Google recently announced that they will be experimenting by building a super fast fiber network. I wrote a post “Why Google Needs to Become an ISP” a few months ago stating that Google needs to become an ISP because their search can be simply defaulted to another search engine. It is a war between tech companies to see who can control the platform and end-to-end services. Apple has devices, software, and stores. Microsoft has operating systems, office products, and mobile OS. Google’s strategy is simply to diversify and unify as much as possible.
Never thought my words would actually be heard from Google. They must have found it through Search
Why is Google building a high speed network? It is because the faster the network, the more people will be online which means the more ads they can display. Furthermore, Google can charge a subscription for access that is competitive to other ISPs. Google can also lease its fast fiber network to other ISPs as well for further revenue.
Google Wave is a hot topic now. It is Google’s ambitious project for next generation unified real-time communication and collaboration tool. I finally got my invite and can now invite up to 8 others. I’m giving them away so if anyone is interested contact me through the web form. It even works on the iPhone!
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Google Voice is really quite an amazing service with a lot of features – for free. Granted if you have a smart phone with browser or near a computer to manage your calls. For those of you still sticking to your dinosaur phone lacking an Internet browser, this Google Voice Quick Reference is for you. Just print it out and put it into your pocket. I didn’t even know some of these features were available such as conversation recording. Managing Google Voice features is now whole lot faster.
I don’t want to get my hopes up. I was so disappointed by the Palm Pre and I was not terribly impressed with iPhone 3.0 But I watched the promo vid for Google’s Android 2.0…
And I gotta say that I’m liking what I’m seeing. Oh please dear lord don’t let me be disappointed yet again. I gotta renew my two year ball-and-chain with the iPhone in July 2010, and it’s probably going to come down to a choice between iPhone 4G running OS4.x and an Android phone running Cupcake Eclaire 2.x. And I really really really wanna choose the Android OS because I’m getting pretty sick of the Apple monolith.
I think I’ve downloaded roughly 200 apps since I’ve owned the iPhone. I’ve paid for probably 40%-50% of those, maybe more, I’m not sure cause the App Store makes it so easy to buy junk you don’t need. Of those apps, I use maybe 10 on a regular basis. Maybe. Might be as few as 5, depending on how you define regular use. So it makes absolutely no difference to me that Apple has 100K apps in the store. I’m never going to know about 99% of those apps, and of the ones I do know about, I’ll want to try maybe 5% of them. And here’s where the sheer inertia of Apple’s store comes into play. Too many choices that people will never ever find out about. It’s like going to the local convenience store and standing in front of the drinks fridges. You have 50 kinds of ice tea, 90 kinds of soda, 30 different bottled waters – how many of those choices do you actually consider or even know about?
Google Wave has been making headlines in the tech world. Not many people know this since not everyone received the official invite yet but it already works in the iPhone. It looks quite fantastic. You can simply go to wave.google.com in mobile Safari on your iPhone and wil be prompted that you are using a browser not supported during the preview, however, once you click through, it actually works well.
You can save a bookmark on your Home screen and it creates a little icon like other Web pages on the iPhone. However, Google Wave is a bit different. Once you launch it it removes the Safari wrapper which allows you to nagivate to another page or search the Web. It actually looks like a regular native iPhone app.
The screen shot on the right is what Google Wave looks like on the iPhone launched from the Home screen bookmark. The screen shot at the bottom is what it looks like from within Safari.
You can now use Google Docs to perform OCR image-to-text conversions when you upload high-resolution files. It is a nice newly added feature from Google (and of course it is free)
For 3rd party webapps or services that uses Google Docs, they can use this URL parameter to accept JPG, PNG, and GIF files for conversions. Keep in mind this is still in beta.
Tell us what you think of Google Docs OCR performance. Was it good for you?
New in GMail fresh from the mad scientists at Google Labs – you can now activate a feature that allows you to play your Google Voice messages in your GMail account. Furthermore, the playback syncs with your GVoice account and causes them to be marked as no longer new. Slowly but surely Google is tying together all their services into a supermegamonstercloud application set. Though it still pisses me off that the same features they activate in Google Tasks in GMail aren’t immediately available in Google Calendar. And that Tasks still doesn’t have an API that some coder in a dark room can use to sync my To Do’s with my iPhone. C’mon you lazy Googlers – get at it!
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