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LouCypher shared an item on Google Reader
March 8, 2010 1:51 PM - Sign in to comment - Link

comScore just posted its monthly report on online video viewership, and the total number of videos viewed in January slipped slightly as compared with December.

In December, 179 million people watched 33.2 billion videos. In January, it was 173 million people and 32.4 billion videos. It’s not a big decline, and we already saw in one of our monthly top webisode round-ups that special holiday content can boost viewership during December, so we know that this probably isn’t indicative of a downward trend.

In fact, the larger trend is very much up. YouTube — by far the web video viewership leader — had users watching an average of 93 videos in January. That’s 50% more than a year ago, even though it’s almost a 4% decline since December.

YouTube still dominates, though. “Google Sites” (mostly YouTube) accounted for 39.5% of web video views in January. The nearest competitor was Hulu with just 2.8%, followed by Microsoft sites with 1.5% and Yahoo sites with 1.3%.

The narrative we’re hearing here is that we’ve settled into something of a groove. There’s an upward trend, but the numbers are still dominated by almost exactly the same outlets. Are there any startups you believe will upset these stats in the future or is this going to be the lay of the land for the foreseeable future?

Tags: ComScore, Google, hulu, microsoft, News, web video, Yahoo, youtube


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The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the Hot Trends list. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here's a snapshot:

Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana's purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham's finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock's dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of "Avatar" during the ceremony:


The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here's a look at a few of the star searches last night:


Finally, the evening wasn't all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.

Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow's height and Miley Cyrus's mother's tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney's (Elisabetta Canalis).

So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller’s appearance as a Na'vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech.

As we've seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).

We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent... oh, they're telling me to wrap it up...!

Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst
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China Claims Google Didn't Report Hacking Attack — Mixed statements from Chinese officials coming out of annual parliamentary session, with some reports claiming Google never filed a complaint with the government about the cyber attacks, while others report the two parties are currently in negotiations.
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Google is testing a new television programming search service in conjunction with Dish Network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The service, which appears to be very much in a limited testing phase, runs on a special set-top box and apparently searches content from both the Dish programming guide, as well as web video services like YouTube.

Without any details about the specific implementation, it’s unclear how similar this venture is to the new upcoming TiVo Premiere service that was announced last week.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Wall Street Journal’s report dealt less with the service itself and more with the technology that powers the set-top box. Apparently, portions of Google’s Android OS power the Google-enabled device. While Android has been spotted on other devices like tablets and netbooks (or, so-called smartbooks), a move to the embedded device space could be huge.

As consumer electronics rapidly shift toward connectivity (hey, it might have taken us 15 years, but now everything is moving at a rapid pace), there are huge opportunities for embedded systems developers. As it stands, most embedded devices use either a custom-built kernel or a modified version of BusyBox, but Google could theoretically offer a framework that would be both free and value-rich for device makers, while also offering opportunities that impact Google’s core business.

Of course, this isn’t Google’s first foray into television. Back in 2008, Google AdWords launched Google TV Ads as a platform for companies to buy airtime in various markets. That project hasn’t been as successful as other Google ventures, but perhaps a more direct way of tying search to television would have better results.

What do you think about the possibility of having Google on your TV? Let us know!

Tags: dish network, embedded devices, google search, google tv, iptv


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Google is looking to integrate its Latitude and Buzz offerings, according to a story today in eWeek.com. Which means Buzz’s privacy problems may be about to get even bigger.

Google continues to draw flak from privacy advocates over Buzz, which launched last month. The company has scrambled to alter certain features and give users more control after some complained that their Gmail and Talk contacts were publicly released, and Google eventually admitted that the product had been rushed out the door.

Latitude, which launched last year, enables users to find friends and broadcast their whereabouts to others. Those aren’t revolutionary features, of course — Loopt and Useful Networks are just two that have gained some traction with similar friend-finding offerings. But Latitude’s tracking functionality is potentially more invasive than Buzz, which requires users to check in every time they want to update their location. And Google a few months ago sparked controversy by adding location alerts and history, features that inform users when their fellow Latitude friends are nearby and allowing users to see where they’ve been. (To its credit, Google wisely requires additional opt-ins for the new Latitude features.)

