Google Central (part 1)

Update: Grand Central has become Google Voice

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I feel that I'm turning into some sort of Google-watcher these days or have been a Google junkie without realizing it.

A couple of days ago I found an entertaining video on YouTube (how apropos) of interesting sites and places to visit in Google Earth. I recently posted about new Google search functionality and presentation options. Before that it was a brief look at Google's Android mobile phone platform. Last year I was - and will soon be again - looking at Google Trends as a potential prediction tool for the American Idol contest winner.

This is sort of interesting as it brings a set of old school (Groups - Usenet, Scholar - refereed journals, and Glossary - reference sources) content together with new school (YouTube, Blogger, Google News commentary) together in a jumble of seemingly disparate audiences through Google-branded channels. It clearly extends new school functionality (Web 2.0) into old school mediums (proto-web and Web 1.0) while trying to preserve or normalize the presentation, experience and general consumption of content and services. Through this normalization process, Google is able to preserve/build brand recognition (Google TM) Grand Central, "a production of Google." Their info page asks and answers: "What is GrandCentral? Get all the same calls, but in a whole new way." That's all fine and dandy; it's nothing you can't get from existing, consumer VoIP providers. Their feature set is pretty comprehensive which conceptually place it as a virtual voice communication firewall in some regards.

That's kind of cool but it doesn't seem like a Googlesque sort of venture. Until you add other Google services. Now you have an interesting stack supplying different, but converging on, fully integrated services:

• Unified messaging and search through Gmail, Gtalk, Google SMS, GOOG-411, Grand Central and Android-powered phones - interactive communication anytime, anywhere.
• Location-specific and/or context-relative search through traditional Google search, Google Local/Maps, geo-tagged Picasa pictures, Google's Ride Finder and Transit - find anything and find a way to get to it.
• Topical information via Google Trends, Google Finance, Google SMS and storage through Google Notes and Google Docs/Spreadsheets - search for time-sensitive information through a comparative search funnel, world markets and your own content and have results presented in next-to-real-time via SMS or your personalized iGoogle hompage or Google Desktop.
  
• Organization and sharing/presentation through Google Personalized Search, Google Docs/Calendar, Google Notes, Google Bookmarks, various Alerts (news, SMS, calendar alerts, Blogger post alerts, etc.)
  

This is only a partial analysis (and none too in-depth, by any means) and doesn't take into account relevant issues, such as Google's wireless 700 MHz spectrum bid, which help with the convergence understanding and visualization. I'll post again as it's sort of fun to be an armchair Google strategist.

Google Earth Fun

Ten minutes of mostly entertaining Google Earth fun.


Secrets Of Google Earth

The PC World staff have some still shots of some of the highlights as well as a Google Earth placemark file you can download and import to explore on your own.

My Coffee Maker...Seg Faulted???

So it's snowing today and I'm working from home for other reasons. Isn't it nice to enjoy a cup of hot, freshly brewed coffee in the morning. It sure is...until your coffee maker decides to dump core.

Crazy.

I haven't tried it again but if I need a new unit it damned well better be able to receive SNMP traps so I can set it to brew while I'm away.

Useful Kibble

I've been catching-up on some reading and thought I would simply share three sites/feeds that I find to be truly useful. In no particular order:

• Lifehacker, "an award-winning, daily blog that features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently."
• Wise Bread "is a community of bloggers here to help you live large on a small budget."
• Parent Hacks "is a collaborative website that collects and publishes parents’ tips, recommendations, workarounds, and bits of wisdom – their hacks – in a single pot so we can all partake."
• Geekdad, "tech toys, science projects and other nerdy things to do with your kids."

They may not have ground-breaking news, cutting edge technology reviews or deep, theoretical insights but I always manage to extract some useful kibble from them to apply to my daily existence.

Great Analysis of the World's Under-Sea Fiber Network

"A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."

