Microsoft SemanticMap vs Google Glass

Microsoft’s SemanticMap: After Project Glass, Another Take On How To Make The World More User-Specific.

SemanticMap The Next Step In Public Information and Navigation On The Go is a Digital signage prototype featuring proximity detection, face recognition and gesture interaction technologies developed in Microsoft Research Asia. The system provides the right amount and detail of map-related information according to the user's distance from the display.

Google's Snowy Easter Egg

If you search for [let it snow] using Google, you'll have a hard time checking the search results. Google uses a JavaScript animation that adds some snowflakes and covers the entire page with snow.

Fortunately, Google added a "defrost" button that makes the search results reappear. You can also click anywhere on the page and move your mouse to "defrost" the page or draw something. Click the "+" button and you can share the Easter egg with other Google+ users.

Google's Tilted Easter Egg

If you search for [tilt], [tilted] or [askew] on a smartphone using Google, you might notice a strange special effect: Google's search results page is tilted to the right. It's an Easter Egg, just like the 'did you mean' link displayed when you search for [recursion].


{ via Search Engine Land }

Google Public Data Explorer - Adding search power to Public Data

Google introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with their data provider partners, they've curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity(OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) topopulation density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

Google Rolls Out Two-Factor Authentication For Everyone. You Should Use It.

Given how much data we’re trusting to online sites these days — email, search history, even voice calls — the repercussions to having our account passwords phished, hacked, or guessed are worse than ever. Unfortunately as far as consumers are concerned, account security has been stagnant for years: nearly every service requires a username and password, and that’s it. Cue the scary music and a Dateline special on having your identity stolen.

The Google Art Project Makes Masterpieces Accessible to All

Google has announced its new Art Project, in collaboration with 17 international art museums, to bring a new world of art online. Featuring collections from the Tate Britain, Museo Reina Sofia and Van Gogh Museum, Google has used its Streetview technology to help bring the museums to life.

http://www.googleartproject.com/

One place to find everything new from Google

If it seems to you like every day Google releases a new product or feature, well, it seems like that to us too. The central place we tell you about most of these is through the official Google Blog Network, where you’ll find more than 100 blogs covering all kinds of products, policy issues, technical projects and much more.

Google Scribe - get suggestion as you type

Google launched a very interesting tool that offers suggestions as you type: Google Scribe. It's not exactly the service I anticipated 3 years ago, but Google Scribe works surprisingly well. For example, I started to type 'This works sur' and Google suggested 'This works surprisingly well', which is exactly what I wanted to type. Instead of typing 14 characters, I could only type '1' or press Enter to select the first suggestion.

Let Google Docs convert your files [JPG, PDF etc] to Google Docs format using OCR

This addition includes converting image and PDF files to text using recently added Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The full list of files that can be converted include:

• For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tsb
• For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf
• For presentations: .ppt, .pps
• For OCR: .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf

Google Wave to Be Discontinued

Google's blog announced that Google Wave, the innovative communication platform released last year, will be discontinued.

'Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began.'

A Guide to Getting Started with Google drawings

Last year Google published Getting Started Guides for spreadsheets, documents, and presentations -- because using a product for the first time can sometimes be challenging. People have found these very helpful, so Google has created a Getting Started Guide for drawings.
This guide covers the basics about Google drawings and gives you all the information you need to start creating, editing, formatting, and sharing your drawings. It also includes some tips and tricks about features you may not know too much about. If you already use Google presentations, but aren't so familiar with drawings, you can read this guide to learn, for example, how to embed your drawing into a presentation.

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

Take a test drive into the cloud

We’ve talked about the power of cloud computing and how millions of businesses have already gone Google by switching to Apps. But sometimes it’s hard to imagine what working in the cloud would really mean, and frequently, people ask us how they can better understand the benefits of Google Apps specifically for their business. How would online collaboration really affect your workplace? And how could increased email storage or integrated IM and video chat actually impact your company’s productivity?

Try Google Docs Without a Google Account

Now you can try Google Docs even when you don't have a Google account. It's not difficult to create a Google account, but sometimes you want to show someone how Google Docs works without revealing sensitive information from your Google account.

If you go to https://docs.google.com/demo/, you can start editing a document, a spreadsheet or a drawing and share the links with other people, so you can collaborate in real-time. Google says that the documents are only available for 24 hours from the time they are created.

Google Wave, Available Without Invitation

At the Google I/O developer conference, Lars Rasmussen announced that Google Wave no longer requires invitation. If you have a Google account, go to wave.google.com and you can use Google's real-time communication service.

Google Wave is now available in Google Apps, so that businesses, universities and other organizations can improve communication flow.

More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers

9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

Google Buys BumpTop, 3D Desktop

Google bought BumpTop, an interesting software that replaces your computer's desktop with an intuitive 3D environment where you can quickly organize your files.

Google Dictionary Shows Usage Examples

"Google Dictionary has a lot of useful information about English words and expressions. Besides showing synonyms, antonyms, definitions from the dictionary and from the web, related phrases, Google Dictionary added usage examples from Google News.

Google extracts the quotes from news articles and attributes the quotes to their authors. You can find quotes in Google News if you search for the name of a popular person and click on the 'Quotes' section (e.g.: Gordon Brown, Steve Jobs). Unfortunately, you can't restrict Google News results to quotes.

Google Reader Play - ​And now for something completely different

Since I've been using Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to share with you an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

​Apps Script Gallery for Google spreadsheets

​Every week, the Google Apps gang here in New York organizes a movie night. It’s always a lot of fun, but organizing it is chaotic! Naturally, we use a spreadsheet to keep a list of movies we’d like to see (that’s the easy part!), and then on Tuesday evening there’s a storm of email as we try to pick a winner.