Simon’s Blog

So I guess Google gets their ideas from Batman now.  It makes sense Batman has a lot of good ideas, like dressing like a bat and wearing a nomex survival suit that can stop a bullet as long as it’s not a straight shot.

Batman had the idea first, in The Dark Knight he used everyone’s cell phones to assemble real time data on the Joker’s location in Gotham City.  Yay crowdsourcing.  Now Google is doing something similar, using people’s mobile phones to track their speed and aggregate the data to provide traffic data for city streets, in addition to the traffic data they purchase from INRIX.  The amount of traffic data in major cities is impressive, it’s nice to see street level traffic data instead of just the highways.

From The Google Blog:

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Worried about privacy?  Read this article. Many iPhone apps report your location and demographics back to the developer.  The Palm Pre’s Web OS reports users’ locations back to Palm daily.  Scary huh?

I use Google Maps on my iPhone frequently when I drive, so your welcome Google, and everyone who uses the traffic layer, I’m helping you out big time.

Apple and Google, two great companies who continually innovate new technologies. I could go on and on about how much I love Google and Apple. Google has amazing web apps, Apple has amazing hardware and software integration. And of course I love my iPhone; much of the iPhone’s power stems from the tight integration between the Google and the iPhone OS (Safari, Google Maps, YouTube, Mail). Google even built Apple a flash-less version of YouTube so that it’s videos would play in Safari. However the close relationship is disintegrating, partly due to the fact that Apple and Google are now competitors in the mobile marketplace. Google exec Eric Schmidt has left Apple’s board. In recent weeks, two significant iPhone apps developed by Google have been rejected by Apple.

Google Voice is a feature packed VoIP app. It let’s users make cheap long distance calls, send free texts, get voicemails transcribed to your email, and much more. Apple rejected it presumably because AT&T doesn’t want people bypassing their voice services, but the official word from Apple is that Voice duplicated existing functionality. The FCC has launched an investigation asking for an explanation from Apple, AT&T, and Google. AT&T quickly denied any involvement in the app approval process.

Google Latitude, which displays your friends locations on a map, was rejected because Apple thought users would confuse Latitude with the built in Google Maps application. COME ON, if some one is smart enough to download Latitude from the App Store they are smart enough to know it is not the same as the built in Google Maps app, because they just downloaded it, and installed it, as a new app on their home screen. Hey Apple, why not allow Google to integrate Latitude into the existing Google Maps app like on every other mobile platform.

Android users as well as Windows Mobile, Symbian, and soon Web OS platforms enjoy powerful map layering functionality. They can load up Google Maps and toggle several layers, traffic, Wikipedia, Google’s My Maps, and Latitude. Imagine this scenario. I load up Google Maps on my non-iPhone, I search for and find a hamburger place. Then I toggle on the Latitude layer and see my good friend Rufus is nearby and available for burger eating. Toggling on the traffic layer I see that Rufus is surrounded by grid lock so instead I meet up with some other chick on Latitude. Then I impress the chick by toggling on My Maps and show her a custom map of all the vacation homes I own.

On other platforms, Google is not restricted by Apple’s arbitrary decisions. And that makes me angry, and jealous, with rational anger fueled by irrational jealousy. Latitude can run in the background on other phones, which means your location updates automatically. iPhone users can only use the watered-down web version of Google Latitude. If my Google buds looked for me on Latitude they would see where I was 38 days ago when I last used that web app, it’s pretty useless unless my location is update regularly.

I am torn, do I stay with the Apple and enjoy glorious hardware and software integration among all my Apple devices? Or do I move to Android where data pours from clouds and apps are free to run wild?

It looks like this guy already made his decision.

Here are some of my favorite Google Chrome tips.

Type the following into the omnibox to see stats about Google Chrome.

about:version
about:memory
about:cache
about:plugins
about:dns
about:stats
about:histograms
about:network
about:crash
about:internets

Google has released a revolutionary web browser called Chrome.  It runs laps around the other browsers in terms of usability and speed.  The release is stable I encourage all to try it out.

Google Chrome Comic

 Chrome’s multi-process architecture turns traditional client-server computing upside down. Since each process represents a web application, Google has brought us one step closer to cloud computing.