The digital age has been upon us for a while, but there are certain things that people simply prefer to do the old fashioned way. For many, holding an actual book in their hands is the key to their reading enjoyment. Have we reached a tipping point where e-readers are becoming more popular?
Perhaps it’s not a tipping point yet, but it has achieved double-digits. 10% of American adults use some variation of electronic readers with another 12% saying they are likely to buy one in next 6 months. What does all of this say about our reading habits?
GOOD tackles the question in this infographic. Click to enlarge.
NASA’s missions to the moon 40 years ago left behind remnants. With no wind or water turbulence, these remnants can still be seen today, and thanks to images received from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), we can still see the tire tracks from the first lunar rover, the landing sites, and even equipment that was left from experiments.
“When I first took a look at these images, my jaw plopped to the ground,” said Noah Petro, Research Scientist for NASA/Goddard. “When you see something that you’ve never seen before and in a quality you’ve never seen before… it really just made me speechless.”
The video shows images from the leftovers of Apollo 12, 14, and 17 missions.
When Yelp denied Google’s $500 million bid to buy them in 2009, many believed that the location/reviews company was positioned to fight the search giant in their niche and win. That has been the case so far, but Google is making strides to change that, including today’s announcement that they had purchased the venerable restaurant resource and ratings company Zagat.
Restaurant reviews have always been the cornerstone of Yelp’s service. Most major restaurants are loaded with Yelp reviews and consumers tend to trust them more than they trust other online services. Zagat has been the exception, having a longer history of understanding the restaurant market and loading up with more premium content.
That content comes with a price – the website is subscription-based. In the short term, Google does not plan on changing that, but it’s only a matter of time. Google Places is one of the major focuses for the company from an advertising perspective and adding Zagat reviews directly into it may be enough to compete with Yelp on the restaurant front.
Here’s the full release from Google’s Marissa Mayer:
“Did you know there’s a place in Menlo Park near the Safeway that has a 27 food rating?” one of my friends asked me that about two years ago, and I was struck because I immediately knew what it meant. Food rating… 30 point scale… Zagat. And the place… had to be good. With no other context, I instantly recognized and trusted Zagat’s review and recommendation.
So, today, I’m thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.
With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry. Founded by Tim and Nina Zagat more than 32 years ago, Zagat has established a trusted and well-loved brand the world over, operating in 13 categories and more than 100 cities. The Zagats have demonstrated their ability to innovate and to do so with tremendous insight. Their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed. Their iconic pocket-sized guides with paragraphs summarizing and “snippeting” sentiment were “mobile” before “mobile” involved electronics. Today, Zagat provides people with a democratized, authentic and comprehensive view of where to eat, drink, stay, shop and play worldwide based on millions of reviews and ratings.
For all of these reasons, I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with Zagat to bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trusted reputation and wealth of experience to our users.
(BTW, Kaygetsu, the place in Menlo Park, definitely lives up to its 27 food rating!)
Google appears to be expanding the use of its encrypted search page, automatically redirecting some Chrome users to the HTTPS version of Google search. The company has also expanded the number of Google search tools that work with the encrypted page to include Google Image Search, Google Instant and Google Instant Preview.
Using Google search over SSL means that your search terms are encrypted, so prying eyes can’t see what you’re searching for, nor can they see the results you get back. Google’s efforts to provide an encrypted search page are just one part of a broader move afoot on the web to shift more traffic over to the more secure HTTPS protocol.
Why all the fuss about HTTPS? Well, every time you search Google or log in to Twitter or Facebook over a plain HTTP connection, you expose your data to the world. It’s a bit like writing your username and password on a postcard and dropping it in the mailbox. There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP — HTTPS. That extra “S” in the URL means your connection is secure, and it’s much harder for anyone else to see what you’re doing. Think of the extra “S” as the envelop that keeps prying eyes from looking at your postcards.
Although the HTTPS version of Google does, in Google’s words, “provide you with a more secure and private search experience,” it’s worth noting that it doesn’t stop Google from tracking your search terms and other data.
Google Operating System, which tracks all things Google, dug up a post on the Google Support Forums where a Google employee says that Google is “running an experiment with some percentage of Chrome 14 users where we send them to SSL search.” That means that some Chrome users may find themselves using the HTTPS search page without even realizing they are.
Chrome 14 is still in beta, so in order for this to affect you, you’ll need to be using the beta channel.
