to aid in the selection of an unborn child's sex is an offense. Thus, advertisement of such products are not shown in Print-media, TV and Radio ads.
India’s Health Ministry and Ministry of Communications & IT have also been made respondents in the case because they have been non-responsive in stopping such ads. It should be interesting to see how these tech companies respond. If you look at it from a technical standpoint, such ads could have been easily spotted and not shown by these companies. There is already a procedure by which the content in ads is checked by these companies and can prevent such ads to be shown. Even the search results are moderated according to local laws and standards and it isn’t uncommon that the Chinese government have successfully changed the behavior of these companies.
May be these tech companies haven’t realized the magnitude of the problem or just ignored the law. But we are surely going to find out, if the Supreme Court holds them liable for such instances. Or can web companies just say that they are mediators and not content owners and get away.
Google had earlier stated in its Public Policy Blog that, “Think about the telephone system. We don't hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime. For the same reasons, it's a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don't blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers. Rather, the standard recognized worldwide is that Internet intermediaries are responsible to take action when they are put on notice of unlawful content through proper legal channels.”
Now that’s as awful analogy!! Telephone system is a one-to-one or conference system, where you don’t have your comments recorded for the entire world to look at. Neither can it be technically feasible nor morally acceptable to hear every call being made. Whereas content on the Internet, that is displayed as search results can very well be observed and banned, like has been done in China. In India, you have laws to stop it in other forms of media, then why should the Internet be any different?? There are obvious “report abuse” links to results and web displayed content. But the utter slowness in the response of such services is another reason why the system needs to be fixed on both the government side, tech-side and the users-side.
What’s a grand way of proposing when you are a geek and work for Google?? Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee just showed us that if you are a Google employee you can use Google’s Street View to propose to your girlfriend. You can look below at the Street View where Google employees have all stood in line and co-ordinated their timings with the Street View car that takes pictures around the streets.
Drag and double-click to zoom in the image above, or view it on Google Maps
The Street View team actually decided to co-ordinate a pre-announced Street View run outside Google's Mountain View offices, with the idea that Googlers could line up along the street and appear in the imagery. There are also other interesting things that you can view from within this view or you can go ahead and download Google Earth and check out the Street View layer. Some nice fingers, some interesting characters, some photogenic cops await you in the full view!!
If you have been following the “Street View story”, yeah the privacy infringing one!, then you will realize that there are really do diametrically opposite views to that story... When Street View was first launched and then integrated inside Google maps, you had to stand up and notice that some people would get crazy to get in the frame. And like we have seen in the recent past, all kinds of pictures have been popping up in street view. Some of them have been funny, some nudist, some have been advertising and some have been for a social cause. But what really needs to be asked is whether there is anything like privacy on the streets ??
Obviously if you wanted privacy, you have your home... and if someone stills peeps in, you surely have those window panes and curtains to help you. But the entire point of Street View is that you can follow the street and find your places more accurately than anything a top-view map would tell you. Also it feels like you are actually in the place!!
Google is the king of the web and everyone realizes web is the place to be. But has anyone wondered why other giants like Microsoft, IBM and HP don’t have 
hold over the internet market as much as Google. Steve Jobs, the Apple’s messiah today revealed to its company employees through an email that Apple still has to learn ways to improve its web services and was referring to the recent debacle with MobileMe.
Apple is the leader in portable audio market with iPod and also holds a cult figure on the desktop front. But like Microsoft, Apple still hasn’t figured out a way to provide efficient web services. The MobileMe is a one-stop solution for web services delivered for the iPhone and includes features like over-the-air syncing, linking web applications like Mail and Calender. Basically MobileMe is a subscription-based cloud application where all the Apple devices including iPod, iMac, PC, iPhone and the rest can collaborate together. But lately the services have been failing all too often. Sometime the services don’t work or work with constant interruptions. Forums all over the web have been filled with discussions on failure of MobileMe. And its not just MobileMe which is failing for Apple. The .mac which is another web service for Apple desktops is also having problems lately.
In an email sent to Apple employees, Steve Jobs mentions that MobileMe is not up to Apple's standards. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.” Jobs adds that, “The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services... And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
All this just proves that the online world of business and technology is lot different compared to the desktop world. Heroes become zeroes in a second’s flash and being agile is the name of the game. When we criticize Google of being too fast to release new technologies under the “BETA” label, we ought to remember that this is the key to their success. They often release services that aren’t fully feature-rich, but they work stable-enough to be accepted by the internet audience... And then slowly they keep adding more features!!
