Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts

2013-06-15

Google's 'Project Loon'

Meet Google's 'Project Loon:' Balloon-powered 'net access | Crave - CNET

The search giant wants to give everyone on earth Internet access, and it has a high-flying idea for how to accomplish it.


Google has officially announced "Project Loon," its plan to connect the entire world to the Internet that uses a decidedly 19th century technology: Balloons.

Official Blog: Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it.



Loon for All – Project Loon – Google

The Technology

Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. They are carried around the Earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction. People connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from balloon to balloon, then to the global Internet back on Earth.

The Pilot Test

Project Loon starts in June 2013 with an experimental pilot in New Zealand. A small group of Project Loon pioneers will test the technology in Christchurch and Canterbury.


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2012-03-29

A Google Self-Driving Car Experience

Amazing! Google's self-driving car allows the blind to drive | Fox News

Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack.

He also happens to be 95 percent blind.

Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, “drove” along a specially programmed route thanks to Google’s autonomous driving technology.

Self-Driving Car Test: Steve Mahan - YouTube



We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, we wanted to share one of our favorite moments. Here's Steve, who joined us for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it's also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met.


Google driverless car - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Google Driverless Car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for driverless cars. [...]
The system combines information gathered from Google Street View with artificial intelligence software that combines input from video cameras inside the car, a LIDAR sensor on top of the vehicle, radar sensors on the front of the vehicle and a position sensor attached to one of the rear wheels that helps locate the car's position on the map.

Sebastian Thrun: Google's driverless car | Video on TED.com


Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.


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2012-03-25

Google's Semantic Search Technology

Google Gives Search a Refresh - WSJ.com

Powering up the Search Engine

Google is adding semantic technology to its keyword search system.

Keyword Search
  • Determines the importance of websites based on the words it contains, links to those sites and dozens of other measures.
  • Also factors in the person searching, such as his location and the time of day.
Semantic Search
  • Refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.
  • Can differentiate between words with more than one meaning, such as the car brand 'Jaguar' and the animal 'jaguar.'


When people search, they aim to answer a question. They just search in the truncated version of that question. Keyword research is largely data-driven around the popularity of the terms in their question. Keyword research in semantic search will have to focus on what that person actually means when searching for that keyword.
For example: Yoga. What could people mean they search “yoga?”
  • What is yoga?
  • The different types of yoga
  • How to do different yoga positions
  • The best fit of yoga pants
  • Yoga exercise videos
The possibilities are endless. When you’re framing your content in a semantic search world, it has to be around answering the specific questions people have as it relates to that keyword. With every sentence you write, ask yourself: How does this answer the searcher’s question? You will have to focus on the natural language even if those users are still focusing on keywords.


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2012-02-07

Google's Heads Up Display (HUD) Glasses

Google's HUD glasses have been sighted | Digital Media - CNET News

In December, rumors spread that Google was finishing up a prototype on high-tech glasses known as wearable head-up displays (HUD) that could tap into Google's cloud-based location services and detail users' surroundings. The information would then appear as an augmented reality computer display.

Over the last year, Apple and Google have secretly begun working on projects that will become wearable computers. Their main goal: to sell more smartphones. (In Google’s case, more smartphones sold means more advertising viewed.)

In Google’s secret Google X labs, researchers are working on peripherals that — when attached to your clothing or body — would communicate information back to an Android smartphone.

People familiar with the work in the lab say Google has hired electronic engineers from Nokia Labs, Apple and engineering universities who specialize in tiny wearable computers.

They are in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that “normal people” wear.  However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface.  There are a few buttons on the arms of the glasses, but otherwise, they could be mistaken for normal glasses.  Additionally, we are not sure of the technology being employed here, but it is likely a transparent LCD or AMOLED display such as the one demonstrated below:

In addition, we have heard that this device is not an “Android peripheral” as the NYT stated.  According to our source, it communicates directly with the Cloud over IP. Although, the “Google Goggles”  could use a phone’s Internet connection, through Wi-Fi or a low power Bluetooth 4.0.
The use-case is augmented reality that would tie into Google’s location services.  A user can walk around with information popping up and into display -Terminator-style- based on preferences, location and Google’s information.

HUD Google Glasses are real and they are coming soon | 9to5Google | Beyond Good and Evil

Our tipster has now seen a prototype and said it looks something like Oakley Thumps (below). These glasses, we heard, have a front-facing camera used to gather information and could aid in augmented reality apps. It will also take pictures. The spied prototype has a flash —perhaps for help at night, or maybe it is just a way to take better photos. The camera is extremely small and likely only a few megapixels.

I/O on the glasses will also include voice input and output, and we are told the CPU/RAM/storage hardware is near the equivalent of a generation-old Android smartphone. As a guess, we would speculate something like 1GHz ARM A8, 256MB RAM and 8GB of storage?  In any case, it will also function as a smartphone.


