Group items tagged

Google is talking about a new world of search at the I/O developer conference. The biggest change is called Google Now. It's a new generation of semantic-style search. Google Now figures out where you commute to work and how. It gives you a faster route if there is a lot of traffic. When you're at a public transit stop, Google Now tells you when the next one arrives This is a developing story. Refresh for updates.

A new post over at the Google Fiber blog notes that with pre-registration now closed, 180 out of 202 potential "fiberhoods" in the Kansas City region have qualified for Google Fiber. As we noted back in July, Google encouraged Kansas City communities to participate in a six week rally to determine which neighborhoods were connected first. Not only did those rallies help Google determine the maximum deployment strategy for the best ROI, they also generated an immense volume of free advertising for the company. 

Anyone can now track his or her citations via Google Scholar. The free citation service is "a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time," the company said in an announcement yesterday on the Google Scholar blog. Google announced a limited-release test of the service in July.

Google is getting into the Internet Service Provider (ISP) game, as you might have heard. Its new offering, Google Fiber was announced today in Kansas City. Right now, the service is only available there, but from what we can tell, it's ridiculously fast. For $70 a month you'll get "gigabit" Internet service, which is 100 times faster than your standard cable modem. Kick in an extra $50 a month and you'll get cable-TV-like-service as well.

"Google on Wednesday released a cloud-based version of its Google Wallet app that now supports credit and debit cards from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover."

"Google's long-running fight to digitize the world's written works has closed two more chapters, but the story hasn't quite reached the end. Despite stakes that include millions of dollars of ad revenue for Google versus the potential loss of revenue and royalties for publishers and authors, however, the epic saga's climax is turning out to be surprisingly muted. There are three parts to this story so far, with Google Books the protagonist (or antagonist, depending on your point of view) at the center of all of them. Following two separate court decisions this week and last, two of those parts are now concluded, leaving only one more thread of the tale to wrap up."

he Google self-driving car project has been around for some time, but has crossed a milestone of over 300,000 miles tested. If you hang out in Mountain View around the Google Plex at all, you'll see these cars driving around with funny contraptions on the roof. You might also spot one on the highway, it's kind of interesting to watch, but pay attention to the road.

A store of information dubbed the "Knowledge Graph" now adds useful context and detail to the list of links that Google serves up. Searching for certain people, places, or things produces a box of facts alongside the regular results. The Knowledge Graph is already starting to appear in a few other Google products, and could be used to add intelligence to all of the company's software. "Search was mostly based on matching words and phrases, and not what they actually mean," says Shashidar Thakur, the tech lead for the Knowledge Graph in Google's search team. Thakur says the project was invented to change that. The Knowledge Graph can be thought of as a vast database that allows Google's software to connect facts on people, places, and things to one another. Google got the Knowledge Graph project started when it bought a startup called Metaweb in 2010; at that time, the resource contained only 12 million entries. Today it has more than 500 million entries, with more than 3.5 billion links between them.

"More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US TV networks created in 60 years." Hunter Walk, YouTube Director of Product Management, Google in a tweet. Google told TechCrunch Monday that YouTube users now upload 60 hours of video every minute.

Well, it's about time. Many of us were absolutely floored by the iCache Geode mobile wallet when it first appeared back in April, and now the company has announced that the hotly-awaited accessory is now available for $199.

Education is already seeing some major changes in light of new, cutting-edge technologies. Students can now access educational information from virtually anywhere at any time, and mobile devices are influencing some to flip their classrooms, changing the educational experience altogether. While current technologies are making waves, further changes linked to upcoming technologies may be on the horizon. One of the most hyped and anticipated devices over the past year has been Google's soon-to-be-released glasses. These glasses will enable users to get real-time information about the places, people, and objects around them, right on the lens of the glasses. While it will be a long time before these glasses ever show up in the classroom (they currently cost $1,500 and are available only to developers), when they do, educators and students can expect to see some of these amazing changes to the educational experience.

