NetworkWorld has gone out and put together a list of the best songs about Google over the years, and they’ve really gotten together some gems. They even found my favorite Google song on YouTube, and they’re all embedded below:
It’s Google, to the tune of Beat It:
Googleheads, a classic (though I have no idea what it’s saying):
The Zach Tate Band’s Google Song:
Jeff Stambovsky’s The Google Song, to the tune of Georgia on My Mind, only available in audio form on their article page.
The Googler, by Yariv Ben-Yehuda:
Obviously, the classic, “On Google (Talking ‘Bout Google)”:
Sputniko’s Google Song:
Diane 42 (Finding Love On The Internet), by Mark Easley:
They didn’t include SNL’s Google Song, thankfully, or some other bombs we’ve heard over the years.
Forbes reports that a new partnership has been announced for Google’s private Health project, Quest Diagnostics. Quest, which has more than 100,000 physicians nationwide connected to their system, provides a great vector for Google to get data from doctor’s offices into the website, making the partnership a significant step for Health.
Microsoft’s HealthVault uses USB diagnostic tools that patients can plug into their computer to upload diagnostic information, while Google’s method may prove more affordable, albeit less convenient to more capable do-it-yourselfers.
(via Digg)
Google announced that it is offering its GrandCentral service to homeless people as a means of helping them get their lives back in order. A good number of homeless Americans (those not suffering from mental illness) are just in need of assistance getting their lives back in order, a difficult prospect when a possible employer can’t even call you, because you don’t have a house to have a phone in.
Google is encouraging the homeless to use GrandCentral and enabling them to get into the sorta-private beta. Even without a computer or phone, the homeless person will be able to have a phone number that always works and never changes (as opposed to handing out payphone numbers) and receive voicemail they can listen to whenever they get to a phone. The GrandCentral number, with its local area codes and permanent status, won’t carry the stigma associated with pooled 800 numbers with temporary access codes.
It’s good of Google to see the potential in GrandCentral to help fix a few lives. The next step: Letting GrandCentral users receive email messages in their voicemail, so the homeless can hand out a Gmail address and listen to a text-to-speech system read them their emails over the phone.
(via DVICE)
The first ten teams have been announced for Google’s Lunar X Prize, its competition for a civilian flight to the moon. Vying for the $30 million prize are groups from Romania, Carnegie Mellon University, Italy and other diverse origins, all of which you can read about here.
(via Slashdot)
Google Maps now offers a means for websites wishing to use its API in their applications to retrieve static images, instead of serving up a full-on active Google Maps environment. The Static Maps API is as simple as possible just a URL containing lattitude, longtitude, image size, zoom level, type of map, and what color you want optional pushpins to be, plus your API key.
Requests are limited to 1,000 per day, per API key, but that means 1,000 seperate requests. If the same image is served half a million times, it only counts as one request, which means it’s pretty safe for use in articles or a page showing the location of a business, but not necessarilly in a large production environment. Map types are limited to standard road maps and special mobile-formatted versions of the road maps, designed for readability on smaller screens, but no sattelite of hybrid maps.
Images are served as GIFs, not the PNGs Google Maps uses, which is a curious choice. Google certainly isn’t saving any bandwidth over that decision.
The latest issue of Marie Claire, which my wife gets, has a big spring fashion feature shot on Google’s Mountain View campus. The 12-page spread features model Britni Standwood on a roof in front of giant Google letters and solor panels, a giant Google Earth globe, an aluminum foil-decorated office, scootering around the grounds, near the lap pool, in a sleep pod, on an electric car, in a “huddle room” and by a dry-erase board.
Here are some low-fi images of the magazine spread:
There is also a page featuring the women of Google, specifically (from left to right):
Shona Brown (Senior VP of business operations) in a $320 Calvin Klein pantsuit jacket and $276 pants
Sukhinder Singh (President of Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations) in a $950 Boss jacket, $225 Theory pants and $745 Manolo Blahnik shoes
Megan Smith (VP of new business development) in a $374 jacket and $282 Chaiken pants
Francoise Brougher (VP of business operations) in a $148 Calvin Klein jacket and $250 Tigal Azrouel scarf
Susan Wojcicki (VP of product management and Sergey’s sister-in law) in a $435 jacket, $385 Tory Burch dress and $540 Casadei shoes
Marissa Mayer (VP of search products and user experience) in a $396 Chaiken jacket, $68 Cosabella camisole, $250 Tory Burch skirt and $850 Chanel shoes
Lest you think this is how the women of Google dress every day, Marie Claire only priced out the clothes it provided. When the exec wore her own clothes, like Brown and Smith’s shoes, it was noted, without the cost or designer (and, oddly, those were the most prominent shoes in the photo). As Valleywag’s Owen Thomas says, “I’ve known Megan Smith for years, and cannot recall ever seeing her wearing something that was not (a) made of denim and (b) priced at less than $100″.
