Developing Wave
Google announced its newest product at the Google I/O conference in California this week,
Google Wave. Wave is a new collaberative media concept and program. It is intended to be an all encompasing email, chat and social networking scheme. What strikes me as interesting is the process of creating this new product and how the Google corporate atmosphere effects how the product is developed. The idea for wave was originated not by corporate nor was it even customer driven. Rather it is
the brainchild of two brothers who asked the question. "What would email look like it it were developed today?"
"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.
So it seems that Lars and Jen Rasmussen came up with the idea, and sold it to their bosses at Google. These guys do have a track record, these are the guys that developed Google Maps. It seems to me a remarkable show of faith that American based Google would let this remote team in Australia run with this. Then again this is Google and
they do things differentlyWhen Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn't impressed. "He came to me and he said 'This may sound kinda crazy, but we're going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we'll get back to you after a couple of years,'" Brin remembers. "It was not a very compelling proposal." But Brin greenlighted the project anyway. After Google acquired their Where 2 Tech startup in 2004, Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens had spearheaded the Google Maps project, and in an extreme case of Google's much-lauded commitment to creative freedom, Brin gave the pair just what they asked for.
"Lars and Jens had previously redefined what mapping was like - they already had a success under their belt - and communications was one of those trigger topics," Brin told reporters yesterday afternoon at Google's I/O developer conference in downtown San Francisco. "We decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was also an interesting experiment. It was one of the most autonomous development groups we've had at Google."
The way Brin tells it, the decision allowed the Chocolate Factory to "innovate how we run things." But by all accounts, this amounted to letting the Rasmussens do whatever they wanted. The result - after two years of development - is Google Wave, the new-age communication and collaboration tool the company unveiled on Thursday to a standing ovation from hundreds of gathered developers.
Not only did they get a green light to go with a project that wasn't a "corporate" idea. No one seems to have given much thought to a marketing plan. The thought sems to be if the product is good enough someone will figure out a way for it to pay the bills.
As Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering put it, "One of the luxuries about working at Google is that we get to focus on building the technology and making users happy, and once we've achieved a certain amount of success in terms of user happiness, only then do we start working about how to make money from it."
With engineering projects such as Wave, Gundotra later added, "We don't think about what competitors are doing... We believe that you build for the user and the rest will follow. Part of the excitement is rethinking the problem and coming up with a fresh approach."
When one reporter questioned whether he was telling the whole truth, Gundotra quickly repeated himself. And judging from Google's track record, we're inclined to believe him. At least for the moment, the company's top-secret search money machine is pulling in more than enough dough to fund such idealism.
No one can doubt that Google can make money, even in the days of a reccession. While the idiea of turning the designers and engineers loose, Worry about marketing and sales plan later. And turn the code and APIs to the open source world, seems contridictory, There can be no doubt that Google will make it work.
Robot Biologist
Adam is a robot developed by Welsh Aberystwyth University researchers which combines artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation to independently conduct and analyse biological laboratory research.
"What's new and exciting about Adam is [it is] the first time we've managed to show that a computer can not only think up new scientific ideas, but experimentally test them and decide whether they're true," said Ross King, a computer science professor and lead researcher at Aberystwyth University, "Adam makes up its own mind what to do. It decides what experiments to do, what to test." He says that for other lab experiments the hardware is already in place, the only step needed is to change the software.
The artificial intelligence alone spans three computers which holds the databases and analytical software to enable Adam to think. For the yeast experiment, Adam was loaded with databases which hold known information relating to yeasts and organisms. Adam compared all fields in the database to find the areas of missing information from which he devised 20 hypotheses.
Adam's AI is connected to robotic arms, sensors, incubators and cameras which enable Adam to start over 1,000 individual experiments every day and follow their progress over a week.
A part of the process is that Adam's AI can cycle and analyze the results of the experiments as well doing routine repetitious lab work. Following Adam's testing, King's team manually tested three of Adam's hypotheses and found that the robot's conclusions were correct, and each was a breakthrough to the scientific community.
Adam has spawned discussion amongst researchers. William Melek, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ontario's University of Waterloo, has noted that to set up the AI needed for subsequent experiments involving new biological variables and criteria, the human expertise would be time consuming to customize it. The usefulness would be limited therefore to the allotment of human input needed to set up Adam.
David Waltz of Columbia University and Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh say that "For the foreseeable future, the prospect of using automated systems as assistants holds vast promise as these assistants are becoming not only faster but much broader in their capabilities -- more knowledgeable, more creative, and more self-reflective," They note the potential of such lab assistants which may more efficiently process the research data.
It was reported that Adam cost about $1million in production costs and this was weighed against the costs of hiring lab techs. King said, We made many mistakes and learned from Adam. Eve is a much cleaner design."
Eve is the second AI computer under development by Professor King's research team. Eve's artificial intelligence will be enhanced to analyze compounds needed for medicinal drugs which may treat killer diseases such as malaria.
Mindreading Robots
At its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, Honda Motor Company demonstrated on Tuesday technology which links a person's thoughts with robots.
The operator wears a helmet which scans for electric currents stimulated by brain activity, but also uses infrared sensors to detect changes in blood flows in the head. The information is sent to a computer, which can then execute robotic movements such as opening the trunk of the vehicle or turning on the car's air conditioning. The commands usually take just seconds to reach the robot.
Honda also released a video where a humanoid robot named Asimo was operated by a person wearing the helmet. The employee was stated to be thinking about raising his right hand, after which Asimo moved its right arm.
