How does Google’s version of 2012 compare with yours?
The hunter is now the hunted: With $5 million from Google, the World Wildlife Fund is deploying unarmed drones to track down wildlife poachers.
For those of us who are more office-bound air guitarist than full-fledged rock star, Google has created JAM with Chrome, an interactive web application that lets you and up to three friends collaborate in real-time to create original tunes using digital instruments.
This is what Google’s secretive data centers look like.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the long march toward our wallet-less future.
(Photo via jurvetson on Flickr)
With Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.
Apple’s Not-So-Secret Weapon: How iCloud Keeps Them One Step Ahead Ahead Of Windows
Space Lawyers: They Exist
A James Cameron and Google-backed asteroid mining company has a bevy of them on retainer to help divy up all that unobtanium. Plus they help craft liability laws for space tourists and consult with governments on extraterrestrial visits.
The search giant is known for its playful, unconventional workspaces—perhaps intended to offset its fairly Vader-esque public image, and certainly, to sweeten the deal for young, in-demand engineers who may be juggling other offers. In Pittsburgh, Googlers enjoy an industrial theme and slides. In Zurich, it’s birch trees and meeting cocoons. Meanwhile, in London, Google has two established offices—one is industrial chic, the other, a space-age white box. Now, a third office—a “Super HQ”—has opened on the eighth floor of Central Saint Giles, the Renzo Piano-designed tower in Covent Garden.
For most people, high school science fairs yield amusing but not altogether practical results: your baking soda and vinegar volcanoes, your potato clocks. There are exceptions, of course—15 year-old Jack Andraka created a cheap, efficient pancreatic cancer sensor for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. And there are the finalists in Google’s annual Science Fair, which invites entrants ages 13 through 18 to compete for a variety of prizes. These kids are results are anything but amusing. They’re potentially world changing.
Below, we look at five of our favorite finalists (there are 15 in total). The winner will be crowned next month.
To understand the patent mess that is gripping Silicon Valley right now, you need to travel across the country to a dark-paneled federal courtroom in Norfolk, Virginia, just down the block from Bob’s Gun Shop.
Google, Mark Cuban, And A Glimpse Into The Heart Of Patent Darkness
“The input to this device is a real challenge because there is no physical keyboard—just like a phone doesn’t have a physical keyboard—and there is no touch screen either. How do you input? We’ve dabbled and experimented with lots of different types of input including using your voice, using some type of touch interface on the side of the device itself, as well as using your head,” Lee says. “So using your head as input, for example, we’ve tried dozens and dozens of different types of head gestures. As you can imagine, some are more extreme than others. It creates a pretty funny experience. In fact, we created a game internally, both to exercise and test things out, but also to demonstrate the absurdity of using your head. It’s kind of like DDR but with your head instead of your feet.”
Google’s Project Glass: Inside The Problem Solving And Prototyping
Google’s self-driving cars may be out on the road already, but it will take awhile before public is truly ready to give up all driving control to artificial intelligence. In the interim, Volvo has a solution that lets drivers (sometimes) sleep at the wheel while still improving highway safety—and it just completed the first real-world tests.
Dubbed SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), the EU-backed project is working on road trains—vehicles equipped with software already found in many Volvo vehicles (including laser sensors, cameras, and radars) that are automatically led along the highway by a lead vehicle, which is commandeered by a professional driver. Regular drivers could one day simply use in-car navigation to find the nearest highway road train, get on the tail end, and let the vehicle platoon take over steering, braking, and acceleration.
Google’s Project Glass product lead Steve Lee walks us through his experience with the development of the company’s sci-fi-inspired eyewear—from his team’s “hundreds of variations and dozens of early prototypes” to his vision of the future.
“As John Lilly tweeted, in response to seeing that Yahoo had launched its own web browser, “Um what? Great move … in 2008.”
