Living Stories is the name of a new experimental collaboration between Google Labs, the New York Times and the Washington Post that seeks to transcend that 500 year-old metaphor with a parsable flow of news content around big stories, says ReadWriteWeb.
Google’s video tour below explains how it works. At last, someone is rethinking the old news paradigm.
Mix together bar codes, your mobile phone, and “Favorite Places on Google” to get a new way to window shop.
100,000 local businesses (and more in the future) have received window decals with QR bar codes that can be scanned by hundreds of mobile devices, including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more, to take you directly to the business’s Place Page where you may find reviews or coupons, if they are being offered. See how it works in the video below.
This launch is part of Google’s overall effort to provide you with the best local business results whenever you’re trying to figure out where to go, “whether it’s a trendy Cuban restaurant in Philly, a comics shop in L.A., a hip hotel in NYC or a little bit of photographic history in Rochester, N.Y,” says The Official Google Blog.
They plan to periodically send out new waves of window decals to qualifying businesses. If you own or manage a business and weren’t selected in this round, your first step is to claim your listing with Google’s Local Business Center for free. That will help them determine that your business information is correct. Then, you can enhance your local business listing by adding enhanced content like photos and videos.
To explore a gallery of several hundred Favorite Places in 20 U.S. cities, to learn more about how to use the QR codes and to find out how your business can get involved, check out Google’s Favorite Places. One of my Seattle favorites is seen in the image below.
In between — or to go along with — holiday shopping, we’re starting to see 2009’s “top” products, services, applications, etc. being touted.
Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb listed their top mobile web apps and have followed up today with their list of the top 10 consumer web apps of the year.
With regard to the consumer apps, they note that there are hundreds of new ones to choose from but “occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.” Not all the apps are newly launched, but reached a mainstream audience this year.
The mobile web apps heavily feature those for the iPhone as one might expect, but there is a mix of others.
Briefly, the mobile group includes: Facebook 3.0 (iPhone), Tweetie 2 (iPhone), Twidroid – see image – (Android), Foursquare (Cross-platform), Google Voice, (Blackberry, Android), Spotify (Cross-Platform), Google Maps Navigation (Android), Layer (iPhone, Android), and a couple more. See the article for details.
Among the top consumer apps are 2 search engines, Bing and WolframAlpha. A couple of my favorites are included: light blogging site Posterous (here’s an example) and Tweetdeck, which I’ve recently posted about. Of course, RWW didn’t leave off huge favorites like Twitter and Facebook. See the article for more apps and information.
I was very excited to see Mashable’s post about Google Maps Navigation being available on nearly every Android-based phone.
When the Verizon Droid was released recently with the Android 2.0 OS and a new Google Maps Navigation system, I was jealous. Google’s Navigation app spells trouble for stand-alone GPS systems since it has nearly every desirable feature of them and is free on Android phones.
I bought the T-Mobile MyTouch phone with Android 1.6 OS when it was launched in late July. I really like Google Maps and used it and the “my location” satellite extensively on a recent trip in unknown territory. But it didn’t speak to me and give me turn-by-turn directions. Now it does!
I hadn’t received any indication that there was an update (usually I am notified when there is an update for software I have downloaded), but I went to the Android Market and looked at Google Maps. It looked like there were new features, including “Navigation, so I downloaded it and I now have Google Maps Navigation.
The upgrade includes most of the basic GPS navigation features of the new system: voice guidance, automatic route recalculation, business information, and traffic data, among other features. That’s along with Google Maps and Wikipedia information and, of course, Street View. However, the “navigate to” voice commands are missing. Hopefully, that and more will be coming in the future. Now if only I had one of those dashboard “car docks” that Droid has…
Called Google Maps Navigation (Beta), the app is a likely threat to stand-alone GPS navigation systems since it has “3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection,” notes the Official Google Blog.
Since I just bought an Android-based phone in July (T-Mobile MyTouch), I’m both peeved that I won’t have this system right away, and hopeful that it will be available before too long on phones other than the Droid. I do love Google Maps for Mobile; it has helped me find my way around several new places, but is kind of hard to manage without voice features (reading your mobile phone while driving is a no-no).
Seven features coming to “Navigation” that I wish I had now:
The Internet Archive (IA) is in the early stages of development of BookServer, with the “lofty goal to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search,” says ReadWriteWeb.
According to IA, BookServer is “a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.”
BookServer will provide book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with online bookstores like Amazon and Google. It will allow publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books. A secondary goal of BookServer’s open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and other booksellers using proprietary formats. It’s confusing for consumers who face a multitude of choices with limited information about which formats will work on which devices.
RWW notes that “while Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it’s still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer’s goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.”
IA says that many will benefit from BookServer:
Authors find wider distribution for their work.
Publishers both big and small can distribute books directly to readers.
Book sellers find new and larger audiences for their products.
Device makers can offer access to millions of books instantly.
Libraries can continue to loan books in the way that patrons expect.
Readers get universal access to all knowledge.
They have provided a slide show called Web of Books on Slideshare to explain how BookServer will work.
