Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Google has simplified their Chinese domain name to g.cn in order to compete with the Chinese Search Engine Giant - baidu.com. It's hard for us English speaking users to imagine how hard is it to spell "google"? But many Chinese users often mis-spell the name. I suppose it is pretty hard for a non-English speaker to remember 2 "O" and 1 "L"... Google first introduced "guge.com" which reflects to a Chinese word, but not seems to be so effective. Recently, they launched "g.cn" and hoping to burn it to the Chinese internet users' mind. However, I am quite skeptical with the effectiveness of Google's domain name strategy. One must see that Baidu does have some unique services such as the mp3 search engine. It is highly controversial (often violates copy rights issues), but it simply works for the millions of teenagers...

It looks like my UTstarcom cell phone (with Windows Mobile 5) may enable me to edit my Google Documents now. Google blog also mentioned google docs now have a mobile device interface for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. Just go to:

http://docs.google.com/m

According to New York Post, a German artist - Marcus Kison invented a ring that displays your "Google Ranking"! It displays a number which reflects how many web pages are mentioning you. (e.g. Paris Hilton would have a number of 17,500,000) Every time you plug the ring to the internet, it downloads the most recent "Google Ranking" and updates the number led. Guess who would have the highest ranked ring today? President George Bush - 40,100,000. The "Google Ring" will hit the market next year at approximately $700, according to Kison.

I wonder how would the ring separate Tim Wang A from Tim Wang B? And how easy is it to hack the number to 999,999,999? :) Anyway, this is what the prototype of the "Google Ring" looks like:

Ok, first the “Desktop Search)”, then “Input Method Editor”, Google really wants a piece of Microsoft's OS pie. It's "Desktop Strategy" is helping Google to gain ground in the client-side applications. Google China launched the Google Chinese Input Method Editor (IME) to allow users to input Chinese without using the OS built-in inputing system. It's a free software which can be downloaded as any other standard Google tools. Input method editors allow writers to write in Chinese characters using the alphabet keyboard. According to Google China officials, Google is considering to develop IMEs for other languages at the moment.

According to Google, the Google Chinese IME will benefit from millions of searched keywords on Google to deliver more precise and versatile character combinations. This means it would save valuable correction time when typing Chinese using standard alphabet keyboard.

One unique feature of the Google Chinese IME is that it can be linked to a Gmail account, enabling users to customize a Chinese IME and have a personal dictionary that can follow them even when they log on from other computers.

The tool was made available yesterday afternoon and it was immediately tested by many users. So far the users find Google Chinese IME is quite advanced in the following areas:

- Precise character delivers when typing long sentences in Pinyin (Chinese Alphabet Pronunciation System). Some Chinese IMEs are weak when typing character combinations that are long than 4 characters.

- Its vast database of keywords, accumulated from its search services include many modern vocabularies really makes the typing more efficient.

- Google Chinese IME has a unique error correction function which helps to correct human errors when typing the alphabets (e.g. A miss-typed Pinyin like “tign” will be automatically corrected to “ting”).

- The fuzzy logic behind the inputing is more intelligent than other Chinese IMEs.

- It supports inputs for both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese characters.

- Users can create “customized shortcuts” to get the often used character combinations.

- It also support stroke inputing methods in case users don't know the exact Pinyin for the desired word.

- Its English/Chinese dictionary is quite powerful.

I guess Google realized they can't possibly create the whole World in 3D by themselves. Therefore Google released a free 3D modeling software - Google SketchUp. It is a very easy-to-learn 3D modeling application where one can use to create 3D models of architectures in few minutes! You can use this tool for any 3D modeling projects. But what Google really wants you to do is to create realistic 3D models that mirrors the physical architectures in the real world and then upload them to Google Earth. This way, 3D lovers will create a 3D earth for them for free! Great deal eh? What's worth to mention is that there are only two types of files you can export to, 2D graphic (jpg, tif, bmp, png) or Google Earth (kmz). This means it's unlikely you can export your 3D models for other programs such as Blender, 3D Max, Maya or Secondlife.

Google just announced it's Chinese name - 谷歌 in Beijing on April 12. (谷 - gǔ - grain / corn / valley 歌 - gē - song) Together, Google's new Chinese name can be translated as "harvest song" and the Chinese pronounciation is very similiar to "google" in English. This is Google's first name in foreign languages which is purposed for the non-English speaking Chinese surfers. 谷歌.cn had been registered by Google.