New Google Search Features

Google has introduced some new search features as experimental through Google Labs. They've added

• right- and left-handed search navigation
• keyboard shortcuts for search results
• keyword suggestions
• alternate views for search results



I like the left-handed search navigation and was playing with the layout and widgets a bit myself last summer when playing with Google's Web Toolkit. eBay has been doing some very similar UI work in its eBay Playground site that I've enjoyed. Amazon tends to overwhelm me at times with JSON this and AJAX that and they can't seem to resist the urge to package the search results and product descriptions to the extreme. I guess this shouldn't surprise me so much as they are a self-billed department store. Netflix, on the other hand, strikes the right balance with me through their consistent and concise detail drill-down through the AJAX essentials, XMLHttpRequest object and javascript onmouseover() event.

I don't particularly care about keyboard shortcuts and search results. This is a personal inconsistency however as I don't use keyboard shortcuts in Gmail either but almost always use the keyboard to navigate between applications, tabs and the OS in general. Maybe this is my unverbalized position that I just don't like the way Google implemented keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'm just inconsistent after all.

The keyword suggestions have been available as a Google Labs offering called Google Suggest for a while and the search bar in Firefox provides JSON-enabled search term suggestions.

The alternative search results are a great move forward with regard to search result presentation, specifically addressing the need for better contextual-based and grouped/ordered search results. I've written about this previously and was eager for new search primitives to address this perceived shortcoming or at minimum search options that accomplished the same thing.

At least I'm not alone in liking the latest search presentation options. Ars Technica described it simply as "awesome".

A Brave, New Semester

2nd semester, 2 more classes:

• BUS 515: Legal and Ethical Context of Technological Organizations
• OIE 541: Operations Risk Management

I'm hoping for a less strenuous semester than last.

Hiatus

Not that anyone reads this blog but I've been on hiatus for the past month or so. Gobs and gobs of work, class, family and holiday commitments. Back for a month or so until classes resume.

Google's Android Platform

I'm excited about the Android mobile phone platform and SDK coming out of Google. Here's the "official" overview:

PDF Desktop Clutter - Things I've Been Meaning To Read

Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information by Henry E. Smith

A Capabilities-Based Strategy for Army Security Cooperation by Jennifer D. P. Moroney, Adam Grissom, Jefferson P. Marquis

A Framework for Classifying and Comparing Models of Cyber Security Investment to Support Policy and Decision-Making by Rachel Rue, Shari Lawrence Pfleeger and David Ortiz

FOREVER MINUS A DAY? SOME THEORY AND EMPIRICS OF OPTIMAL COPYRIGHT by RUFUS POLLOCK

"When was the last time you were truly energized by ideas?"

The Cato University Home Study Course.

Not cheap but certainly valuable.

First Sign of the Apocalypse?

"Sun Microsystems Inc., once one of the most vociferous opponents of Microsoft Corp. and Windows, now plans to resell the operating system."

A Game-theoretic Framework for Creating Optimal SLA/Contract

Intriguing paper. Game theory is certainly a key tools of negotiations, conflict resolution, optimal cooperation problems, etc. Very interesting to see it applied in a practical manner to IT-related contracts.

Abstract: An SLA/Contract is an agreement between a client and a service provider. It specifies desired levels of service and penalties in case of default. It is of interest from the Service Providers point of view, to determine the optimal contract, that will maximize its utility. In this work we model the situation based on the notion of Moral Hazard: providing a good service is costly and results are affected by the resources involved. As a consequence, a credible contract must fulfill the incentive compatibility constraint. We extend the above model to take into account the possibility that there might different types of clients, and that the Service Provider will offer a menu of contracts intended for each of these clients, as a means of maximizing utility. From the Service Providers point of view, finding an optimal contract will consist of solving a nonlinear optimization problem subject to constraints. We derive conditions under which these constraints will take a simple form and we analyze a scenario, in which, the randomness comes from the Response Time of a given IT Service, and the input is the number of servers that will be dedicated to each client.

Reading List #6

I'm winding down from vacation so here's another Reading List comprised of three selections obtained from Sherman's Books & Stationary in Freeport, Maine:

Enjoy!

Reading List #5

During a lovely week relaxing in York Beach, Maine, the following books were either started or finished:

Enjoy!