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2011-11-01

Google TV Update

Google TV to get massive Android software update - CNN.com

Google announced on its Google TV blog Friday that the platform will be upgraded to Android 3.1 (otherwise known as Honeycomb) for Sony devices Sunday, with the Logitech Revue set-top box getting its upgrade "soon thereafter."

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Google is upgrading TV with Android 3.1 Honeycomb operating system
  • Android Market will open up a variety of applications, with the promise of more
  • Google also hinted at future software updates (Ice Cream Sandwich, anyone?)

The Official Google TV Blog: An Update on Google TV

Friday, October 28, 2011

Today, we’re announcing a software update for Google TV. In this release, we focused on four areas of user feedback:

1. Keep it simple
2. Make it easy to find something worth watching
3. Make YouTube better on TV
4. Bring more apps to TV

This software update will be coming to Sony devices starting early next week and Logitech devices soon thereafter. We look forward in the coming months to announcing new software updates as well as new devices on new chipsets from multiple hardware partners.


Google TV - Overview

Plays nice with the stuff you already have

  • No monthly fee for Google TV
  • Use your current cable or satellite TV service
  • Use your current home Internet connection
    (wired or wireless)

It’s always up to date

  • Google TV updates over the air
  • All updates are free of charge
  • The latest apps are featured in Android Market





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2011-09-23

Google Wallet

Visions of a Future Where Phones Replace Wallets - NYTimes.com

Plenty of companies would love to get their hands on our wallets. But Google wants to go one step further: it wants to be our wallets.

Its new phone software, called Google Wallet, is intended to replace the credit cards in our actual wallets.

It does sound pretty spectacular, doesn’t it? No fishing plastic cards out of wallets, no paper slips, no signatures. Everything is handled securely, instantly, conveniently, with one tap of your phone at the register.

Google Wallet - the vision



Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC.

Google Wallet - how it works


  1. Look for these symbols at checkout.  
  2. Tap your phone on the reader.    Your phone sends payment, and, at some merchants, offers and loyalty information. 



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2011-05-26

Google Correlate

FAQ - Google Correlate

What is Google Correlate?
Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

Collected from: FAQ - Google Correlate




Google Correlate lets you see how your data relates to search queries


A while back, Google showed how Influenza outbreaks correlated to searches for flu-related terms with Google Flu Trends. It helped researchers and policy-makers estimate flu activity much sooner than with previous methods. Google Correlate is the evolution of Flu Trends in that now you can correlate search trends with not just flu cases, but with your own data or other search queries.

Google Correlate

Find searches that correlate with real-world data

Most search terms vary in popularity over time. Find search terms that…
[...]
Search terms are often more popular in some states and less popular in others. Find terms correlated with…
Collected from: Google Correlate

How To Use Correlate, Google's New Data-Mining Tool, To Help Your Business | Fast Company

After logging in, you can upload any data and leverage Google's huge search history and algorithms to see if there's a correlation over time. Brand managers keen to see if their promotional TV ad campaigns result in echoed online activity searching for their brands (and possibly compared to their competition) can do so with a few clicks. Publishing houses can see whether readers are searching for their magazine, or their online entity. Economists and sociologists pondering if searches for "credit card" and "no interest credit card" decline proportionally to a recovering economy now have a powerful data ally (spoiler: yes, that correlation is true).

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2011-05-15

Google's Android Apps for Cloud Robotics

Google aims to bridge Android, cloud computing with robotics | ZDNet


Cloud computing and robotics could create one fine mashup that preserves battery life, adds capabilities and allows robots to form groups.

That’s the high-level takeaway from Google’s I/O conference this week. Google launched rosjava, a ROS (robot OS) framework in Java that is Android compatible. The move coupled with Google’s Android Open Accessory API, which aims to connect a bevy of devices—phones, bikes, cameras, clocks and other household items highlights how it is positioning the Android operating system as a robotics tool.


rosjava - An implementation of ROS in pure Java with Android support. - Google Project Hosting

rosjava is the first pure Java implementation of ROS.

From ROS.org: ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

Developed at Google in cooperation with Willow Garage, rosjava enables integration of Android and ROS compatible robots.


Collected from: Cloud Enabled Robots

Related
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2011-04-23

Google's Renewable Energy Initiatives

Google Energy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Google Energy LLC is a subsidiary company of Google, which was created to reduce costs of energy consumption of the Google Group, amounting to 2.5 million dollars[1], and subsequently to produce and sell clean energy. The division also allows it to take advantage of projects funded through the philanthropic Google.org.


YouTube - Going Green at Google

Find out how Google is going green by improving operations, building tools that empower users, and investing in a clean energy future. Learn more at http://google.com/green



Official Google Blog: Investing in the world’s largest solar power tower plant

We’ve invested $168 million in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert in California. Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will generate 392 gross MW of clean, solar energy. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 90,000 cars off the road over the lifetime of the plant, projected to be more than 25 years. The investment makes business sense and will help ensure that one of the world’s largest solar energy projects is completed.

