Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Last November we were driving down the freeway near Davis, coming to the end of an epic road trip, when we passed what we thought was one of Google's camera cars, what looked like a combined LIDAR and camera unit spinning away on the roof...

...and marypcb photographed it (as I had to keep my hands on the wheel) as we passed it...

Now, nearly a year later we know just what it was - one of the Google/Stanford robot cars, on what must have been a fairly early test drive. The human driver must have had a lot of confidence in his robot partner, as he'd taken a child along for a ride...

Here's a shot of the robot from our rearview mirror.



Davis, California
November 2009

I've been playing with, and writing about, Google Wave this week.

You can see the results of that deep dive up on ZDnet:

Google Wave arrived back in May with a blast of publicity — including a keynote of its own at Google's I/O conference. The initial story from the Google team was impressive, with Wave touted as a revolution in collaboration from star developers the Rasmussen brothers (the team behind the first iteration of Google Maps).

Wave certainly builds on the company's strengths, running in the browser and hosted in the cloud. Lars Rasmussen has a lot of ambition for Wave, wanting it to replace email. At I/O, he put it like this: "While email is an incredibly successful protocol, we can use computing advances to do better. Wave is our answer".

The Wave team has thought hard about the structure of a conversation, and how this can be replicated online. Each wave is a collaborative space comprising groups of 'wavelets', which are themselves built up of 'blips'. A blip is the basic unit of conversation in a wave, hosting an XML document. Blips don't need to be human readable — they can contain files or even executable code. Developers can build on these by using what Google calls 'robots' to interact with wavelets and blips. For example, at I/O Google demonstrated a robot that could handle real-time translations.

Read the rest.

Oh, and take a look at the gallery of screenshots too...

Well, we're about to find out, as Google's Chrome OS takes on not Microsoft but mobile network operators...

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Read more at our IT Pro blog.

At Google IO last week I got to be part of a press round table attended by Sergey Brin, one of the search engine's founders. He spoke candidly about why Google is creating its own browser, on the future for newspapers (and how that relates to the history of Google), and the future of Google's search engine.

Here's the piece I wrote for ZDnet on the session:

In a conversation at Google's I/O developer event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Brin pointed out how software gets twice as slow every 18 months — an effect he named 'Page's Law', after his partner Larry Page and in an ironic reversal of Moore's Law. Brin committed Google to bucking this trend: "I want to break this law. I want to make software increasingly fast," he told an audience of reporters.

Brin, whose company launched the ambitious Google Wave collaboration platform a day after his remarks, looked back at how things have changed for web-application development since the early days of Google. Describing the development of Gmail as a web application, he discussed the internal debate inside the company about building it as a JavaScript application, and the arguments about whether it was even possible. Now he thinks the debate is over, and the web-development model is becoming dominant.

"Clearly browsers have been improving, and programming models have improved too. Nobody asks today 'Can you have this on the web?' But we still have a long way to go, particularly in respect to performance," he said.

Read more.

I've been playing with a shiny new HTC Magic, the upcoming G-2 Android phone in the guise of a Google ION developer device, and as part of my explorations I've been looking for interesting applications in the Android Market. That's where I found one of the nicest pieces of mobile software I've seen - Google Sky Map.

It's not surprising that Google has done such a good job with this software, after all, Android is their phone platform, and they should now it (and the reference hardware inside out). The folk in Mountain View also have a huge database of data they can take advantage of - in the shape of Google Earth and all its varied information layers.

So what is Google Sky Map?

It's pretty much what it says on the tin - a piece of software that shows you the sky above you, just like one of those star wheels that give you an idea of the swirl of constellations as they rotate around the night and the seasons. Where it differs from most computer based star maps is that it's live. It's an annotated window into the heavens, using the device's built-in GPS, compass, and G-sensor. The combination of the three lets the software know where the phone is, and where it is pointing - and at what angle. It then calculates the current view, and displays it. Google is augmenting reality, making it part of its world of search.