Her shoes seem nice, though, being a heterosexual male, I really don’t know much about shoes.
Ionut points out an interesting Firefox extension, iGoogleBar, that replaces Google’s navigation bar with something with more options. The extension adds the ability to show the number of unread messages in Gmail, unread items in Google Reader, and Google Gadget-based previews of several services. The better bar is useful, but has some drawbacks, including a performance-challenged script engine called Chickenfoot, and the fact that it doesn’t load until after the page does.
I’d like the ability to customize the nav bar. Presumably, Google will add some sort of customization options for it in the future, but in the meantime there’s got to be a way to hack it. Perhaps there’s a Greasemonkey script I haven’t seen?
The FCC’s wireless spectrum auction continues with some heated bidding, and an unusual and somewhat unexpected turn of events appears to have left absolutely no one with the provisional winning bid for the coveted C-block of spectrum.
Both Google and Verizon, and possibly AT&T, have been cautiously bidding for the national package of C-block. Under the rules, companies who are not the high bidder must bid in every round (or use one of their only three waivers) or they exit the auction, so bidders will often bid on the cheaper regional divisions of the spectrum in order to avoid having to commit to the expensive national package.
Whichever is bidded higher, the national or divided regions of the spectrum, goes to the winner, with the lower segment being ignored. It was assumed the bidding on the national package would almost certainly be higher than the regional bids, so they were a non-issue, to be used only in bidding strategy.
That all changed today, when regional bidding topped national bidding in aggregate dollar value, leaving the auction in some very unpredictable hands. If the spectrum goes to each region’s winner seperately, it could be split up in some strange ways, rendering it either useless or a great, open network. That is, unless a single bidder actually won in every region, or someone panics at the idea and ups their national bid.
Currently, the national bid (Package 50 states, 1-8) is at $5.21 billion. The regional bids are:
WU-REA001-C Northeast 52,530,000 $565,624,000
WU-REA002-C Southeast 48,639,000 $498,476,000
WU-REA003-C Great Lakes 57,568,000 $1,209,715,000
WU-REA004-C Mississippi Valley 28,742,000 $1,725,930,000
WU-REA005-C Central 39,958,000 $800,358,000
WU-REA006-C West 51,966,000 $367,770,000
WU-REA007-C Alaska 528,000 30 $1,918,000
WU-REA008-C Hawaii 1,185,000 $43,253,000
That makes for a total of: $7.125 billion. Google only wanted to spend just under $5 billion, so in theory, Google is way out of this auction. If they win with over $7 billion, I’d be shocked.
image “Spirit of the Radio” by _mpd_ under CC license
Number 64 on Google Trends yesterday was a search for “Puppy Bowl”. The Puppy Bowl is an annual event on Animal Planet, where for three hours puppies play and run around on a fake puppy-sized football field with a number of toys. There is an in-water bowl camera, a referee, two MVPs, and a kitty halftime show, and it’s consistently the most popular show on all of cable TV during the Super Bowl.
Puppy Bowl IV was last night, and I’m sorry I missed it. Me and the wife like to watch the pups go at it during halftime, especially when guys we aren’t that interested in, like Tom Petty or Mick Jagger are performing, but our cable system never carries the big “game”. No one ever seems to put the Puppy Bowl on bit torrent, and DVDs are $15 ($10 each for Puppy Bowls I-III, $20 for all three, and $7-13 on Amazon), so that might be an option*.
So, did anyone else watch the Puppy Bowl yesterday? The video highlights seem to indicate the best Bowl yet. The early ratings indicate the Puppy Bowl was a huge success for the fourth year in a row.
* - on the other hand, this was the first Puppy Bowl in High Definition, and there’s no Blu-Ray/HD-DVD option, so maybe I’ll wait. Or I could call Animal Planet and try to convince them to put it on the Xbox Live Video Marketplace… This is sad.
