Christmas Card to Friends from Stephen Fitzgerald on Vimeo.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a Happy Holidays, no matter what your situations are and what the year may have dealt you. Stay safe, believe and may all your wishes be granted.

Just type, “let it snow” in the Google search bar…

Once the screen is frosted, draw on it with your mouse!

via geekologie

Go to Google.com and do a search for: do a barrell roll.

The wait seems to be finally over and anyone can now sign up to Google+. I am sure everyone with a Gmail account will give it a try (in fact, you may soon have no choice but to join). As to whether, they will actually use it is another matter. I signed up and to tell you the truth, I’m stuck. Friends, what friends? I mean, seriously (because Google wants us to be serious with our identity, etc.), how many “friends” do you really have? Acquaintances, maybe. Colleagues, sure. Coworkers, business contacts, people you know, but real, actual, friends?

To make it easy to start out with circles, Google has already created the following circles: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following.

With the Internet being what it is, privacy takes on an added and urgent dimension. Anything and everything you type (whether public or private) is available to Google for its use and for said friends to copy and paste for the whole world to read and see. In other words, there ain’t no privacy on the Net and anyone who takes his or her circles too seriously will be disappointed. So, as you venture forth into Google+, be careful who you invite and what private info you share. Don’t put anything online that you are not ready and willing for the whole world to read.

I think I am going to avoid the mistakes I made with Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter: too many people I don’t really know tagged as friends. I’m going to let my circles build up organically, one person at a time. I think.

Chances are you use Google to search the Web, Gmail to communicate, YouTube for entertainment, etc. Now, imagine each of these search for an item, a person, a celebrity, a street, a company, a term, a movie, every conversation you have on Gmail, every YouTube you watch, every book you buy, every music you download… they are all tagged with your real name (or that one identity that unequivocally points to you). There’s simply no hiding in Google’s brave new world.

Do I, do you, really want Google to know what YouTube video you watched yesterday, what songs you listened to, what sites you visited, which celebrity sets your heart aflutter? Do we really want Google to know that much about us? Forget Facebook. Compared to Google+, FB looks like a kid trying to bully us in the schoolyard.

Ms. Gannes makes some compelling arguments about the whole privacy issue which makes me think: how much privacy are we willing to surrender… and for what? Turkish delight? Will we, like poor Edmund of Narnia fame, be left staring very hard at an empty box afterward? Food for thought.

Read the article at: AllThingD.

An MIT student working at Google is bringing us a friendlier PC-Smartphone coexistence. Say, you’re rushing to a meeting but need to find where it is located on Google Maps. You bring it up on your PC, find it and rush out. You did not print it and now you’re forced to retype it on your smartphone again.

Not with Deep Shot, the new system designed by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, a graduate student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Google’s Yang Li.

All you now have to do is take a snapshot of your PC’s screen with your smartphone and Deep Shot will recognize the app used on the PC and what exactly you’re looking at. It then uses existing computer vision algorithms to identify the application opened on screen, extracts and transmits the corresponding Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to your smartphone which then opens up the corresponding app and displays the exact screen. Sweet!

Of course, you need to install some code on both PC and smartphone for this handshaking to work seamlessly. And the process is reversible, too, pushing the info on your smartphone back to your computer, say a paper you took some notes of on your smartphone — and which you now want to work on using your computer large screen and much more comfortable keyboard.

source physorg

How many times have you wanted to use an image to start your search with? Perhaps, you wanted to know the name of someone on the picture, where a product can be bought, where a picture was taken or even who took the picture. Using the well-known adage that a picture is worth 1000 words, now you can do just that courtesy of Google Image Search. Just provide a link or upload your photo and Google will try to find “visually similar images.” By finding the same or similar images, you increase your chance of finding your answer. Thanks, Google!

source photographybay

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking the Sun’s rays from reaching the Moon. In fact, some rays do reach the Moon, accounting for the ruddy orange glow. It starts at 2:20 p.m. ET and Google is broadcasting it live (June 15, 2011) from 2pm to 6pm. It should last for about 100 minutes. You can view this eclipse on the ground if you’re in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia or Australia.

source wired

And, of course, the Google Doodle of the day is an interactive lunar eclipse:

Apple’s announcement of its iCloud offering is game-changing. Public cloud computing has been available for a while now but has never taken off in a big way; it was primarily relegated to corporate uses and never meant to be so broad reaching as the iCloud proposes to be.

Since users of Apple devices have no choice but to use iCloud, the latter is immediately upon arrival a runaway success. Every music bought on iTune, every picture taken with the iPhone (which by the way will sport a “shutter release button” in the guise of the volume control), and presumably more (I can’t believe Apple will stop at these; what about books, software, etc.) will automatically reside in iCloud.

The advantage of a cloud is, of course, the availability of whatever you store in the cloud at your fingertips everywhere, anywhere and on any smart device. If you can connect, that is.

And herein lies the first major hurdle that Apple iCloud has to overcome. Will users 1) pay to store stuff in iCloud, and 2) pay for the upload and download? Unless you have a reasonably affordable unlimited bandwidth plan from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), you’d be most probably very quickly paying through your nose. [Take Internet TV as an example. You quickly run out of your monthly allocated bandwidth and have to pay for extra download. I can barely keep under my allocated Internet use limits, and that is why that all those ads and encouragements that Rogers (my ISP) sends me to watch TV online continue to fall on deaf ears.]

Keep uploading and downloading music, pictures and books and it’ll cost you lots in extra bandwidth. And, 3) you still have to factor the extra $25/year you need to pay Apple to host all your stuff on iCloud. Oh, iCloud starts out as “free” but 5GB is not much (though the iTune music you buy do not count toward that space — since it’s already there and Apple keeps one copy for all users). And $25 does not buy you unlimited storage space either folks, so once you hit the unspecified limit (my guesstimate is 25GB at $0.99/GB), expect to fork out more mullah.