Google Inc. will launch a new online service for ebooks next year that will be accessible on any device with a Web broswer, ranging from computers to mobile phones. Google will actually host the ebooks and make them searchable, although consumers can buy directly from any number of online booksellers and other retail partners as well as Google, using the Google Editions platform.
Google expects the program to start with 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010. They will try to keep purchase transactions simple, maybe by using the existing Google Checkout platform. You can find details of how they intend to split revenue in the article from the Seattle Times.
Books bought through Google Editions will be stored on the device and readable without a live Internet connection.
Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders when it launches next year in an effort to avoid further criticism (and law suits) from authors, publishers, and librarians over copyright issues.
I’m hoping that Google will also see its way clear to making the ebooks transferable to ebook reader devices. They have indicated that they might, but have not been specific. I recently purchased the Sony Reader Touch Edition because I was tired of trying to read on my laptop, and I certainly have no wish to read anything lengthy on my mobile phone.
Resource Shelf has a round-up of news about the launch. Image by Carla216. Creative Commons license.
It may be only a minor annoyance to have to download and view a formatted PDF when it shows up in a Google search, but this new feature is welcome anyway.
Quick View links will open up a PDF in the browser, complete with all graphics and formatting preserved. Google has rolled out the links for more than 50% of indexed PDFs and will continue to add the new links at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.
The “View as HTML” lik which has been available may still be seen for some, but much of the original formatting is lost with this option.
Google continues to refine the Search Options that they launched in May. The options provide a side panel that lets you filter, refine and generate different views of your search results.
Today they announced “nine new Search Options tools: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. These features have been rolling out gradually and will be available globally in English by the end of the day. You can try them yourself by searching Google and clicking “Show options” in the blue bar just under the logo.”
Mashable says that by giving users the option to filter results from the past hour, they’ll see more current news and information as opposed to the Wikipedia (Wikipedia) entries and other high ranking content that dominate the top of many results in regular search. Earlier this week, Google added “hot trends” to search results, “a move that might portend Twitter (Twitter)-like trending topics being integrated throughout at some point down the road.”
Ever since I noticed that my library has a number of ebooks in Adobe formats (ePub, PDF) that can be downloaded to a computer and read with Adobe Digital Editions, I have been seriously considering getting a compatible eReader so I can take them with me. Unfortunately, the Kindle is not one of them.
The idea of an ebook reader is attractive to me for several reasons: 1) I like gadgets; 2) I like the idea of carrying around many books on one small device; 3) Every reader I have heard about lately has easy on the eyes eInk and you can adjust the font to suit your needs. The latter has become more appealing to me as I age. I can still read small paperback books but they strain my eyes and I much prefer a larger font. I often get “large print” books from the library when they are available.
And mentioning the library — that is the biggest draw. I read, or start to read, hundreds of books a year. Inevitably, some just don’t appeal and I return them partially read to the library. I really don’t want to buy all the books I think I might want to read. Owning a book I am sure I want to read and keep is another matter.
TechCrunch notes that Google is challenging the proprietary Amazon Kindle line through several partnerships. The most recent is with British Interead, bringing the same amount of ebooks to an online store outside the U.S. for the first time (where close to half a million of them are available for free). Interead is behind the COOLERBOOKS ebook store. The company also manufactures COOL-ER eReaders, “small, elegant ebook readers that kinda look like giant iPods and cost $249 in the United States.”
The COOL-ER uses E InkR, which gives a “like paper” display, replicating the experience of reading a book. The reader uses power only for “page turns” which means that a “single charge lasts for 8000 pages and unlike a book, the electronic display allows you to change the text size to suit you!” The Cool-ER has a bookstore with more than 750,000 titles and supports Adobe Digital Editions. You can view the specs here.
Google first teamed up with Sony, adding about 1 million public domain books to the technology giant’s eBook Store which has both free and low-cost books. Sony has several ebook readers that support the books I can download from my library, the newest one being the Reader Touch Edition ($299.99) which is “temporarily out of stock”. It has a touch screen which is appealing to me. There is a brief video on the site showing how it works.
With regard to the consumer apps, they note that there are hundreds of new ones to choose from but “occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.” Not all the apps are newly launched, but reached a mainstream audience this year.
I was very excited to see Mashable’s 
The 
Google Inc. will launch a new online service for ebooks next year that will be accessible on any device with a Web broswer, ranging from computers to mobile phones. Google will actually host the ebooks and make them searchable, although consumers can buy directly from any number of online booksellers and other retail partners as well as Google, using the Google Editions platform.
Today they 
Ever since I noticed that my library has a number of ebooks in Adobe formats (ePub, PDF) that can be downloaded to a computer and read with 
The COOL-ER uses E InkR, which gives a “like paper” display, replicating the experience of reading a book. The reader uses power only for “page turns” which means that a “single charge lasts for 8000 pages and unlike a book, the electronic display allows you to change the text size to suit you!” The Cool-ER has a bookstore with more than 750,000 titles and supports Adobe Digital Editions. You can view the specs