If you are one of those guys whose social life is only on the Internet, then this will probably make you more excited than any other social networking website ever. Google has launched a nice browser-based virtual world called Lively where users can interact with other users in different virtual spaces. Its more like Second Life, with much less 3D but with more faster environment.
Lively is an addon for Firefox or Internet Explorer and can be installed on only Windows XP or Vista. There is no addon installer for OSX or Linux. Lively allows you to create an avataar and after the avataar is done, you can goto any of the rooms or create your own room and interact with your friends or other users on lively. While creating a room there are different kinds of stuff that you can put into a room, much like what you did in the Sims game.
The installer can be downloaded from here. The installers size is small, but its an online installer that downloads required files from the Internet. One major advantage that Lively has over Second Life is that it is browser based and will not required great hardware to run. On the other hand, Second Life is lot more interactive and can use graphics hardware to render 3D worlds. From the early looks at Lively, its aimed towards a larger audience compared to Second Life. This Lively vs Second Life comparison is analogous to casual games Vs Hardcore games.
A video introduction to Google Lively:
Currently Google Lively doesn’t seem very interactive. But I’m sure as time goes on, it will become more interactive. Users will be able to do different activities with other users and interact freely with the environment. Even the environment has the possibilities of different object interaction and it could very well be like an multiplayer online game of Sims. Lively also has great prospects of being monetized, where user can see advertisements for the products that he likes and can be used as a marketing tool by different companies. Excellent idea that definitely has promise!!
Software Testing is probably one of the most boring and tedious task to a lot of people, but there are still people like me who love writing unit tests. But 
among a lot of developers I know, its always the guys from lower-part of the food-chain that write tests. Google has something for testers that will surely make them happy. Google announced today a new Google Testing Framework (GTF) in their Testing Blog.
GTF is a new testing framework for programs written in C++ that Google has open-sourced today. It is a collection of libraries that Google previously used to test their own softwares, but I’m wondering how that could be true, considering Python is Google’s favorite language!! ;-)
But jokes apart, as soon as the new testing framework was released, I set out with a few of my colleagues to test out the framework. We are one of those guys who are excited about testing and ways to simplify testing. The first thing we noticed even before starting with the library was that it was compatible with a host of compilers and versions. We’ve seen a few test frameworks for specific compilers or platforms, but GTF supports Linux, Windows, OSX and host of compilers ranging from gcc to Microsoft’s VC++.
Another excellent thing about the framework was that it’s easy to learn the basics as well has advanced features. Its very similar to xUnit tests and has good features to compare with CppUnit. The basics can be learnt from here and the advanced guide is here. Predicate Assertions are probably one of my favorite features, that we encountered quickly in a program that we were having trouble to debug. There are also a host of other assertions available and we’ve not got into very deep with all the assertions. But from the initial look at the framework, most of us very ranking it as one of the best testing frameworks out there...
There is still some of us who think Boost Framework is very good and some still think Visual Assist plugin tool (of Visual Studio fame) is pretty good. But the first look at Google Testing Framework has definitely made us stand up!
Online word processors have been used by a lot of people. Document collaboration and sharing is the most killer feature of these online word processors. But till date no online word processing software has caught up with Microsoft Office in terms of good looking UI. Google Docs and Zoho are the biggest in the online word processing market, but yesterday Adobe launched Adobe Buzzword online word processor.
Adobe Buzzword is a flash-based online word processor, with an excellent looking user-interface. The User-Interface is not just graphically good-looking, but it is as fast as Google Docs UI. Buzzword is fast and intuitive. Buzzword also features collaboration, image embedding, table creation and everything else that you come to expect of a good online word processor.
Buzzword has good fonts and you can get a PDF out for printout. It is an excellent word processor if you want to make PDFs and send it out to others without collaborating on documents. Adobe Buzzword makes use of Adobe Flash 9 and its such a small runtime, that you can start using Buzzword nearly instantly and it doesn't feel any different from a desktop word processor. Buzzword is still in beta and you have to signup for the beta from here.
Along with Buzzword, there is also another use private online chat room from Adobe called Adobe Connect. It is also in beta and can be used to do online meetings and drawings on runtime. Adobe is doing some excellent things in the online and Google should watchout for Adobe, since it is really catching up on the web.
Update: Google changed their favicon in new year 2009 again coloring what they had done earlier.