This action has sparked a wave of registration of Guge-related domain names. Domain names that has the "guge" combination are all gone as of today.

Since Google established it's Shanghai office in the year 2005, more online users in China start to learn the GOOGLE language. Baidu has taken the lead of the search engine market in China since 2003. According to a recent study by iResearch, there were 56.6% online users use Baidu vs. 32.8% Google users. The third place is held by Yahoo China. According to the study, there are over 97 million online users (87.4%) use search engines on the daily basis in China. This number may exceed 100 million this year.

The online shopping market exceeded 4 billion RMB last year where 3/4 of the sales were based on online ads and the other 1/4 of the sales were generated from online searches. From the data of the North American online market growth, we can expect this ratio (online ads. vs search ads.) will change gradually in China this year.

One challenge Goolge China is facing is that both Baidu and Yahoo support MP3 searches which some what is violating the copy right law of digital music distributions. However, there are dramatic amount of users are choosing the two search engines based on this service. Google needs to either join the game and offer similar MP3 search services or future enforce it's competitors - Baidu and Yahoo China to terminate the commercial MP3 search features.

Google Finance uses both Flash and AJAX to generate their dynamic pages and stock charts. Google Finance uses a Flash based live ticker which allows users to zoom on the chart dynamically. It is a little slow to manipulate though. What I like Google Finance the most is the Blog section at the bottom where you can find the newest blog postings on the symbol you are looking at. Soon or later, I think Google is going to reveal their gigantic blue-print which include all of the smart services they have been beta testing.

There is a new commercial searching service launched by Google China - Google Local. http://bendi.google.com You enter 2 search term, the first one can be a product you are looking for, or the genre of business you are looking for, such as: Pizza, Hot Pot, Noodle. The second search term would be a geographical range like Beijing, 2nd Ring Road East. Then you will receive a list of business names and their phone numbers with precise address. On the right hand side, you get the city map and direction to the business. Commercial businesses can add their names to it for free at: http://www.google.com/local/add/ I am not aware there is an English version of this exist...

Ever after Lee Kaifu switched to Google, the war between Microsoft and Google is no longer behind the curtain. Started this month, Microsoft high up officials constantly make noises on the new MSN Search Engine will beat Google's Search Engine. It looks like Microsoft is no longer fooling around but is ready to take on a direct competition against Google's bread and butter service - web search. How confident is Microsoft?

What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the US market place than Google. - Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa

My immediate impression was, "Man, Microsoft is gonna bundle this new service with VISTA". The answer is not...

Should we add a Google-like search engine but twice as good, hard-core into Windows? Guess what. If we did that, I don't think a company called Google would be very happy. - Neil Holloway

Then how is MSN Search planning on beating Google?

Integrating search into those other applications... makes it very seamless for people." - Neil Holloway

The applications Neil meant here I believe are MSN Messenger and Hotmail etc. I have to say the MSN Messenger has a pretty concrete IM market and Google Talk just started a little too late. Gmail gave a pretty powerful shot to start but there have been mixed feed backs on people are not feeling comfortable with how Google can "spy through" their emails to deliver accurate advertisements.

However, since we are talking about search engines here, how can Microsoft's new search engine be better? Well, this is not really a secret any more, is to go beyond finding URLs and instead focus in on the specific information sought by Internet users:

Generally these days what you get back is URLs, and based upon research, 50 per cent of the time you do a search you don't get the URL you're looking for. - Neil Holloway

This means:

potential home buyers might find a group of houses in the price range and with the precise amenities they're seeking. Or web surfers might find a restaurant with the kind of menu they want in a particular geographic area. - Neil Holloway

The new service will be launched in 6 months period first in North America and UK and then different countries (languages) after every three months. Who will win the supreme? Let's wait and see.

It's interesting to see the comparison image of Google US and Google China from Brian's blog. The Google China Syndrome is spreading widely across the globe in the past week. This is very much reminding me of the movie "Tomorrow Never Dies" but of course I have fate in Google that they are not going to be as "evil" as Carver's media empire. I would also like to point out the media censorship of the Chinese government also include online gambling, pornography, and racial injustices which are common censorship shared world wide.

Oh, by the way, there are many "tricks" to surf out side of the Chinese giant proxy server while you are in China. ;)

Now you can apply a flash interface over the existing Google Map and yet preserves all functionalities of Google Map!

This demo is built based on VGMap. VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. Flash provides for vector drawing, as well as a interactive and animation functionality. This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly.

