Driverless Dreams

Google is back at it: driverless cars. In the age of Uber and ZipCar providing (nearly) pushbutton access to transportation for a fairly reasonable fee depending on your need, the driverless car sits atop the pyramid of transportation evolution. One device combines the evolution of technology that began with the invention of the wheel. The …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter One: A Revolution Begins

When Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead he looked back on the previous twenty years of his life, Microsoft, and the history of computing, while considering where that path would take society. Windows 95 was a new revolution in computing, the Internet was still in its infancy, and the original Pentium processor was king of …

A Night With The Chromecast

When Google announced the Chromecast during their breakfast, the star of the show was not Android 4.3 or the new Nexus 7 but the small, seemingly trivial piece of technology no bigger than a USB thumb drive. One year after the Nexus Q was announced, put on hold, and ultimately retired before officially launching, Google …

Sundar Pichai Solves Microsoft’s PR Problem

With Google I/O coming up later this week, Google OS chief Sundar Pichai sat down for a short interview with Wired’s Steven Levy. For the most part, it’s what you would expect, no huge storylines before the company’s biggest conference of the year. The head of Chrome and Android lowers expectations a bit by saying …

Chone and Tell

Google Now is an excellent tool, but sometimes a tricky word or name just won’t be interpreted correctly. For example, the search engine couldn’t understand a voice of “When is Trot Nixon’s birthday?” Nixon, of course, has an unusual family name, Trotman, truncated into a nickname, Trot, so it’s somewhat understandable that Google hasn’t mastered …

Search Plus Your World

It’s no secret that Google has come a long way since Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their first server in a  Lego case . The company has evolved from search and ads to email, mobile phones, and a stable of product offerings and research initiatives in its continuing mission to organize the world’s information. …

A Piece of Glass

In the original Google Glass video the protagonist takes a picture of some wall art and shares it with his circles on Google+ with a simple voice command. Cool, right? Too bad Google Glass isn’t available right now (Ingress players would probably be over the moon) so everyone could do that sort of thing. But wait: Google updated the …

Thoughts from Google I/O or a Three Day Tour

Last month I set out on a trip to California to visit with family, investigate working on the Left Coast, and attend Google I/O. I/O (Input/Output) is Google’s annual developer conference and their stage to announce products, strategy, and outlook for the year to come. I/O has been home to the unveiling of several big …

Arizona Man Sues Google Over Trademark

Since the days of Napster there have been stories about copyright infringement on the internet. Reports of piracy, torrents, using images and photographs without permission are commonplace. Trademark news is less so, but an Arizona man has decided to battle Google over the rights to their name. Jeff John Roberts over at paidContent reports that …