Of course even if you aren’t part of Google’s effort to expand Google Search over SSL, doesn’t mean you can’t configure your browser to use the HTTPS search page by default. Firefox fans can just install the HTTPS Everywhere extension. Chrome and Chromium users can simply right-click the URL bar, choose “edit search engines” and then look for the Google entry. Just click edit, add an “s” to the end of the “http” and you’re done. Internet Explorer users can head to the IE add-ons page and create a new search provider using the form.
Google launched its Chrome Web browser on September 1, 2008—three years ago today. In the time since its debut, Google’s Web browser has attracted a considerable following and influenced other browser vendors. To celebrate the anniversary, Google has published an interactive HTML5 infographic that presents the history of the major Web browsers and Web standards.
Chrome’s contributions to the Web and browser design are significant. Google set the pace of development for modern browsers by being the first browser vendor to adopt a radically shorter development cycle and a release management strategy that emphasizes fast-paced incremental improvement. Chrome’s transparent update system and channel-based prerelease distribution model are being adopted by Firefox and could eventually be picked up by other browser vendors.
Chrome’s distinctive minimalist design has also changed the way that browser vendors think about usability. Chrome’s approach to paring down the interface and offering a more streamlined user experience has been embraced by other browsers. Google took the lead on some controversial moves, like not displaying “http” in the location bar.
The technical influence of Chrome can even be felt outside of the browser ecosystem. The performance of Chrome’s sophisticated V8 JavaScript engine and the ease with which it can be embedded in other software have led to its adoption in a range of other environments. For example, V8 was used to produce Node.js, a server-side JavaScript runtime that is popularizing the use of JavaScript for backend Web development.
Although Chrome has come a long way, the browser still lags behind its competitors in some key ways. When we first reviewed Chrome in 2008, one of our biggest gripes with the user interface was the lack of tab overflow handling. After three years, this issue still hasn’t been fixed. Chrome’s user interface for browsing history is another major weak area relative to other browsers. History autocompletion in the Omnibox is also quite limited compared to Firefox’s AwesomeBar.
Despite the limitations, Chrome’s audience has grown explosively since its 2008 launch. According to statistics from StatCounter, the browser’s marketshare hit 10 percent last year and continued growing to 23 percent, as of this month. It’s become an important part of Google’s product landscape, serving as the central pillar of the company’s ambitious Chrome OS operating system.
After three great years of innovation and raising the bar, Chrome’s future looks bright.
Offline Gmail is back. Originally built around Google’s Gears plugin, the company announced earlier this year that it was pulling the Gears-based feature and rewriting it to use HTML5 and web standards. Now offline Gmail is back (along with offline support for Google Docs and Calendar) and no longer requires the Gears browser add-on.
Offline Gmail does, however, require the Google Chrome web browser. In fact, the offline version of Gmail is an entirely separate app you’ll need to install through the Chrome Web Store. The Web Store app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets and uses a widescreen layout that will look familiar to anyone using Gmail on an iPad or the new three-pane mail interface.
Unfortunately, the offline app for Gmail is just that, a separate web app. You won’t be able to use Gmail offline simply by clicking a button in the regular web interface. Rather you’ll need to install the offline Gmail app and switch over to that interface whenever you’re offline.
And that’s not the only downside to this release. Offline Gmail will only give you access to the last three to seven days’ worth of email (the exact amount will vary depending on how many messages you get each day). All of your starred messages will also be available, but beyond that you’re out of luck — there’s no way to, for example, download a specific tag or set of messages for offline use.
Things are even worse in the offline version of Google Docs which, for now, is limited to read-only access — not exactly helpful when you’re trying to finish that report sans wifi.
Google says these issues are temporary and that the offline support is a work in progress, but given the extremely limited functionality one wonders why they were released at all. Of course Google’s motto is release early, release often; clearly they’ve released early, hopefully the often will kick in soon.
In the mean time if you need offline access to your email, we suggest a traditional desktop client.
Ever since Back to the Future Part II came out and tickled my fanciful soul with the Nike Air Mag, I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a pair. They’re finally real and oh my god they’re so dreaaamy. More »
Google appears to be expanding the use of its encrypted search page, automatically redirecting some Chrome users to the HTTPS version of Google search. The company has also expanded the number of Google search tools that work with the encrypted page to include Google Image Search, Google Instant and Google Instant Preview.