'Sunk costs' and the war

University of San Francisco economics professor Bruce Wydick has an exceptionally clear op-ed piece in the 15 August 2007 issue of USA Today regarding America's involvement in the Iraq war.

It's Wikilicious!

The hype du jour is that a clever analysis tool for wikipedia entries and interesting/entertaining sources that edit/massacre/delete entries that pertain to themselves now exists.

* (I don't recall where I read this first today but to keep things on the up-and-up it was either Slashdot or Wired through my feed reader).

It seems that one can data-mine *.wikipedia.org via online search or download of a snapshot image with all previous edits, a la a useful audit trail. OK, that doesn't seem too interesting. Until...one looks at the sources of the edits and the effects and affects of these edits.

This is a perfect example, without drawing attention to myself, of the difference between data and information and the relation between the two. Data is available...it's up to individuals or processes to transform, and hopefully protect, it into information.

The New Age of Ignorance

As a follow-up to my last post concerning the systemic and intentional attempts to dissuade students from studying mathematics, I thought I would just offer a pointer to this, by way of the Edge, article from The Guardian:

The New Age of Ignorance

We take our young children to science museums, then as they get older we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most adults have very little understanding of how the world works.

Mathematics: Seriously, Just Say "No!"

In a previous post, I commented on a trend in the UK where students were being discouraged from taking "unnecessary," higher level mathematics classes. By way of Slashdot, it seems that is is an issue in Australia as well. The poster states and asks:

"The claim is that Australian schools are actively discouraging students from taking upper level math courses to boost their academic results on school league tables. How widespread is this phenomenon? Are schools taking similar measures in the US and Canada?"

I ask again: Will science education in the classroom be dead by the time my kids go to school?

Data v. Information

I had fun with a previous post regarding a data visualization tool called many eyes, from IBM alphaWorks Services. There are some nice graphing templates available but pretty graphs simply do not the wonderful experience make. OpenOffice CALC and Microsoft Excel can produce a multitude of graphs in a variety of canned formats but do they really assist in helping one understand the data being presented to them.

Are they capable though, as tools, to transform data into information? The distinction may or may not be a subtle but the implications are huge. We're generally over-run with data and consider so much of it to be throw-away. Information, however - information being data with some sort of context applied to it - one holds onto as long as possible because the context applied to the data, the transform or function applied to some data set, increases the data's value and elevates it to that of information.

Consider a couple of simple examples:

What does this string of data mean, if anything: 011903124555555

1. Well, it could be a random string of 16 digits and not very interesting (highly likely).
2. Out-of-country phone dialing number? (yes, US Embassy in Turkey)
3. Credit card number? (same format for Visa/MasterCard but not a valid number)
4. USPS/FedEx/UPS/DHL tracking number? (UPS if you drop their "1Z" prefix)
   
5. US social security number? (Massachusetts SSN with some cruft appended to the end).
6. Product SKU (I seem to recall that there are standardized SKU formats)
   

We just don't know, without any context applied to it. Now, what if we thought about another string of digits in the context of identity theft:

• 034011234,Last,First,Acct#

Huh...that looks important and maybe should be protected. Maybe it's a person with an account # and MA SSN on-record. The problem though, is that if the suspect data were changed to be:

• Acct#,034011234,Last,First

It could become meaningless because the transformation changed through simple re-ordering of data elements and the context may no longer be identifiable therefore leaving the data as data. There's a good chance, however, in this specific case that the context could be inferred. What happens if we eliminate the comma delimiters and just spew a line of text in the hope that it will be properly caught and processed?

• Acct#034011234LastFirst

Here we have an example where Acct# and SSN have been concatenated and probably lose meaning outside of the process that knows to stop reading the Acct# field after X characters and read the next nine characters as the SSN. First and last names can be extremely difficult to distinguish without capitalization and/or localized knowledge of standard names. Michael Smith may mean nothing to a non-English speaker.

So what does this mean from a practical point of view? Without waxing philosophical, from an information security and protection standpoint, it is an extremely compelling reason to give serious consideration to Translucent Databases, which I will post about at a future point in time.