"A little more than a year ago, we published a list of 9 Latin American accelerators you should know. It included names such as 21212, Aceleradora, Startup Farm and Wayra, which have had a transforming impact on the Latin American startup scene, as showcased during TNW Conference Latin America's Best of Accelerators Startup Battle last month. While it is still valid for the most part, it is now far from exhaustive, as new accelerators keep on emerging. This is particularly true in Brazil, where entrepreneurs looking for seed funding and mentoring now have new opportunities to look into, especially in specific niches. Here are five initiatives you should check out:"

Between now and 2016, be prepared to spend an average of $1,472 per year online shopping. Right now, U.S. consumers hover somewhere around $1,200-$1,300 per year, but that number will increase by 44%, to $1,738, by 2016.

usband-wife team Drs. Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband evaluate today's level of access to medical information online. "While previous technologies have been fully under doctors' control, the Internet is equally in the hands of patients," they write. "Such access is redefining the roles of physician and patient." When it comes to patients researching health advice on the web, Hartzband and Groopman have been exposed to consequences both positive and negative. They applaud that physicians, like patients, can now access the wealth of medical information on the Internet. "Journal articles can be obtained within seconds, and experts' evidence-based analyses are readily available…" they write. "Primary care physicians now have easy access to many guidelines whose reach was previously limited to specialists."

"Since deregulation in the 1980s and the emergence of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, the telecommunications industry has faced disruptions and premature reports of its untimely demise. But the challenges have never been greater than now. The stock market has punished most large carriers while richly rewarding companies that compete with telcos. Since Google's IPO in 2004, its market capitalization has risen to about $150 billion, while the value of most operators in developed markets has fallen. The U.S. telecom industry has lost more than 100,000 jobs in the past five years and more than 400,000 in the last decade. The decline in wireless average revenue per user (ARPU), which began in the United States in 2006, has since spread to most major operators. Carriers are not standing still. They are rapidly reducing costs and trying to streamline operations1. These moves are necessary but not sufficient. The world is spinning too rapidly for restructuring as usual-no matter how deep-to keep working. Game-changing forces, such as cloud computing and "voice for free" services, are warping the industry. (See Exhibit 1.) Cloud computing, for example, exposes operators to competition from major IT players, while free voice services-led by Google, Skype, and others-threaten operators' main source of revenue."

The Department of Education released a draft report about big data and education today. It's called "Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics," a title that's unlikely to win any converts to the notion of a data-curious* view of learning. Part of what's going to get stuck in the craw is that phrase "data mining," I reckon. Despite all the potential and all the buzz about (big) data, data-mining remains something with a fairly negative connotation. Advertisers. Political campaigns. Big government. All sifting through your personal data, trying to uncover the things that nobody knows about, trying to get you to buy or sell or vote. Add to that now the knowledge that every click we make online -- every YouTube view and Facebook like and Google query -- is eminently trackable, it's enough to make all those unsolicited phone calls and junk mail seem quite benign, not to mention old-fashioned.

Yet there's something intriguing about the concept of augmented reality, the notion of enhancing objects in the real world with virtual sounds and images and additional info. And when Google revealed earlier this year that it was developing glasses that will be part wearable computer, part digital assistant that flashes relevant data right before your eyes, augmented reality (AR) no longer seemed such a digital parlor trick. The geek gods had spoken. In fact, recent analysis by the London firm ABI Research concludes that the next big phase of AR-now largely played out on smartphones and tablets-will be through wearable tech. That's when the technology will become truly functional, when your glasses are able to tell you everything you want to know about the restaurants and stores on the block where you're walking.

Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote is an in-depth look at how social media and digital tech is changing the way we choose our leaders. In it, Mashable reporters uncover how the campaigns are utilizing massive stores of data gathered through social networks to better target political advertising, how crowdfunding could shake up campaign finance, and we meet the masterminds shaping the digital best practices for electoral politics. We report on how watchdog groups are using social media to protect the vote, why social media has put even more heat on candidates to stay on-message, and ask whether voting over the Internet will ever be safe. In spite of its massive and unprecedented growth, we're only just beginning to figure out what it means to be social online, and political strategists are still in the early stages of figuring out what social media can and can't do. The trend is clear, however: digital will be an ever more important factor as each new election cycle rolls around. We can't know yet what the future might hold for social media and politics, but here's how social is changing things right now.

Over the past several years, I've been writing about how government data is moving into the marketplaces, underpinning ideas, products and services. Open government data and application programming interfaces to distribute it, more commonly known as APIs, increasingly look like fundamental public infrastructure for digital government in the 21st century. What I'm looking for now is more examples of startups and businesses that have been created using open data or that would not be able to continue operations without it. If big data is a strategic resource, it's important to understand how and where organizations are using it for public good, civic utility and economic benefit.