Want to use Google’s Charts API to create nice-looking charts for use online, but don’t want to have to actually learn how to use it. Lucky you, lazy boy, because Jon WInstanley’s created a Google Chart generator for you. Fill out the form, copy the code, and you’re done. Here’s a chart I made (that honestly makes no sense, given the inputted data, so good luck):
I missed Martin Luther King Jr. day while I was on vacation, but Barry has all the logos put up by the big search companies that day.
Google’s Doodle:
Ask ran this full-page logo:
If you’d like the logo, perhaps for a desktop wallpaper, or even to use with Ask.com’s new skinning capability and make your permanent Ask skin, here’s the original file:
XKCD, one of my favorite comics (and so popular, a comic of its made Google Hot Trends) ran this a little while back:
Wei-Hwa Huang, Google’s resident award-winning puzzler, wrote a Google Gadget in about three hours that does exactly what the guy in the comic does. Here’s a screenshot:
And here’s the Gadget, live and in action:
I love how he’s implemented it, even implementing the punchline. Get the Gadget for iGoogle here, and add it to your webpage like I did over here.
John Malone, a partner with IAC Chairman Barry Diller in various ventures since 1992, has started taking steps to have Diller removed from the board of the company he built. Diller has been working for months on splitting up InterActiveCorp into multiple smaller companies, and Malone’s Liberty Media Corp. wants the media veteran taken out, by force if necessary, in order to stop his plans.
While Liberty only owns 30% of IAC’s stock, it controls 62% of the voting power. The structure of the stock gives Liberty all of the Class B shares, which have ten times the votes of regular shares, as well as 23% of all regular shares. However, an outstanding agreement gives Diller full voting control over Liberty’s shares, and he isn’t about to vote himself out anytime soon.
Malone wants the voting rights to be reclaimed by Liberty so he can show Diller the door, claiming that Diller’s plans are contrary to Liberty’s interests. If he succeeds with his lawsuit, he won’t need anyone else’s help removing Diller from the company, which owns many internet properties, including Ask.com.
Normally, any company would love to be owned by a mogul like Diller, since he is a very successful businessman. However, Diller’s actions at IAC prove that he has no knowledge of the tech industry and no interest in building innovative or even successful companies. Diller buys floundering firms, gives them enough resources to become healthy (but not necessarily successful), and sells them for a tidy profit.
Diller bought and sold Ticketmaster seven times in the last decade, including three seperate times just in 1998. The man doesn’t want to build the next Google (or, more accurately, the next FOX), he wants to buy low, sell high, and doesn’t care what he leaves behind. It may work for him, and has worked very well, but it isn’t good for the industry, the economy, or for most of the employees at IAC.
Recently, Diller let go Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone, reportedly because of delays with Ask’s news site. While Ask hasn’t made huge market share gains, no one can deny it is innovating, and if not for the efforts of dedicated employees like Lanzone was, Ask.com would likely be completely gone from the market today. Diller wanted a bunch of projects done quickly, probably so he could sell some of it off, and his strategy only hurts the company and cost it a valued exec.
I won’t be sad to see Diller go. Liberty may very well lose this battle, but if it doesn’t, hopefully Ask will be much healthier under Malone than it ever was under Diller.
photo of Barry Diller by JD Lasica under CC license
While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
Check out the Ustream page or watch it here, I’m broadcasting now. We’ll be looking at some pictures I took last night, then we can talk about any topic anyone brings up. After that, I’ll try to get in a product review, maybe look at the Centro (finally!).
Here’s the video. If you want to say something to me, the chat box is there for you (or you can do it even easier on the Ustream page). There are already 27 viewers, so it should be fun.
Release 2.0 of gOS, the Green Operating System some people call a Google OS, has been released as a free download. The new version is available as a bit torrent download, and adds:
Google Gears for offline access of some Google (and non-Google) web applications
Virtual desktops
An improved Mac-like dock bar (tauntingly called the iBar)
A Google search box smack in the middle of the desktop
A browser based webcam application with special effects (gBooth)
Integrated online storage through Box.net
Adobe Flash 9 for Linux pre-installed
Better wifi management with “Exalt”
gOS 2.0 Rocket requires a 400 MHz processor 128 MB of RAM, and, shockingly, 3 gigabytes of hard drive space.