This new technology simply opens a new dimension to the future Google GPS development. Will give it a try to see how this works...

Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive said yesterday at the Association of National Advertisers annual conference in Phoenix that It would take 300 years to index all the world's information!

"We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years," Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. "The answer is it's going to be a very long time."

This means approximately 5 million terabytes of data, right now, Google has indexed approximately 170 terabytes. Schmidt also revealed some impressive values on Google's mainstream profit, online advertisements:

Of the estimated $283 billion spent on advertising in the United States, $11.3 billion is spent on the Internet, with Google taking in about 1 percent of that, Schmidt said.

Baidu beats Google in delivering detailed online map of Chinese cities. You can now browse through a quite detailed online map database through map.baidu.com. It does not yet have the "Satellite" version but the city maps are quite accurate and impressive. For some reason, Google has not yet attached Chinese maps with their map engine although you can see some detailed satellite images of some major cities in China.

Baidu is one of the leading Chinese search engines. It uses similar spider (bot) driven data collection structure as Google in archiving and indexing online contents. There had been rumors on how baidu “Copied” ideas from Google. From a user’s perspective, there are definitely many similarities between the two search engines. One thing Baidu does and Google doesn’t do is MP3 indexing. It is quite insane how many mp3 songs you can search and download through Baidu MP3 search engine. This has raised some serious concerns over intellectual property and copy rights related issues. Over the last few years, Google has purchased some significant stakes of Baidu. However MP3 searches help Baidu to generate their loyal client communities. So, it’s less likely for Baidu to completely abandon this service in the near future. I am anxious to find out how is Google China going to work with Baidu in the super heated search engine industry.

VS.

Yesterday was Google's 7th birthday. They claim that Google's total archive is 3 times as much as Yahoo according to the search results. Way to go!

video.google is using Flash for the video previews. Very slick and fast. Great quality. Macromedia uses Sorenson Compression to handle all the video compressions in Flash. All you need is an up-to-date Flash Player to view Flash video. It is a more popular standard compare to Real Media, Quick Time or Microsoft ASF. Flash does have a limitation on maximum number of frames in one SWF file - 16000 frames. This is some what limiting video presentations when the file is exceeding the limit. However, Macromedia has introduced a new file time - *.flv which is fully supported by standard Flash players and dedicated for video delivery. Flash 8 has built-in FLV player component makes the authoring experience as easy as drag and drop.

Well, let’s put it this way, the leader of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer wants to personally “bury” Eric Schmidt and the company Google. According to Mark Lucovsky’s sworn statement in the court days ago. Mark was a senior engineer and currently working in Google. He also worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell.

Here is Mark’s statement:

"At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'"Lucovosky said in his statement. Mark replied that he was joining Google. "At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again.
I'm going to f***ing kill Google."

Carefully thought through, just how innovative has Microsoft been in the last 5-8 years? How many "killer applications" have been produced by Microsoft? Other than Microsoft Office, I can’t think of any. I have to admit that they are still doing everything right to sell the Windows product which is a product they tried to bandit for the last ten years. They spend most of their effort on acquiring companies that are threatening them and shut them down. Anyway, good luck to the search engine war against Google. This one is coming to stay I think…

Ever tried to search on the word "Failure" via Google? Try it if you havn't! I think this is caused by millions of web pages contain the word "Failure" and pointing to the official white house page.

From GMail to GTalk? Lead by Georges Harik, Google recently launched the new product - Google Talk! What is it targeting? Instance Messaging market of course! When Google announced the 1G mail box, nobody expected the global Gmail registration fever. Now they are squeezing themselves into the crowded IM industry. According to the recent statistics, among the IM providers, AOL has 41.6 million members, Yahoo Messenger has 19.1 million and MSN has 14.1 users. However, there are constantly new IM products and service providers being established constantly. One of the well known is Skype. We have used the tool in our collaborated Pachyderm project developments many times and the quality was great. Skype is taking the market by its unique digital voice compression and IP to Phone features. Google Talk is certainly seeing this as a good idea to compete with the existing IM giants. The program is less than 1M and you can download it at: http://www.google.com/talk/. Since it is from Google, I'd say give it a try!

Experienced a major server crash. Lost many postings. Tried to recover some from the search engine caches. I found Google cache is more frequently updated than others. I recovered most of my July postings from MSN. Neway, the hosting company promised they have switched to a new and faster database, so, hope this won't happen again.

