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Google celebrates the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and the 20th anniversary of Wallace and Gromit on both their American and British sites.  I much prefer the Wallace and Gromit omage.  But then again, I just love claymation and stinky cheese. 

We took notice when Google first announced they were going to add a music search function.  If you haven’t seen the music search feature yet in your searches, you will; they are rolling it out slowly.  However, you can test it out here.

I’m not terribly sold on this, but it’s a step in the right direction.  What I’d want is something that searches for Mp3s like the Hype Machine, as well as torrents.  But I understand the legality involved with both of those practices and how that functionality isn’t in Google’s best interests.

I’ve long resisted to switching to Google Voice because I can port my cell number to Google.  I’d have to get a new number and give that out to the five people in my life who still care enough to call me.  So annoying.  But now, they’ve opened a “light” version of the app, which will provide any cellphone user with the robust feature set.  FYI.

There are no details like streaming vs. downloaded, individual mp3s vs. entire albums, cost structure, etc. but TechCrunch has it on good sources that Google will unveil some sort of Music Search service within the coming weeks. 

It would be nice if they included torrent searches in the mix, but that’s merely wishful thinking.

I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner:

The company said Google Editions marks its first effort to earn revenue from its ambitious Google Books scanning project, which attempts to make millions of printed books available online. Although the scanning program has faced complaints from authors and publishers over copyright, Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders.

The books bought through Google Editions will be accessible on any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon.com Inc and its Kindle e-book reader.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said Thursday the e-book market is evolving to allow access of books from anywhere and from any device.

Consumers can buy directly from Google or from any number of retail partners using the Google Editions platform, including online stores like Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. Google will actually host the e-books and make them searchable.

We expect the majority will go to retail partners not to Google,” Turvey said at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. “We are a wholesaler, a book distributor.”

Google Wave gets rolled out to a 100,000+ test audience today in the hopes that the bugs and wrinkles will get fully worked out.  Those people will also get invites to hand out to people, with what I assume, is a rollout plan similar to Gmail.

I’m of two thoughts: Is this really going to be the next generation of communication programs and when will it roll out to the public at large?  “While the team declined to give a specific time-table, they did say that it will definitely be 2010, and alluded to the fact that it should be the first half of 2010. They also noted that one key next step will be to provide support for other languages. Right now, Wave is English-only, even though it has tools built in that translate its content to any other language,” writes Tech Crunch.

As if you needed yet another way to consume more information, Google has rolled out what they are calling Fast Flip: “The way we would describe Fast Flip would be that it’s not quite a feed reader, and not quite an online magazine. The front page of Fast Flip presents you with several rows of content that can be sorted by topic—the top row lets you choose between recent, most viewed, and recommended headlines, while the second row lets you choose between various hot topics (unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift resides in this row as of this writing), and the third row lets you choose between specific news sources.”

Whereas an RSS reader is something you can specifically taylor to your individual tastes, Fast Flip acts as a method for scanning newspapers and magazines (no blogs I suppose).

Google has partnered with 36 magazine and newspaper publishers, who will receive revenue generated from ads on the site. Currently, the publishers include The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and ProPublica, according to The Official Google blog.

The BBC reports that other publications such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Popular Mechanics, and Slate, have signed on with Google. (Full disclosure: The Christian Science Monitor is one of the newspapers featured on Google Fast Flip.)

An interesting look into the future of wireless telecommunications.  On one side is Google and on the other side are all the old telecos using the same business practices when landlines were invented.

About a month ago, Apple mysteriously rejected a Google app for their new Voice program.  It turned out that it was AT&T that forced Apple’s hands, being that they are the sole provider of service for the iPhone. 

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that’s nothing—hence Google’s proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

I have AT&T for my wireless phone, mostly because I’m too lazy to switch, but also because rates/plans are pretty standard.  These companies want to pretend like we don’t know they are ripping us off, but we do. 

It drives me crazy that a data plan is $30, 200 text messages is another $5 (sending and receiving), etc. etc.  (If you paid per MB of data for texting it would run you close to $5000) In the end you’ve got to spend about $100 a month to have a worthwhile cellphone.  Otherwise you’re better off not really having one at all.

Had no idea who he was until this morning.  One would think that someone who’s made significant contributions to the field of electromagnetism would be more well-known. Today is the day of his birth.

Thus the study of electromagentism was born, and it’s the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers. Remember that next time you flick a light switch.

As with many great discoveries, it happened by accident. In 1820, Ørsted, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, was preparing an evening lecture when he noticed that a compass needle moved away from magnetic north and pointed to the wire whenever current flowed from the battery.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the compass needle pointed in the opposite direction when you flipped the battery round.

With an invisible current creating an invisible field that moved a physical needle, this caused quite a stir at the time. In London, the Royal Society gave him a medal, and he was also made a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit, of the French Legion of Honor, and the Danish Order of the Dannebrog. On his death in Copenhagen in 1851, he was given a state funeral.

Google is developing their next-generation search engine and needs help testing it out.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.

After giving it a spin I didn’t notice a huge difference in the results, except when it came to finding me.  It seems identity/name searches are much more accurate.  [via]

Lost in the Google Chrome OS announcement was the underlying digs at rival Microsoft.  Sure plenty of people called it the shot across the bow, but Computerworld takes a look at five specific statements from Google’s 655-word announcement that are a direct attack on Microsoft. 

Truthfully, however, many of their thinly veiled critiques at Windows and Microsoft are pretty true.  Microsoft stopped evolving their products, stopped trying to push ahead with improvements, when they became the defacto market leader — something that could be problematic for Google as it positions itself as the tech company for the internet era.

Many people theorized that when Google rolled out the Chrome browser a year ago, that it would only be a matter of time before they announced some sort of operating system.  It made sense given their forays into office documents, email programs, etc.

Officially, the company has announced plans for Chrome OS.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Which is all well and good, but Google also has a history of launching products and then letting them die on the vine, so to speak.  Even Chrome, which was launched to much fanfare has made little headway in browser share.  I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Microsoft’s bloatware has got to go, especially when they are still charging an arm and a leg for it.  Chrome OS is going to be an open-source platform, in the vein of Linux.

The announcement is intriguing, but it’s still just an announcement.  [via]

Google rolls out yet another web app, and it’s ambitious.  Google Wave.  It looks to be a blending of email, IM, and several other things; they claim it’s the logical evolution of web communication. 

It’s good that they’re thinking in these terms because basic email, IM, et al. haven’t really evolved much over their respective existences. 

From Tech Crunch:

Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. The much better comparison is coincidentally the company started by another group of (former) Googlers, FriendFeed. But Wave is a different product for a number of reasons, and seemingly has loftier goals — all of which I’ll touch on below.

Here is the app in action to give you a better idea of its potentiality.