The good thing with the iCloud is that it will be a success in the consumer space because Apple users are so enamored with their devices that they will pay for it. Plus, did I mention that they have no choice? Which will force other competitors to follow suit: Google, Amazon, Microsoft.

In the corporate space, companies such as VMWare will probably also benefit as CIOs start to divest their infrastructure to move to the cloud. They will really have no choice since it will be cheaper and they’ll have to justify a higher infrastructure cost versus using the cloud. Amazon is already in that game and will no doubt benefit. Google is synonymous with cloud, but it better jump into this specific consumer space or get left behind while they continue to pursue incredibly interesting but commercial-wise hopelessly unrealistic side projects. They could offer us free unlimited storage space in the cloud, plus affordable, fast and unlimited Internet access. They would own this space! But will they? Another player is Microsoft. Will it jump into this particular fray or miss it altogether, collective heads buried into bringing us a Windows 8 that nobody asked for or wants? Because the other players talk about it while Apple does it, Apple will rule the consumer cloud space (at least for Apple devices and services) for now; there is still a gap in the corporate space. Is RIM up to it? Its co-CEO is unfortunately more interested in owning an NHL franchise than work on the next generation RIM. The future is cloudy (pun intended) indeed.

As the current issue of CIO.com predicts, jobs will be at risk because once companies move en masse to the cloud, all that corporate infrastructure — and the jobs that accompany it — will become redundant. And don’t think you’ll also get outsourced: the skills required at the oursourcing company has more to do with designing infrastructure than running it.

So, yes, this cloud is about to rain on so many people and companies. It’s where technology is inexorably taking us and so where we must go. If there’s anyone who can make it work, it’s Apple and its courageous (if you’ve watched the keynote address) CEO, Jobs. So rain away!

It’s always fascinating to see the behind the scenes of actual photos, especially those that make the covers of magazines like Time. In this behind the scenes video, TIME commissioned photographer Martin Schoeller to photograph five of this years TIME 100 honorees— Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Oprah Winfrey, Wael Ghonim, the Google employee and Egyptian activist who helped lead the revolution, chef Grant Achatz, and comedian Amy Poehler.

source @LightInFrame

I have been busy taking a University of Ottawa degree for the past 8 months [yeah, explains lots of things about the freshness of the site, right?] and almost every project and presentation I did included a Google product in one form or another: Google Earth, Google Street View, Blogger, Google Docs, etc. I just don’t know what I would have done without Google! I am about to graduate, so thank you, Google!

What’s the intuition? That Google is about to be in every nook and cranny of our lives.

See, I was reading this article about MondoWindow, a site that allows you to view the scene below as you fly above. Simply log in to MondoWindow from the air, type in your flight number and airline, and you’ll get all the info you’d ever want about where you are, a zoomable satellite image of the terrain below you, links to items of interest on the ground, etc. Sounds wonderful for anyone bored and with an iPad (or laptop). [Not as sure about Apple though. I used an Acer netbook that cost me only CAD $230 and it was fine.]

But that’s when the epiphany struck: you can do something similar now on Google Earth and Street View, or Google could so easily retool its products to allow you to do so. Input your starting point and destination and launch Google Earth to simulate traveling from point A to B. Choose the altitude, speed of travel, and watch it happen on your screen. See something interesting down below? Zoom in and, if desired, go right down to Street View level, slow down the speed and explore the town, ruins, volcano, whatever to your heart’s content. Then with the flick of a finger, resume your flight path. If your device is GPS-enabled, Google GPS should easily be able to track your current position.

Now imagine if Google is allowed to tap into every camera along the way. Street View is suddenly live!

Google Street View is not only for outdoors use. I found that out when I was researching art resources and stumbled upon Google Art Project. Here, you can virtually explore some of the greatest museums of the world and view great works of art using the Google Street View technology.

Now imagine this technology used in a real or virtual supermarket or mall. The potential use is limitless and forebodes the future, hopefully a good one. How do you compete with Walmart? Build a virtual store that is even bigger, has more choices and, because it does not occupy any physical locations, is 100% self-served, has no waiting lines, never runs out of your favorite items, and sources with its suppliers electronically, can offer even lower prices. Google Mall, anyone? They don’t have to run it, just provide the technology and sell virtual space in it.

Got to run, got an exam to prepare for. But, do you see what I am getting at? I have a suspicion that Google wants to be in everything we will ever need to do, see or use. And if they do it right, and do no evil, they just might be.

Google Infographics

The name itself is derived from the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google started in 1996 with 25 million pages in its index; today it has approx. 40 billion indexed pages (equivalent to 24 petabytes of info), with 1.5 billion of those images. It takes Google’s computers 0.5 seconds to sift through them all and return relevant matches to your search. How much storage is needed to store all that info? About 1 exabyte.

Google needs $8.3 billion every year to operate. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page each earns $1 a year. However, before you feel bad for them, their personal fortune in Google stocks each amounts to $17.5 billion. Google is extremely profitable, averaging $400,000 per employee. Only dog lovers need apply; though dogs are allowed in the offices, cats are persona non grata. Google’s first tweet was “I’m feeling lucky” typed out in binary ones and zeros (“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″). Google may not like it, but its name is officially a verb “to google” in the Merriam and Webster and Oxford dictionaries since 2006.

How much does Google want to grow to? It’s goal is to index 100 petabytes of information (wonder if it will change its name then to “Peta”), which is about half of all the material ever printed in human history.

source penn olson

Here’s a video explaining Google’s revenue in more detail and what Google really want to become.

From gli96187

source penn olson