Brightsource Energy’s Solar Energy Development Center in Israel’s Negev desert



Renewable Energy for Data Centers

We are purchasing clean, renewable wind energy sufficient to power several of our large data centers in a continuing effort to green our operations. To date we have completed two agreements, both from NextEra Energy Resources. The first was for 114 megawatts of wind generation from the Story County II facility in Iowa, and the second for 100.8 megawatts of wind generation from the Minco II facility in Oklahoma. (See our announcements for Iowa and Oklahoma) We made these agreements through Google Energy LLC, an entity formed in December, 2009 that allows us to procure large volumes of renewable energy by participating in the wholesale market.
Collected from: Google Green


The wind farm, which began operation in December 2009, consists of 100 GE 1.5MW XLE turbines




Investing in a clean energy future

[...]
  • North Dakota wind farms. In May, we invested $38.8 million in two North Dakota wind farms that generate 169.5MW, enough to power 55,000 homes. It was our first project investment, and uses some of the latest wind turbine technology and control systems to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of renewable energy to the local grid.
  • Offshore wind transmission. In October, we made a development stage investment in a project to build a backbone transmission line off the Mid-Atlantic coast. The project will put in place strong, secure transmission, removing a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind. When finished, the 350-mile line will connect up to 6,000MW of offshore wind energy—enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households!



A clear windy day at the Ashtabula II wind farm





Google.org invests more than $10 million in breakthrough geothermal energy technology


Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) could supply thousands of times US energy needs


Mountain View, California (August 19, 2008) – In the continuing effort to develop electricity from renewable energy cheaper than from coal, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), through its philanthropic arm Google.org, announced $10.25 million in investments in a breakthrough energy technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). Today's announcement also includes funding for research on next-generation geothermal resource mapping, EGS information tools, and a policy agenda for geothermal energy.



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2010-11-15

Stock Market Prediction based on Google Searches

Stock market prediction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stock market prediction is the act of trying to determine the future value of a company stock or other financial instrument traded on a financial exchange. The successful prediction of a stock's future price could yield significant profit. Some believe that stock price movements are governed by the random walk hypothesis and thus are unpredictable. Others disagree and those with this viewpoint possess a myriad of methods and technologies which purportedly allow them to gain future price information.


 Google searches predict stock market moves



(CNN) - Economics, in a broad sense, is the study of how the financial decisions of billions of individuals coalesce into large trends that shape the way money is created, destroyed or transferred around the globe.

In that vein, physicists in Germany and the U.S. have released a study that shows how individual searches on Google correspond to large movements on the stock market.

The joint study by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany and the Center for Polymer Studies at Boston University looked at the stock moves of S&P 500 companies and compared them with searches of the company names on Google Trends from 2004 to 2010.


Can Google Predict the Stock Market? - ScienceNOW

[...] To predict the market, you need data on what is going through people's minds before they make their financial decisions. One such source of data is the total weekly volume of Internet search queries, now available to researchers through Google Trends. 
Researchers led by Preis compared the week-by-week fluctuations in two sets of data: The number of times that the name of a company in the S&P 500 was included in a Google search query, and the price and trading volume of that company's stock. They focused on the 6 years from 2004 to 2010.

The findings, to be published 15 November in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, aren't going to make anybody rich. The Google data could not predict the weekly fluctuations in stock prices. However, the team found a strong correlation between Internet searches for a company's name and its trade volume, the total number of times the stock changed hands over a given week. [...]


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2010-11-01

Chrome OS -- Google's Online Operating System

FoxNews.com - Will Google's Online Operating System Revolutionize the Computer?


That big old hard drive in your computer? Google says you don’t need it anymore. The company is also betting you won't need that Windows, Macintosh or Linux stuff either. No, Google wants you to access, operate, and edit all your files on the Internet.

To help with that, the company has developed a lightweight operating system of its own, the first new competition for Windows and Macs in years. It's called Chrome OS. And it could have a profound effect on the way we work with computers. 

Google Chrome OS Will Be Released By Year’s End


Chrome Google Operating System would be launched in time for the holidays.
Developers at Google have reached Release Candidate stage of completing the operating system.


Chromium OS - The Chromium Projects

Chromium OS

Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. Here you can review the project's design docs, obtain the source code, and contribute. To learn more about the project goals, read the announcement blog post.

Videos




Google Chrome OS Could Shake Up PC Market - PCWorld


Ultimately, Google plans to extend Chrome OS beyond netbooks and into the desktop/laptop market dominated by Windows. Given the ergonomic shortcomings of today's netbooks--specifically, cramped keyboards and small screens--consumers who find Chrome OS appealing may avoid the platform simply because they don't like the hardware it runs on. Since Chrome OS runs on both x86 and ARM processors, it's likely that a new crop of thin-and-light laptops--larger than netbooks but slimmer than full-size portables--will soon feature Google's OS too.

Chrome OS is more than simply another Windows or Mac competitor. It represents a dramatic shift away from desktop-oriented PCs to a cloud-based future. It'll be interesting to see how consumers and businesses take to Chrome OS devices--and how Microsoft and Apple respond to Google's latest threat.

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