Favicons are a common thing on web pages today. Infact it is one of the first things that come to sight, when visiting a webpage. Today, I went to the Google analytics page and the favicon seemed a little different. It looked like Google's 'g' was non-capitalized and was sitting on some egg. I felt newegg had acquired Google Analytics ;-)
You can look at the screenshot below:
I first thought the site has been phished or something happened... But realized it was just a favicon change. I like the capitalized 'G' that was earlier there... Infact I now see gmail also showing the new favicon!
Everyone has realized the real money is in selling the cloud computing services. Amazon had it, HP will be getting onboard and Google now wants to make money out of it. Services for running your web applications and providing you that server in the cloud, is expected to be the next big business on the internet and Google's foray called "App Engine" was launched for this cause. Initially free, Google will now be charging for hosting your apps on App-Engine.
App Engine currently supports just Python for your web applications. But it has promised that other languages will be added later. The good thing about App Engine is that its fast and easy to setup, if you have a Python web application. You can also be assured that Google is hosting it and hence chances are that the reliability and availability of your applications will be high! All those good features do come at a price and hence the fee that Google announced today is not really bad. But in a world of Google freebies (for excellent services), its a little hard to predict when Google will charge for a service.
The pricing for Google App Engine are as follows:
Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
The pricing shows that its not all that costly compared to Amazon S3 and is cheaper than what you would be spending on your own hosting and maintenance. The API provided with App Engine is pretty good and Google has added an image-manipulation API that can scale, cut, crop and rotate images. Another API for better caching (memcache) has also been added. As time goes by, it'll be interesting to see how many languages are added to App Engine. I'm hoping Java and Ruby/RoR is added quickly and I may deploy some web apps and get some clients for that deal!!
Orkut is one of the big social networks on the web. With other social networks evolving everyday, Orkut doesn't want to be left behind in the race. And with this in mind, Orkut has added a new feature of "Themes". Themes allow users to change the look-and-feel of the scrapbook, profile pages. Earlier users had to use 3rd-party JavaScript (with GreaseMonkey only on Firefox) to use custom-themes, but now Google has added themes for everyone to enjoy.
Orkut currently shows only 4 themes:
Spring Theme:
Country Theme:
Beach Theme:
and the Classic Blue Theme...
You can also disable the themes if you wish... You will also be allowed to create your own themes and just like Orkut apps these will be downloadable and sharable with your friends. Themes have not been rolled out to all the users, but will take a few more weeks to be shown to all the users. Just like the success of Orkut Apps gave an opportunity to developers, Orkut Themes will give designers a chance to monetize their skills.
Google Code is one of the popular open-source project hosting places on the web. And since its Google, it gets press coverage, it is stable and fast and gets a lot of quick features with a simple interface. Subversion or SVN (a new world CVS), which is popular for code-sharing and version control system is used on Google Code. Google added a new code browsing feature on the projects SVN to help view code.
The Google Announcement reads:
In one Dilbert cartoon, Dogbert confronts a long-winded technology "guru" by showing him some actual code, which blows him away. It's funny because it's true: some long, abstract discussions can turn into short, concrete ones when you can point to code.
We hope you find that the details make this tool a joy to use. For example, it's easy to get straight to the source code of a file, yet still see some of its recent history right on the same page. And, you can flip through revisions of a file with just a click. Stay tuned as the tool matures and evolves into something even more exciting in the months ahead.
I don't know about Dogbert, but I find this new feature extremely useful and is what I would normally do offline, after I download anything off the SVN. A look at the Google Gears SVN makes an interesting read. It is really a nice addition to make and its pretty fast with all the AJAX stuff with jQuery. Google congratulates Jason Robbins and Jenan Wise who added this feature and we would like to add to the congratulations!!
Google launched a new webpage called Google Sky, to do some space watching (Shouldn't it be called Google Space ?). Earlier Google Sky was part of the desktop application of Google Earth, but now with the efforts of Diego Gavinowich and other Google developers, Google Sky has been brought to the webpages.
Just like Google Earth and Maps, Google Sky's interface is the same zoom, move around. But Google Sky has got Infrared, Microwave, and Historical viewing options. Nice to look through those different views. Other things include images from Hubble, Chandra, Galex, Spitzer. Really nice images if you like astronomy and sky watching like me. Google Sky can also be used as an educational tool by school professors to explain the Solar system, which is shown through another section of Google Sky.
Now if only some one can make a thing like Wikimapia.org, where users can create there own listings on Google Earth images. Wikimapia really helps find places around a place with users labelling the places. I really want someone to show me where the aliens live. Then, I can keep looking at those planetary bodies and announce whenever an alien ship sets sail for Earth!! And as for other places around Earth, I've tried looking at Mars & Moon, but couldn't find aliens there :(