Google recently launched a stand alone software - Google Earth. The software is free, it allows one to easily pin point a location or find out the flight paths and driving directions between two destinations. The data is based on the google map search engine. It also has a 3D building feature that allows one to tilt the map and if there are any 3D images for the particular section you are viewing, they will show as real 3D figures on the flat panel. When you look for the driving destinations between two locations, you will be given an amazing 3D animation illustrate the entire driving direction. Simply put, this is an amazing application. Why Google doing it? I guess soon or later, Google wants a piece of the GPS pie and plus advertise for travelling related services like Hotels, Resturants, Entertaiment Zones etc... Smart Move!!!
Google GPS Google Earth

Google map is no longer a new toy. Millions around the world have experimented and enjoyed the amazing interactive map engine. Recently, a programmer, Cristian Streng whom used the feature that Google may pin down a location via the Latitude and Longitude, created a small software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. The software is free, however, I imagine the amount of data need to be downloaded from the internet via WAP, which would show up on your monthly bill from your wireless service providers. Anyway, if you want to impress some one or have a really good deal in wireless internet browsing, download it here:
http://www.mgmaps.com/download.php

Google GPS

Interestingly enough, one of my co-worker Joel Chauvin mentioned to me about google's new service "Google Map" this afternoon, then I read this from D'Arcy Norman's blog. It took less than 3 min to find my building in both map version and Satellite version! Quite amazing! I have to say the navigation and interactivity of the image data is very smooth. It's amazing to think about nail down a specific building starting from the entire North Amercian map! Go check it out yourself... I remember reading an article talking about Bill Gates recently commented on GPS technology and his interest in having a scoop in the pie. Guess Google is taking it seriously?

Click here to view the bigger picture.

Google announces today that they will double the Gmail user space to 2GB in the next few weeks. According to New York Times, Gmail also plans to remove limits on message capacity as it competes for users with Yahoo Inc. This makes me think when will Microsoft eventually give up on making money out of their email services. The 3 giant online service providers (Yahoo! Google MSN) are really heating up the battle recently, like expected, 2005 is going to be an exciting year for the IT industry.

Google launched an open source development community - code.google six months ago. Chris DiBona, director of the Google open source iniatives mentioned recently that Google is going to increase the exposure of this community and use it as a two-way portal connecting the community and the open source developers. Many developers in Google are coming from an open source development background, and Google needs to keep a healthy relationship with the open source community in order to compete with the giant corperates like Microsoft and Yahoo. Here are some descriptions of the community from Google:

What is code.google.com?
Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.

Who are the people behind code.google.com?
A lot of people worked together to both prepare source code for release and prepare code.google.com for launch and ongoing maintenance. We really care about free and open source software (F/OSS) at Google, and this site is one aspect of that affection.

http://code.google.com

There have been multiple times that Bill Gates mentioned in the public that one of his biggest regret which is also one of the Microsoft’s biggest misjudgment is to let Google took the lead in the search engine industry. Gates also warned Google to look out that Microsoft is not giving up on the big pie; they will upgrade their current search functions which are built in their operating system and browser to compete and gain back the lost market. However, internet rumors say one of their core OS engineer - Mark Lucovsky has switched over to Google. Although no one knows what kind position is he going to hold in Google. Mark worked for Microsoft more than 16 years, and he is one of the core developers in Windows NT technology (in charge of NT core, Win32 runtime components development). Mark has expressed his disagreement on how Microsoft Ships Software via his blog. However, the million dollar question is what does Google want from Mark? A Google OS? With Firefox, I guess Google is really ready to take on Microsoft’s next generation product – Longhorn.

I started seeing these so called commonweal banners from Google on multiple Chinese web sites. This is one way for Google to establish its dominating image in the search engine industry in China. The banner is simply a white background with a question in the middle such as, “How deep is the ocean?”; “Where is the nearest planet?”; “What is largest numerical value?”; “What’s the temperature in sun?”; “How deep is the ocean?” etc. Following the question is a line “Google will help you to find the answer.” By clicking on the banner, you will reach the Google search page with results to the question which was on the banner. What I find these banners quite interesting is that it really catches kids’ attention. What’s the chance of having them read pages of encyclopedia? Imagine let them play some online games and toss them a banner like this, have them browse through the result sites and develop their own interests in learning. I have not yet encounter a banner like this in English, maybe Google feels no need to further establish it leading role in the Western world.

A sample banner, screen captured from a Chinese website, 1/2 of it's original size: