Giant Gingerbread statue arrives at Googleplex
Android users, rejoice!
Nothing is official as of yet, but from what I've read online, Android 2.3 will be known as Gingerbread and Android 3.0 will be known as Honeycomb.
Android users, rejoice!
Nothing is official as of yet, but from what I've read online, Android 2.3 will be known as Gingerbread and Android 3.0 will be known as Honeycomb.
What we’re driving at
Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use. So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research. Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain. To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History. Safety has been our first priority in this project. Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance. And we’ve briefed local police on our work. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half. We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new “highway trains of tomorrow." These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads. In terms of time efficiency, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting. Imagine being able to spend that time more productively. We’ve always been optimistic about technology’s ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today. While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting.
I want off this planet Google, please make it happen.
Notifier app for Android delivered all alerts– notifications for calls, SMS, battery status to your PC over Wifi. But what if you wish to do all that plus control your Android Phone, wirelessly?
The new app called TalkMyPhone lets you do all that and more using Gtalk. This application opens a gtalk conversation with you to Notify the following:
- Incoming sms
- Incoming calls, before it even rings on your actual phone (this is the fastest thing)
- Battery state
And you can control your Android phone with following commands:
- Reply to the incoming sms from PC (using “reply:<message>“) e.g. “reply: see yaa soon, I`ll be there”.
- Send sms from PC (using “sms:<contact>:<message>” – contact can be a name or a phone number)
- Read last 5 sms from a contact (using “sms:<contact>” with no argument)
- make you phone ring in case you loose it (using “ring”)
- Find your Phones GeoLocation : it will send you google maps links (using “where”)
- Copy text to the keyboard (using “copy:<text>“)
- Get Contact info (using “contact:<contact>“) e.g. “contact: father”. (Partial searches work.)
- Open any url in Android Browser (just paste it in the conversation) and it will open URL in browser
- Confused? Get commands help using ‘?’
Excited? Should be! This is the most powerful app I’ve ever seen on Android.
How to Setup TalkMyPhone
Its easy, you need to have two Gtalk accounts (one source & one destination, where you receive alerts). Just fill in the credentials and start the app’s service, you are all good. All future notifications will be delivered to destined Gtalk address and you takeon full control.
The best part is, its Open source.
Good bye JPG and PNG?
Oct 1 2010, 2:33am CDT | by Luigi Lugmayr
Google pushes a new image format called WebP that is supposed to make the web faster. Google is on a mission since while to make the web faster. They released tools like Page Speed to help webmasters optimize their site. Google identified that the majority of the latency on pages across the web are caused by images. Google wants to tackle this issue with the new WebP format that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.
Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Google focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.
To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, Google used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. Google ran a test on a million images from the web and achieved on average size savings of 39%. This is pretty impressive as they ran their tools on already compressed images.
The WebP tools are now available as a developer preview. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, Google is developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. So there is no hurry yet for webmasters to convert to WebP.
More details on WebP are available on Google.
There have been so many updates in the past week that it seems like every Android device is deciding to receive an OTA just to not feel left out.
This time, Google's own flagship device, the Nexus One, receives an update to its OS. Here is the information on the update, courtesy of Devastatin from the XDA forums:
- Android version: 2.2.1 (!!!!)
- Baseband version: 32.36.00.28U_4.06.00.12_7
- Kernel version: 2.6.32.9-27240-gbca5320
- Android-build@apa26 #1
- Build number: frg83
Update instructions after the break. Thanks, Anthony!
1. Download the Android 2.2.1 firmware for the Nexus One Here
2. Rename the file update.zip and copy it to your microSD card via USB. [Note: make sure the file is named update.zip and not update.zip.zip.]
3. Power down your Nexus One
4. Hold down the “Volume Down” button as you power the phone back on.
5. A screen should appear showing your phone’s system searching for various files. Scroll down to “recovery” and press the “Power” button.
6. When you see the triangle with an exclamation point symbol, press the “Power” and “Volume Up” buttons at the same time.
7. From the menu that appears, select “Apply sdcard:update.zip.”
8. When the screen displays “Install from sdcard complete” select “reboot system now” and wait for the phone to power back up. (this will take a long time)Just a software update as far as we know. We have heard that once it is updated, some of the 3rd party keyboards have issues. Swype was reporting an issue while not working and Swiftkey wasn't predicting words. So if you do this update, watch out as you may not be able to use your favorite keyboard right away.
This is a very new update, so we'll keep you up-to-date as we hear more. [XDA forums] Thanks to Anthony and Devastatin for providing info!
I can't find what changes does this update give.

Days after introducing voice calling within Gmail, Google on Tuesday unveiled a "priority inbox" feature within Gmail intended to highlight important messages.
Priority Inbox will automatically filter incoming Gmail messages to place the most important messages up top, followed by starred e-mails, and then everything else underneath. Priority Inbox can be customized, however, to display the categories of your choice.
Once enabled, there will be a link on the left-hand bar for "Priority Inbox" atop the "Inbox" link, so users can switch back to their regular view if they choose. Users can also choose whether Google takes them to Priority Inbox or regular Inbox upon sign-in.
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What type of messages will end up in the Priority Inbox? The system is constantly evolving, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager for Google Enterprise, said in a phone interview, but if there is a thread to which you respond very frequently or certain types of messages that you often read very quickly, they would likely end up designated as priority.
"They start to be useful to people right away," Sheth said.
If Google flags something as priority and you do not agree, you can use the plus and minus buttons atop the page to notify Google that that e-mail is less important.
Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users in the next few days. When it hits your inbox, there will be a "New! Priority Inbox" link on the top, right-hand corner of your Gmail inbox, which you can click to activate.
The idea behind Priority Inbox was to combat inbox information overload, Sheth said, pointing to the extra time the average employee takes to sift through mountains of e-mail. Google has been testing Priority Inbox for "quite awhile" internally, Sheth said, and "testers are spending 6 percent less time managing their e-mail, [which] translates to over a week of additional time each year."
"This is the next evolutionary step in making the inbox more intelligent and letting people deal with information overload," Sheth said. "Over the past 20 years, the inbox has just been a chronological list [of e-mails], and this breaks out of that paradigm."
Google envisions this being useful for the average Gmail user as well as its Google Apps customers, who will be able to access Priority Inbox if their admin has selected "Enable pre-release features" in the control panel.
"Obviously e-mail is tremendously critical to business users, and being able to save time is very, very valuable," Sheth said. "And literally time equals money in the business context, [so] we think this is going to be a great feature for our Google Apps users overall."
"But we also think it's going to have a great impact on our consumer users," he said, pointing to the level of organization Priority Inbox has brought to his own Gmail account.
Given Google's experience with producing relevant results via its core search product, Sheth said taking that to the inbox was a natural progression.
"Google is very well-suited to do this in that we're all about providing you with relevant information," he said. "[We thought that] if we could bring Google.com-like relevancy to your inbox, it would make your inbox a lot better."