On a deeper level it's actually a specialised version of what marypcb calls a "What's-That", a device that when pointed at something, well, just does that. It annotates the world with an overlay of information to give us the information we want and need. Phones don't have the power needed to deliver that level of image recognition, but they do know where you are. Constrain the problem to maps of the heavens, and you've got a winner on your hands.

The sky at night can be confusing - with light pollution and high cloud making identification hard. Just being able to point a phone in the right direction to get the names of the objects you can see is an excellent solution to the problem. After all, it's the most personal of devices and one that's going to be with us when we most need it.

Then there's Wikitude, which is a step even further in the direction of the What's-That, using the device camera and the device sensors to overlay points of interest from geo-coded data in Wikipedia and Qype on the phone screen.



Here it is, letting me know what's in the world outside my hotel room. We used it today to identify mountains as we drove up the Cascades.There's still not enough data in the world of public geo-coded information - but what there is is enough to make you want more.

You know, I really like living in the future.

Part of thesis in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers is that the underdog wins by changing the rules. The numbers seem to agree with him - in a survey of military conflicts, the underdog (out numbered and out armed) wins only 30% of the time. However, where the underdog changes the rules, introducing new wayus of fighting like guerilla warfare, skirmishing, and other asymmetric techniques, they win nearly 70% of the time.

I've noticed that people are wondering why Microsoft is referring to Bing as a "decision engine". I suspect someone on the Microsoft search marketing team has read Outliers, and has realised that the only way it can compete with the dominance of Google is to move the fight somewhere else altogether. Changing the rules by defining a new category is exactly what it needs to do to take advantage of the relatively slow movement of the incumbent. Smaller, out-gunned and out-marketed, Microsoft needs to write its own rules for internet search. Google has become the verb for search, so Microsoft is moving the discussion away from the search sphere completely.

It's a smart move.

After all, we all need to make decisions, and search engines have become part of that process, especially task specific engines like Kayak and Farecast. Bing is trying to bring task oriented search into the same frame as general search, using contextual inference of user intent to define the results it delivers.

It's just a pity for the Microsoft marketeers that they chose to change the game on the same day as Google did. Now they have to compete with search and real time collaboration in the shape of Wave.

Oops.

It's not Bing vs Google anymore, it's Bing vs Wave. Now things are getting really interesting.

Today's Google Doodle is rather cool.



Theodore Geisel would have been 105 today.

Google has just opened up access to the development builds from the updater tools inside the Chrome browser (you could download always download dev builds from the Chrome site, or build your own copy of Chromium...). You can download a small tool, the Chrome Channel Chooser, to define which branch of the Chrome development tree the built-in updater uses - the slow but stable beta branch, and the fast, but risky, dev channel.

Me?

I'm going for dev. I kind of fancy the ride.

Would you build a world-beating business out of servers like this? They're motherboards stuck on thin sheets of fibreboard, shoved into a rack, and hooked together with piles of ethernet. No cases, no additional cooling, and hard disks bolted onto yet more fibreboard. If one dies (and it will), you just move its load onto another...



Google did. This is one of the original server racks, now on display in the Computer History Museum.

I've been playing with the beta build of Google Maps for Mobile on a couple of different phones (a Blackberry and a Windows Mobile device) and different networks, and I have to say - it's looking pretty decent. The biggest change is a good one, with the introduction of My Location. It's a definite "does what it says on the tin" feature, as it uses a database of cell tower locations to show you where you are, within a kilometer or so. That's enough to get you located, and able to use the mapping tools to find exactly where you are.

I've found it a lot more accurate than the stated error, usually getting me within a street or so of where I am (and as it doesn't use GPS, I can use it indoors or in the Tube). I've used cell location tools before, and this is by far the best and most accurate. Some place you at random places on the map, while others just fail to have decent UK databases.

Here's Google's own YouTube whiteboard animation of My Location in action:



So, are there any quibbles? I'd like it to support Google Maps new terrain feature, but I suspect that the build cycles are out of sync here - especially as the terrain view came out around the same time as the latest build of GMM...