Earth Day 2008: Eco-friendly logos

Major search engines changed their logo in support of Earth Day.

Google


Yahoo


AOL


And most surprisingly, green Flock browser...


You can download Flock Eco-Edition from here.

Google wants to do Genetic indexing

Google never feel its database is huge enough, so according to Business Week, Google wants to index your DNA too.

Excerpts from the article:

Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data. 'We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful,' Google spokesman Andrew Pederson says. 'We felt it was important to get involved now, at the early stage, to better understand the information generated by this fast-moving field.'

Google Earth 4.3: Still ahead of Microsoft Virtual Earth

A couple of days ago, I watched a video demo on the new Windows Live Maps, which introduces the 3D rendering of Birds Eye view. And now, it appears Google Earth 4.3 is doing the same thing too.

Google Earth is doing more, it even allows us to adjust the time in order to watch the sunrise and sunset in Google Earth. Also, Google Earth has the Street View feature, which I don't think Microsoft Virtual Earth has it. On the other hand, Windows Live Maps has some nice enhancements on traffic info. Specifically, Windows Live Maps will suggest a rerouting to you based on heavy traffic.

Below is the video demo of Google Earth 4.3.

Google Maps camera records a police arrest

A police patrol car arrests a man and that scene is captured live by Google Maps camera!!! Explore the Google Maps street view at here...



(via Google Sightseeing)

In case you haven't be entertained enough, please read this: The Strangest Sights in Google Earth from PC World.

Google goes black in support of Earth Hour

Google Israel turns black on 27th March in support of Earth Hour. (Note: Earth Hour in Israel is on 27th March).


And again on 29th March, Google.com turned black too.


I kept checking google.com.my yesterday, trying to see whether it is using black background, but it is not. Obviously, Google wants to "raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation" in US and Israel only. Having said that, it is funny to see Google is using the black background while saying black colour actually increases energy usage....hmm....so Google is supporting Earth Hour or not?

YouTube Now Offering Video Statistics

This is announced few days ago, but when I tried to find the video stats in my YouTube account last time, the service was not ready yet. Today, I log in to YouTube again, and found it is up and running now...



It is good to see You Tube is going one step forward to provides us with some useful insights of our videos...

You can access the statistics by....

1. Log in
2. Go to "Account"
3. Under "Manage My Videos", select "Videos, Favourites & Playlists"
4. Click "About this Video" for the video you wish to access the stats

Google Sky is now available through your web browser

Google Sky was formerly available only within the Google Earth software but now you can explore it in a web browser. The navigation style of Goolge Sky is similar to Google Maps. It lets you pan through the galaxy. In addition, you can view different celestial bodies in ultraviolet, infrared, x-ray, or microwave light. Similar to Google Maps, you can search the galaxy by typing into the search box. I like the image showcases too. The best part of the image showcases is the historical maps of constellations. Also, do not to miss the podcasts while you exploring Google Sky.

Links
Google Sky
More information on Google LatLong Blog

Google Sky intro video clip...


Historical map of Aries...

Googles releases Google Moon and Google Mars

Combining science and art, Google takes large volume of imagery celestial bodies and apply them to Google Maps technology. The result of this hard work is Google Moon and Google Mars. To enhance its educational values, Google adds a lots of side-notes on the landing sites of Apollo missions on Google Moon.



More information: Google Moon, Google Mars

Introducing video ads to Google search results

Google used to differentiate itself from competitors by having no banner ads or other intrusions on Google.com, but this is going to change. According to the news here, Google is going to test video ads on search results. Google is considering other formats including image ads. So, this is going to be cultural shift for Google.

Yahoo! Mail is the most popular email service

According to TechCrunch, more people are using Yahoo! mail than GMail in 2007. If GMail maintains its current growth rate, GMail will catch up by year 2010. But expecting GMail to maintain such linear growth rate does not sound practical to me.

Google Chart API for ASP.net

It is nice to see how fast the community responds to new stuffs. Someone has build on top of Google Chart API to make it easier to use for ASP.net developers. The ASP.net control can be found at here.

Google in 2007

A summary of Google's performance in 2007 can be found at here. iGoogle grows at an incredible 268% rate - not too sure what leads to the success. Overall, Google is still very popular with the web search and image search. Dropping popular in video search is understandable because of YouTube acquisition. As for other products, I never use most of them although I knew their existence. Frankly, out of so many products Google has released, there are still many of them I never know, not to mention never use. Look at this post, how many of you know and use all of them?

The end of advertising as we know it

IBM Institute for Business Value has released an interesting finding on the shifting trend of advertising - from traditional one-to-many advertising model to one-to-one targeted model. I believe the traditional model is getting less effective especially on the global internet - firstly, I seldom pay attention to the irrelevant banner ads on a web page, let alone click on the ad to find out more information. Pop-up ads are even more obtrusive, that is why we need pop-up blocker. If I am not mistaken, the new advertising model was started by GoTo.com which is more like an advertisement search engine. Sadly, GoTo.com pursued a wrong business decision by dropped out GoTo.com website and renamed the company called Overture which later acquired by Yahoo. Google refined what was done by GoTo.com and called it AdWord. Later, Google also introduced AdSense, which is more sophisticated. Currently, Google is working on the advertising strategy on YouTube. Hmmm…what sort of innovation Google will bring to us this time?

Working Offline on Google Documents

For Open Office fans, a new extension named OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs is published recently. This extension allows you to take Google Documents (GDocs)offline and work on them locally and then synchronize your offline copies with the online copies. This sort of desktop-web integration opens new possibilities like backup documents to web, sharing documents, work with the documents everywhere regardless of whether you are online or offline. For MS Office users (like me), there is a similar service (DocSyncer) available as well.

As Internet becomes ubiquitous, it is obvious that Desktop-Web integration and synchronization technology become more and more important. I am planning to include synchronization functionality in the future version of my software to facilitate data flowing between user computers and between offices (HQ and branches) too.

Google Chart

Google Code recently released a very useful product called Google Chart API. As described by Google, it allows you to dynamically embed charts in your web page. Chart API is pretty straightforward, simply add

IMG SRC = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? + parameters"

tag to a web page then the chart will be generated. You can use Javascript to encode dynamic data from back-end databases too. very very nice product - simple, easy and free. I will certainly revisit this API in the near future.