Google had a media event at the Computer History Museum today to announce new mobile computing services, and seem to have brought to light the kind of “jetpack and flying car” futuristic functionality that mobile computing aficionados have been talking about for years. I’m sure it will all be a little creaky at first, but today may prove to be an important mobile computing landmark.Google Goggles (IMO one of the all-time great product names) is a picture-based search tool, wherein you can take a picture of something and have Google return search results based on it. This could be good to identify something you don’t recognize, or learn more about something you do. Lately I’ve been using the iPhone app Red Laser to archive a list of products I’m interested in and do a quick price comparison search. Goggles seems like a cool way to do the same thing for everything else in the world. This sounds like the first step in a Google-enabled augmented reality service, which I’m sure Google engineers are working on as we speak.
Search by Voice (which is available to be via the iPhone app but which I’ve never felt the need to use) has been expanded to work on more devices and in English, Mandarin, and Japanese.
What’s Nearby is a location-based search that’s part of an updated Google Maps app on Android devices, and soon to be available on the web-based Google Maps on other devices (no word on whether the iPhone’s Maps app will get the update). What is does is simply give you a list of the ten closest places (restaurants, shops, points of interest) that are near your location.
In short, your location is a very important data point when it comes to mobile computing, and your lat/long coordinates and even what direction your facing and what particular object you’re looking at are important parameters for your searching. Google obviously wants to be at the hub of all your searching efforts, and they’re trying to pull in all the relevant data to make that searching more effective, and, let’s be honest, more flashy and more fun too. We’ll see how these feature evolve and expand over the next few years, and whether they’re ever as integral to the mobile computing experience on other mobile platforms as they are on Android.
With all the big brother added value Android is becoming a really compelling mobile OS.
I think Google is starting to prefer Android (sometimes unwillingly). Google Nav and Voice etc are best (or only available) on Android.
At some point it will be hard to compete with small mobile devices that have the power of millions of Google servers at their disposal.
Brave new world indeed.
That doesn’t raise a red alarm bell in your mind that Google will essentially dominate every mobile computing task in your life? We saw what happened with Microsoft, and everyone loved them at first too. If something similar happens with Google, it will be worse than anything Microsoft has ever managed or even dreamed. It’s not only scary what Google are essentially trying to do, but how willingly most people just accept it and don’t really think about the implications.
Again, who loved microsoft at first? Their first big accomplishment was plain stolen from Apple! I did not saw Google doing things like that yet.
But I agree we should fear Google, how long they will maintain the “don’t be evil” thing? I would hate to see that kind of power on the hands of companies like Apple who think they can decide things for us and to the hell people that doesn’t agree with them.
Nobody loved MS. MS stole IP, bought out real innovation, abused monopolistic practices for economic gain, destroyed standards wherever possible, and barely made a decent software product.
Out of all of MS’s software, only Word 2.0, .net IDE/Dev tools, NT 4, Win2k, Windows 7, and ie 5 were any good.
Pretty much every 3 years MS would come out with a decent product, and then foul it up and ruin it soon after.
Word 6 copied Word 2, because all other versions were horrid. Windows XP ruined win2k, IE 7/8, etc.
Microsoft has consistently made buggy, crash-prone, bloatware and used their clout as a monopoly to destroy good products in their infancy.
The only real counter to MS was Opensource since it changed the rules of financial gain in the software industry.
And sadly, as a young man in my 20s, I still remember all of this, and even tried to get away from the wintel duopoly by switching to a PPC iBook years ago. As I write this running windows 7 on my Macbook Pro.
Wow, how old were you at that time? 12?.
The big difference between google and microsoft is open standards. I can export pretty much anything from their services into open formats and reuse that anywhere else. Where microsoft thrived on lockin.
But can you expunge it from their “services”?
‘Goggles’ sounds rather useful, albeit not as a mobile app, but as one I’d use while looking through holiday photos, and trying to remember what it depicted. I came away from a recent South American holiday with dozens of pictures of old churches and colonial buildings, and very little idea which of these buildings is which…
I wonder how would the “Did you mean…?” feature of the current Google search would like with Goggles. For example, you upload a picture of some famous politician (to use it as a search “string”) and then you get “Did you mean” with the picture of some equally famous pornographic star… I’m just noticing how delicate that feature might turn out, as is the case with the current text search on http://images.google.com occasionally.
Edited 2009-12-08 09:49 UTC
thank you
Edited 2009-12-09 07:35 UTC