Tag Archives | Google

When in Google Earth, View as the Romans Viewed

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 12, 2008 at 7:58 am

googleearthGoogle Earth, which has a strong a claim as any Google creation to being its single neatest offering, is adding an exceptionally neat new feature: a 3D recreation of Rome as it was in 320 a.d., complete with the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and all the other landmarks you’d expect.

(I say “is adding” rather than “has added” because despite the download page‘s statement that Ancient Rome there in gEarth’s Layer View, I didn’t see it in either the Windows or Mac copies of Google Earth I just downloaded–either I’m doing something wrong or the download isn’t quite ready.)

I can’t wait to try it; in the interim, here are some images and a Google demo.

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Won’t it be spectacular when most of the most interesting civilizations of world history have been recreated this way, in even more detail–as they surely will be over time?

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Gmail Adds Voice and Video Chat

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 11, 2008 at 3:38 pm

gmail1Gmail is rolling out a new feature today: Voice and Video Chat. The bad news–for me, not you–is that it isn’t showing up for me yet when I log into Gmail. The good news? I happened to be visiting Google when the news broke, so I got an in-person demo. (They say that it’ll be available to all Gmail users by the end of the day.)

The feature looks cool, and it’s exceedingly straightforward. When you’re in Gmail, your contact list will show a little green camera icon next to any buddy who has a Webcam, is online, and has installed the Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in (which works with IE 7, some versions of IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, Chrome). Click the icon, and you get a chat window with video in the botton right-hand corner of the Gmail interface. (You can also blow it up to full-screen mode.)

Here’s Google’s demo:

I haven’t used Gmail for chat much; this is a reason to give it a try…assuming that I can get the folks I’d like to chat with to install Google’s plug-in, that is.

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Help Me Figure Out What to Ask Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 7, 2008 at 4:33 pm

google-logo1Next week, I’m venturing down to Mountain View to spend the better part of a day visiting the Googleplex and meeting with a bunch of Google folks involved with activities such as search and the Chrome browser. It should be a good time, and I plan to ask lots of questions.

Including, maybe, questions on your behalf. So if you’ve got any, shoot ’em my way via Comments, and if I have the opportunity to pose them to the right people, I will. (The last time I sought question from the Technologizer community, I ended up getting an interesting answer to one from Steve Jobs.)

One way or another, I’ll report back here on what I learn…

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10 Ways to Avoid Emergency When Your Web Services Disappear on You

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 30, 2008 at 7:22 pm

Venture capitalists telling the startups they invest in that the good times are over. Big companies hunkering down. Layoffs, layoffs everywhere. You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist not to come to the conclusion that a lot of cool consumer Web services aren’t going to close their doors before the economy turns around.

And you’d have to love living dangerously not to gird yourself for the possibility of some of the services you depend on going away. After the jump, ten tips to help you and your data survive disaster with as few headaches as possible…

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Google Earth…Now in Convenient iPhone-Size Form

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 26, 2008 at 6:11 pm

I still remember the first time I saw Google Earth–back when it was known as Keyhole Earth viewer and wasn’t yet owned by Google–and how its intensely graphical virtual portal to the real world’s geographic richness knocked my socks off. Last week, Google gave me a sneak peek at Google Earth for iPhone and iPod Touch, which is live in the iPhone App Store in Australia now and due in the U.S. store soon And once again, I was dazzled.

The iPhone version of Google Earth is dazzling because…well, because it feels just like Google Earth, but it’s also very much an iPhone app. It begins with the same big-blue-marble view of the earth; enter any location, and you can fly there via smooth animation and high-resolution satellite imagery. Once you’ve landed somewhere, you can pan around, zoom in and out, and click on Wikipedia and Panaramio icons to read articles and see photos relating to local landmarks. In the hands-on time I got at Google’s offices, at least, everything was remarkably fluid and fast, just as with deskbound versions of Google Earth.

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Gmail Enters the Emoticon Wars, Inevitably

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 24, 2008 at 8:48 am

STOP THE PRESSES! The big news in tech this morning is that Gmail has introduced a feature I’m surprised it didn’t have already: emoticons. Lots and lots of emoticons. In two styles: squarish-headed and roundy-headed.

Here they are:

That’s a total of 148 emoticons, some of which are animated. (And yes, the last one in each set is…er, a pile of crap: I didn’t know that Google had a slightly off-color sense of humor, and I’m not sure if I’d want to be presented with that emoticon each time I wanted to insert a simply smiley, frowny, kissy, or weepy into my e-mail.)

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Yahoo’s Inquisitor: Better Searching With Fewer Clicks

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 23, 2008 at 6:08 pm

We users of Firefox (and the Firefox-based Flock) are spoiled: It’s easy to slip lazily into the assumption that every cool browser tool premieres as a Firefox add-on. So I managed to remain ignorant of Inquisitor, an interesting Safari plug-in that brings features for speeding up Web searching directly to the browser’s search box. But as of today, Inquisitor is also available in beta versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer. And if you use either of those browsers, it’s worth a gander.

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Google + Yahoo? Fuhgetaboudit.

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 21, 2008 at 9:20 am

Can’t say you didn’t see this coming. Merger mag The Deal reported Tuesday that Google and Yahoo will likely abandon their efforts to partner on online advertising. According to the story, regulators met with the two companies on October 17, and the tone was described as “grim.”

The DOJ is expected to challenge the partnership, although it had appeared for a time like progress was being made towards agreement on some core concessions. That now appears to not be the case.

Antitrust lawyers told the magazine that the government’s case may not be a slam dunk, however with uncertain times ahead with the economy and all, taking up a costly court case may not be in Google and (especially) Yahoo’s best interest.

Of the two, Yahoo needs this deal the most. In the wake of the Microsoft merger disaster, the company desperately is in need of good news. It’s quarterly financials — to come later today after the closing bell — are expected to be weak, and its laying off 1,500 workers, if not more.

With its own web advertising business apparently struggling, the Google deal would have given it a crutch to lean on. While the entire web advertising industry is going to take a significant hit, Google will likely be able to weather the storm easiest through its market strength.

Who wins here? Microsoft. Not only will the lack of a deal keep its hopes of becoming a serious competitor in the web advertising space alive, but it will likely make Yahoo a cheap acquisition target in the not-so-distant future.

Yahoo shareholders can’t be happy with that proposition.

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Why the Kill Switch Makes Sense for Android, and Not for iPhone

Posted by David A. Sampayo on October 17, 2008 at 6:50 pm

”Gasp!” went the collective Internet on Wednesday when the IDG News Service spotted a clause in the terms of service for Google’s Android Market stating that:

Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement … in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion.

In other words, Google has a built-in “kill switch” to remotely disable applications that violate their developer agreement.

While the terms of this agreement certainly seem reasonable, tech critics thought back to February, when Apple explained its own terms of service for the iPhone, which also seemed reasonable at the time. As we know, Apple’s developer agreement turned out to be much more trouble than initially anticipated, causing a storm of criticism around the developer NDA and Apple’s disqualification of apps that “duplicated functionality” of other Apple applications.

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T-Mobile’s G1 Android Phone: The Reviews Are In

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 16, 2008 at 8:05 am

T-Mobile’s G1, the first phone to use Google’s Android operating system, doesn’t go officially on sale until October 22nd. But a bunch of reviews ave hit the Web. And since I don’t have a G1–I’m hoping to remedy that–I’ve been reading other folks’ takes on the device.

After the jump, highly-compressed summaries of three of the reviews I’ve checked out so far.

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