Honda states that it could be quite some time before the technology is ready to go live due to difficulties such as the human brain's liability to become distracted, creating mixed thought patterns. A related problem is the amount of focus required by the operator.
"Practical uses are still way into the future." said Honda Research Institute Japan Co executive, Yasuhisa Arai. "I'm [just] talking about dreams today."
North Korea At It Again
In what has been interpreted as a thinly veiled threat, the North Korean government in Pyongyang has issued a statement saying that it could not guarantee the safety of airliners transiting its airspace.
The warning has led to Korean Air, Asiana Airlines and international carriers Air Canada and Singapore Airlines to reroute services that normally pass through North Korean airspace.
The statement has been widely condemned, with South Korean spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon saying "Threatening civilian airliners' normal operations under international aviation regulations is not only against the international rules but is an act against humanity..."
The latest interchange of words comes on the eve of two events. The first a launch of a North Korean satellite seen by the United States, Japan and South Korea as a test launch of North Korea's Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.
This satellite launch coincides with an annual joint United States, South Korean military exercise, which the North has condemned in the past as a dress rehearsal for an invasion. An expansion of this year's exercises in length and scale is being seen by Pyongyang as cover for preparations to shoot down its launch vehicle.
Pyongyang has threatened both Japan and the United States, the two nations in the region capable of shooting down its satellite with "...merciless retaliatory blows" and has placed its 1.2 million strong army on alert.
Kepler Goes to Space
The Kepler telescope
NASA's Kepler Telescope, which will search for planets orbiting other stars, was successfully launched by a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at approximately 10:51 p.m. (EST).
NASA regained the rocket's signal at 12:11 a.m. EDT Saturday, shortly after confirming the satellite's separation from the rocket.
According to the Kepler Mission page on NASA's website, the telescope "is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets." The telescope is named after Johannes Kepler, an astronomer, astrologist and mathematician from Germany in the late 1500 and early 1600s.
The Kepler Telescope will use the 'Transit Method' of detecting planets. When planets pass in front of their parent star, a small black dot is cast over the star, called a transit. Transits by terrestrial planets produce a small change in a star's brightness of about one part in ten thousand (.01%), lasting for 2 to 16 hours.
Kepler's view is 105 square degrees and will be focused on one area all the time. It will orbit around our Sun, maintaining a constant distance from Earth of 950 miles. It will continuously and simultaneously monitor the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission, which is expected to be three and a half years.
The Milky Way Galaxy, showing Kepler's range of view.
Image: NASA.
"Even if we find no planets like Earth, that by itself would be profound. It would indicate that we are probably alone in the galaxy," said William Borucki, the mission's science principal investigator.
Although planets orbiting stars other than the Sun had been theorized for centuries, it was only in 1988 that a team of Canadian astronomers made the first detection of extrasolar planets orbiting the star Gamma Cephei. Now over 300 extrasolar planets are said to have been discovered.
The launch comes just weeks after NASA's failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which crashed into the ocean off Antarctica's coast. It would have been the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The cost of the project was US$273 million.
Discovery Ceases to Discover
NASA announced during a press conference on Friday night that that agency has decided to delay the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, which was scheduled for takeoff on February 27. NASA cited the need for additional time to evaluate the shuttle's hydrogen fuel flow control valves. A new launch date has yet to be scheduled, though NASA is considering mid-March as an option. Another review of Discovery's flight readiness is scheduled for February 25.
Discovery had originally been scheduled for liftoff on February 12, but NASA wanted to perform additional tests on the valves which control the amount of hydrogen fuel pumped into the external tank when the shuttle is taking off. When Space Shuttle Endeavour went into space in November 2008, one of the valves broke. NASA fears that if one breaks off on this mission, then it could damage the outside of the shuttle.
"We need to complete more work to have a better understanding before flying," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. who chaired Friday's Flight Readiness Review. "We were not driven by schedule pressure and did the right thing. When we fly, we want to do so with full confidence."
The current scheduled mission, STS-119, is set to fly the Integrated Truss Structure segment ("S" for starboard, the right side of the station, and "6" for its place at the very end of the starboard truss) and install the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The arrays consist of two 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet, including the equipment that connects the two halves and allows them to twist as they track the sun. Altogether, the four sets of arrays can generate 84 to 120 kilowatts of electricity – enough to provide power for more than 40 average homes.
Commander Lee Archambault will lead Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.
Plug Computer
I've been fascinated with the shrinking technology. Cheap powerful and small are the keys to success in todays market. Cell phones today not only hold address books but are expected to run apps, surf the net and do email. There is a device out there called a
plug computer it looks pretty much like a wallwart but has SD , USB ports and a megabit Ethernet port. It runs a Linux OS and while it probably has more capabilities than as a thumb drive server. It looks like it might be admirably suited for that function. For either home or office capability this device has a lot of potential for sharing thumb drives or camera photos. The device is energy saving and runs on just a couple watts .
With the rise in broadband users, people continue to consume and share increasing amounts of digital content each year. The time and money invested in personal photos, home movies and in content purchased digitally is significant and continues to grow. Network connected consumer electronics devices, smart phones and social websites have emerged to help consumers share and access their personal content in the home and over the Internet. With the growth in digital content, there is a need for services to secure, manage and share content simply and reliably.
Today digital home services such as media servers, file sharing and backup software all need to be installed on a PC. A plug computer is a small, powerful computer that connects to an existing network using Gigabit Ethernet. This type of device eliminates the need for an always-on PC in the digital home to access these services.
Its a product worth watching, unfortunately, the only thing for sale is the development kit. Still if one is somewhat handy and has a $100 dollars in the budget it could well be worth checking out.