Integrating Latitude features with Buzz — which has millions of users — will further complicate a service that for some is already too confusing and who are likely to inadvertently broadcast their location information to Buzz-using friends even if Google does a good job of informing them that the two offerings sometimes work as one. Unless Google first makes Buzz much simpler, CEO Eric Schmidt will have a lot more opportunities to blame users for misunderstanding the service.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Doug88888


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LONDON (Reuters) - Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right — with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China — and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey.

A poll of 27,000 adults in 26 countries for the BBC World Service showed 78 percent of internet users believed the Web gave them greater freedom, while nine in 10 said it was a good place to learn. Respondents in the United States were above the average in believing the internet was a source for greater freedom and they were also more confident than most in expressing their opinions online.

“Despite worries about privacy and fraud, people around the world see access to the Internet as their fundamental right,” said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan which conducted the survey. “They think the Web is a force for good, and most don’t want governments to regulate it.”

However, others felt concern about spending time online, with 65 percent of respondents in Japan saying they did not feel they could express their opinions safely online, a sentiment that was also felt in South Korea, France, Germany and China.

The issue of Internet freedoms hit the headlines earlier this year after Google threatened to quit China, the world’s biggest internet market, over strict censorship rules.

Of the 27,000 surveyed, more than half agreed that the “Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.”

That belief was particularly strong in South Korea, Nigeria and Mexico while residents in Pakistan, Turkey and China were the least likely to agree, with only 12 percent, 13 percent and 16 percent respectively strongly agreeing.

Google launched its China search site in 2006 and complies with local laws requiring censorship of certain content such as pornography and sensitive subjects such as the banned Fulun Gong spiritual movement and Tibetan independence.

Other international groups such as Microsoft and local players including China’s search leader Baidu must also comply with those laws.

Over 70 percent of respondents in Japan, Mexico and Russia said they could not live without the internet.

Almost 50 percent of those who used the Internet said they most valued the ability to find information. Over 30 percent valued the ability to interact and communicate with others while 12 percent saw it as a source for entertainment.

Of the areas of concern, the poll found that fraud was the greatest worry, ahead of violent and explicit content and threats to privacy.

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Sharon Lindores)

Photo: (Florian/Flickr)

More From Reuters:

More from Wired.com:

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Not many companies could get away with defending controversial data retention practices by saying that the data is needed to "learn from good guys, fight off bad guys, [and] invent the future." But that's how Google sees itself and its practices—not surprising from a company that would give itself an unofficial motto like "don't be evil."

I had the chance recently to sit down with two of Google's top privacy people: deputy general counsel Nicole Wong and security/privacy engineer Alma Whitten. While the "good guy/bad guy" and "don't be evil" quotes may seem too cute by half to some, Wong and Whitten made a strong pitch for the truth of both slogans. In their view, Google really is fighting the good fight when it comes to your online privacy.

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reMail iPhone app re-released under Apache 2 license

Two weeks ago, we reported that Internet search giant Google had acquired third-party iPhone mail application reMail. At the time, Google rehired reMail CEO and programmer Gabor Cselle to work as a product manager on the Gmail team. reMail was then pulled from the App Store and Google decided to discontinue the app, only offering support through the end of March. However, Google recently contacted Ars to say that it had decided to make the code available as open source on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License.

The Apache 2.0 License states that the code is free to use, alter, and redistribute as the user sees fit. Further, users can charge for any aspect of the software they choose, including the application itself or support. That means people can use portions of code to add functionality in their own applications or create totally new ones without having to release them under an open source license. Google usually favors the Apache license over alternatives and uses it for Android.

This may still mean the end of reMail, but it's good news for anyone looking to incorporate more advanced e-mail functionality into their own applications. As Cselle pointed out in his blog post, he has already dealt with many of the obstacles associated with developing an e-mail client, including communication with IMAP and parsing MIME messages. In other words, there's no need to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

If you're interested in poking around, the code can be found on Google Code, where there has already been a fair amount of action since the announcement on Friday.

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(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)

What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?

While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don't always get the attention they need and deserve.

A year ago we outlined our goals for the next chapter for Google.org. We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we're incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology.

This past year, we:
  • Ramped up Google PowerMeter to help consumers reduce their electricity use and save money, secured utility and device partners, and launched the API on code.google.com to help expand partner access globally.
  • Introduced Earth Engine, a new computational platform we have begun building for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery to monitor changes in key environmental indicators like forest coverage, at COP15 in December.
  • Quickly expanded Google Flu Trends to 20 countries and 38 languages as the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world. We also added city-level flu estimates to 121 U.S. cities and developed the Flu Shot Finder to help people find vaccine locations.
  • Responded to earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, with maps, updated earth imagery, and networking projects, and built Person Finder to help people find information about their loved ones after a disaster.
  • Advocated for policies to spur innovation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal (RE<C), and our engineers worked on ways to reduce the cost of solar thermal and other RE<C technologies.
We will continue to greenlight large scale engineering projects that build on Google's strengths in technology, our computing infrastructure and global teams.

Overall, our philanthropic mission at Google includes our Google.org projects and a range of other initiatives — from grants, scholarships and other charitable giving programs to in-kind product support for non-profits. Our founders have set a goal of devoting approximately 1% of Google's equity and yearly profits to philanthropy. In 2009, we devoted around $100 million plus in-kind giving to a broad range of philanthropic efforts. Here are some highlights:
  • Academic scholarships and awards: We provide scholarships to encourage students of various backgrounds, ethnicities and gender to excel in their studies in hopes that these and other programs will help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
  • Academic grants: We support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in core areas relevant to our mission. We fund projects across a variety of subjects, host visiting faculty members at Google, and have launched the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
  • Holiday charitable gift: We made $22 million in donations in 2009 to a couple of dozen deserving charities around the world to help organizations that have been stretched thin by more requests for help in a year of fewer donations.
  • Employee gift matching: Google matches up to $6,000 for each employee's annual charitable contributions and contributes $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers through our "Dollars for Doers" program to encourage employee participation in charitable causes.
  • Charitable Giving Council: We support grants for Googler-led partnerships on causes such as K-12 educational initiatives in science, math and technology.
  • Community affairs: We invest in communities where Google has a presence around the world, creating opportunities for Googlers to invest time and expertise, engage in local grant making and build partnerships with local stakeholders.

In addition, our Google for Non-Profits site provides information and links to free tools to help charitable groups promote their cause, raise money, collaborate with others and operate more efficiently. Google Grants, for example, offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profit organizations. Since the program began, we've donated over $625 million worth of AdWords advertising to all kinds of charitable organizations.

To keep up with our activities, check out the Google.org blog.

Posted by SMegan Smith, VP and General Manager, Google.org
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Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.

Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we've analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we've learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.

You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here's the top 20 to get you started:
  1. School comparisons
  2. Unemployment
  3. Population
  4. Sales tax
  5. Salaries
  6. Exchange rates
  7. Crime statistics
  8. Health statistics (health conditions)
  9. Disaster statistics
  10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
  11. Last names
  12. Poverty
  13. Oil price
  14. Minimum wage
  15. Consumer price index, inflation
  16. Mortality
  17. Cost of living
  18. Election results
  19. First names
  20. Accidents, traffic violations
You'll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.

To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it's important for me to note that the data only covers one week's worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.

The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it's easy to access, understand and communicate. That's why today we're also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We've embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:



This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click "explore data" to dig deeper.

Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.

With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we've added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We're excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.

We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.

Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team
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Cyber-Nerdy Cities Woo Google's Fiber-Optic Service With Viral Campaigns

Hoping to be selected as test sites for Google's upcoming high-speed fiber network, many cities have launched weird viral campaigns. According to an Associated Press report, Google set the nomination deadline for March 26th, and will announce the winners by the end of the year.

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, told the AP that Google wants cities that are ready to hit the ground running. "They want a fast, easy rollout," he said. "They are really looking for a community that is fully bought into this." Judging by a few of the more interesting nominees that PC magazine found, that won't be a problem.

Continue reading Cyber-Nerdy Cities Woo Google's Fiber-Optic Service With Viral Campaigns

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Cyber-Nerdy Cities Woo Google's Fiber-Optic Service With Viral Campaigns originally appeared on Switched on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook (Reuters) — Reuters - The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals.
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Android finally invades AT&T — AT&T has added the Google Android platform to its portfolio of mobile devices with the launch of the Motorola Backflip.

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comScore: Online Video Views Down Across The Board In January

comScore has just released its US online video rankings for January 2010, and the results aren’t positive. Overall views dropped by around 2.5%, with  32.4 billion in January vs. 33.2 billion in December. And Hulu, which celebrated crossing the 1 billion view milestone for the first time in December, dipped back down to 903 milion views. The drop can’t be blamed entirely on seasonality, either, — January 2009’s overall video views were up 4% over December 2008.

Rankingwise, there weren’t many changes. Google Sites (which is essentially YouTube) is still the reigning champion, with Hulu and Microsoft Sites still rounding out the top three. Fox Interactive Media fell from 4th to 6th place as its views dropped from 550 million December to 293 million in January.


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High-Speed Network Poses Hurdles for Google — Google's plan to provide ultrahigh-speed Internet connections faces a big challenge: building the network and making sure there are services available to take advantage of it.
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Google Testing TV Search Service With Dish — According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is testing a new TV programming search service with Dish Network: The service—which runs on TV set-top boxes using elements of Google’s Android operating system—allows users to search content from Dish as well as other Web video, like YouTube, and to personalize a lineup of shows, according to these [...]

*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the "View Original Post" link below. ***


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Asymptotics and usability — In Google Wave, when a user is editing a wave, every keystroke entails sending messages back and forth between that user, the Wave servers, and every other person who has the same wave open at the same time, so that all users can see what everybody else is typing as they type it. But that's not so bad: it's just a small message, and everything is still pretty fast, at least on a new wave with not much in it yet. Despite all this communication the system can be very usable and responsive.

However, when a wave grows to a hundred or so messages and a few tens of thousands of characters, everything slows down to a crawl. Each keystroke takes a second or so to process. Typing directly into a wave can become so painful that it can be much easier to switch back and forth between a separate text editor and Wave and to copy and paste large chunks of text (each a single operation, as fast as a single keystroke) rather than editing directly within the wave. The only way to return to a responsive system seems to be to archive the wave and start a fresh one.

So far this is verifiable personal experience but the rest is speculation. My wild guess at the underlying cause for this lack of scalability: as each keystroke is processed, it entails an amount of work by the browser, or worse an amount of communication between the browser and the Wave servers, that's linear in the size of the wave. For instance, it's plausible to me (though I don't know the details of the communication protocol) that each update causes the server to communicate the entire new updated state of the wave to the browser. The net effect is that, if one creates a wave by typing a character at a time, the number of bytes communicated, over the course of the wave, is quadratic in the number of characters in the wave. And as we all (should) know, linear algorithms scale well to large amounts of data and quadratic algorithms don't.

The moral: asymptotic analysis matters for usability, even for problem sizes that are not massive (there is no problem fitting a whole wave into main memory) and even in situations such as this one where the designers are probably thinking less about algorithmic efficiency and more about functionality and user interface design. If your system doesn't scale, it will become slow and unusable when its users push its boundaries, and that will limit the uses people make of it.
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Google Labs visualizes Seattle's Tableau with "Data Explorer"

A month after Seattle's Tableau Software launched a free online tool for creating and sharing dynamic data visualization charts, Google Labs has announced a free online tool for creating and sharing dynamic data visualization charts.

Like Tableau Public, Google's "Public Data Explorer" comes as the federal government is posting huge buckets of data online through its Data.gov transparency project, stoking demand for tools to analyze and present the information.

But there are a few big differences in what's being offered to end users.

Google's experiment is relatively closed and seems aimed at building partnerships with public agencies as much as providing free Web tools. At this point its tools can only be used to analyze a handful of datasets that Google's procured from public sources. Google's asking agencies to suggest additional data that it can upload and publish on its platform.

Tableau already has partnerships with agencies using its commercial visualization tools in-house. The free public version released last month is more open than Google's and can be used on any data. Users of the free version also have to share the underlying data via the visualization, while Google's tool doesn't yet allow the data to be downloaded directly.

Here's an example of a visualization created with Google's new tool:

Here's a Tableau Public visualization blending unemployment with venture capital and housing data:

2009 Housing Prices
2009 Housing Prices

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Android coders get high-speed graphics ability — Google has released a new native programming kit that provides new graphics abilities to programmers using Android 2.0 phones.
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2011 Ford Super Duty the answer to the $64,000 question

(All photos by the author)

Didn’t Ford just give us a new Super Duty, like, two years ago?

Yes they did. So why a complete makeover for this segment?

The government.

Yes, lawmakers in our nation’s capitol have mandated stricter emissions guidelines for the (diesel-powered) heavy duty pickup segment for 2010 and automakers have hit the end of their “grace periods.”

Ford (with GM to soon follow and Chrysler did theirs last year) gave its Super Duty pickup line not only a pair of totally new engines and transmission, but decided to address the entire vehicle with this model makeover. The result? The baddest big boy toy to date from the big blue oval.

… [visit site to read more]

Related posts:

  1. 2010 Ram Heavy Duty
  2. Wednesday Walkaround: Most capable 2009 Ford F-150
  3. Dodge Ram vs. Ford F-150: Round two

Tags: ,

Related posts


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Foobar Combines Firefox Address and Search Boxes [Downloads]

Firefox: If you want to compact your user interface in Firefox and turn your address box into a destination for not just URLs but searches too, Foobar combines the address box and search box into one.

If you often find yourself typing in a search command into the address box when you actually meant to use the little search box off to the side, Foobar is a handy addition to your Firefox arsenal. Install the extension and your address bar becomes a little more spartan, the address box and search box are now one.

URLs typed into the box take you to the site, but anything outside a recognized address like HTTP, FTP, or ABOUT: becomes a search in the selected search engine. In the above screenshot my entry of site:lifehacker.com Firefox will pull up the Google search results for Firefox on Lifehacker.com.

Have a handy Firefox extension—interface-altering or otherwise—to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Foobar [Mozilla Add-ons via How-To Geek]


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Rapportive replaces Gmail ads with useful social information

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RapportiveThere are a number of email plugins that look to give you contextual information about the person you're communicating with. The first one I tried (and arguably the best I've seen) is Xobni, an Outlook plugin.

There's now a similar plugin available for Gmail users called Rapportive. Rapportive replaces the ads you normally see in the right-hand sidebar with a profile of the person you're emailing with that is automatically generated by searching online services for your correspondent's email address. Rapportive is only available to users that are using either Firefox or Chrome as their browser, since Firefox and Chrome have a plugin architecture.

The information Rapportive provides is interesting, and it searches a surprising number of online services. But I can't help but think that they're putting themselves on shaky ground by choosing to replace the ads in Gmail; I doubt Google could easily block this behavior technologically, but if Rapportive gets too popular I don't doubt that Google's lawyers might be able to block it, permanently.

In the mean time, if you're looking for a clever way to get more information about the people you correspond with the side-effect of blocking ads in your Gmail, have a look at Rapportive.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Rapportive replaces Gmail ads with useful social information originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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