Google launches Code University

Well perhaps it is not so much a launch as a re-launch. Mid 2007 Google launched an educational program. At the time it was called ‘Google Code for Educators’. Google has now re-designed the site and re-launched as the Google Code University. The site is aimed at helping educators and students alike become more familiar with the technology behind Google and the internet in general. It is a repository of computer science educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos.

The Google Code University Course Materials

Most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, The Google Code University encourages educators and students to reuse and build upon them. The courses are divided in to the following sections AJAX Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages. The site covers various topics from ‘What is mySQL’ to ‘Concurrency Management’.

Many of the somewhat aloof concepts associated with key backend functionality found behind many of Googles products, are carefully explained. The sites provides code samples, Linux commands, diagrams etc to help explain these concepts.

CS Departments Search

The Google Code University provides a facility for searching teaching materials that have been published to the web by faculty from CS (Computer Science) departments around the world. You can refine your search to display just lectures, assignments or reference materials for a set of courses.

Looking back at my education in computer science, The Google Code University covers many important aspects of web development and administration that are often neglected my main stream educational institutes. All in all I think this is a fantastic offering.

The Future of Gmail

When you spending so much time on the web, it is more than likely that you'll develop a sixth sense of what's missing from services that you're using on a daily basis. I often find myself thinking about new features that in my opinion should have been integrated a long time ago (or at least it feels like they should).

My most used service is email. In my case it's Gmail, so this whole post is about my point view on that. However, you could apply it to any other web-based mail platform I guess.

For some reason, we all think about our email as a temple of top secret information, and the common assumption is that email is confidential and not shared (although we actually do it all the time, by forwarding emails, for example). But what if Google gave us the tools to share and publish pictures & files right from within the email itself, and on to public services and social networks? What if I got a great post from one of the blogs that I subscribed to by email and want to share it trough Twitter, Facebook etc..?

Here's what I think the Gmail email should look like in the year of 2009:

File Viewer:

This should be the easy part for Google - Making the right connections with their own services: Picasa and Youtube. It's so crucial that Picasa hosts my email pictures automatically, like they're doing with their Blogger platform for a year or so now (don't worry, it is saved to a private folder). Also a must-have would be the ability to finally watch a Youtube video from within an email - how hard is it to enable that?

Shared Labels:

This might make you a little nervous, but try to keep an open mind about this one: I truly believe that this could be a very helpful tool for groups. If I'm working with someone on a project, and open a label where I'm gathering all the correspondence between us, I think it's only logical to allow this person access (partial or full) to those emails. I'd love to have the option to share a label with the contacts I choose, so they'll be able to review the content and conversations whenever they need to for our shared project.

Shared Files:

As mentioned above, I think this is the core of this post: a more social email is needed.
Instead of downloading then uploading a file somewhere else to be able to share it, a much more useful way would exist if Gmail uploads all the images to Picasa and allows the users to share them from the email, and even create a short URL to make it available to services like chat, microblogs, social networks and so on.
For video files, some suggestions:

1. Ability to privately upload any video file to youtube as well.
2. A nicer way to watch video file from the email - like the MP3 player but for videos.
3. If someone sent me a Youtube link by email, ability to watch it right from there - and also share it externally.


RSS Reader Gadget:

If you enabled Gmail lab, you probably saw the Googledocs and Google Calendar gadgets. I think the Calendar gadget is more useful because it can really give you a glimpse on events and occurrences that you might have forgotten. There's definitely a place for a dynamic Google Reader Gadget, I don't even think I need to explain why...

Speaking on Gmail Lab..

As you probably noticed, the list of tools in the lab is getting longer, and it's getting harder to follow all the new releases. I think Google should create a better index of those tools, make it searchable, divide it to categories, and allow other people besides them to write the applications.

Bring back the Web Search!

I seriously can't understand why Google is taking off the one thing they do best - Search. For years, I have been searching on the web from my Gmail account. They could at least explain to me (and other users) why they took this feature down, leaving us to find and get used to another less convenient arrangement. What I had liked about it so much was that it simply opened another tab (or window) and it was the easiest way to search for something especially for people who practically exist within their email account. But here's a compromise: Why not enable users to get this feature back from the Lab?

I guess I can go on like this forever, but those are the most important features that I'd like to see in my future Gmail account.

Can Google Latitude get my stolen phone back?

Not yet – but with a bit of inspired app design, it could help.

We all know how annoying it is to lose your mobile phone, especially if you never did get round to backing up those valuable contacts. But with location-based services becoming ubiquitous, isn't there a way to track down your lost or stolen handset?

That was exactly what San Francisco-based Nick Strada thought when he realised he left his Nokia E71 in the back of a cab: he'd activatedGoogle's Latitude location service a few days earlier, so surely he could track down the culprit?

When he logged into Latitude online, he was surprised to see his phone floating around a good 3,000 miles away – in central Boston. When phoning and texting his own number failed, Strada realised the phone's keypad had probably locked, and eventually the phone's battery died, taking its location with it. Surely there's some interesting potential here to help retrieve, or at least protect, a stolen handset?

Thousands of application developers have begun to flex their creative muscles, and some have already started to address the problem.

Apple's App Store offers Password Trap, which tries to identify a thief's location while luring them with false personal data; the optimistic Owner Information, which is supposed to makes it easy for whoever finds you phone to return it to you; and GPS Thief Tracker, which, if the thief happens to open it, will send a discreet email with the phone's location.

On Google's Android platform, meanwhile, there's plenty of inspiration for a stolen phone tracker that could be "plugged in" to Latitude.

Textecution is designed to stop drivers texting, and so disables the phone if it moves faster than 10mph. Could a new app disable the whole phone if it is taken more than five miles from your home location? Or maybe Latitude's regular security alert messages could be reconfigured remotely so that your thief is bombarded by infuriating alerts every 15 seconds? Or how about a simple remote lock, that makes the phone unusable?

The more severe the repercussion, the more you'd have to trust the application. Strada's fantasy about a remote mobile detonator may be taking things a bit far, but this is a fascinating creative challenge and, for the developer that cracks it, could be a lucrative business.

And however you find out where your phone is, you will still end up with a more practical problem: how do you confront the thief? We don't know how seriously the police would take GPS "evidence", so you may just have to borrow some muscle.

Google plans to make PCs history

Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals' personal data.

The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet.

The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as "the most anticipated Google product so far". It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs inside most of the world's computers, in favour of "cloud computing", where the processing and storage is done thousands of miles away in remote data centres.

Home and business users are increasingly turning to web-based services, usually free, ranging from email (such as Hotmail and Gmail) and digital photo storage (such as Flickr and Picasa) to more applications for documents and spreadsheets (such as Google Apps). The loss of a laptop or crash of a hard drive does not jeopardise the data because it is regularly saved in "the cloud" and can be accessed via the web from any machine.

The GDrive would follow this logic to its conclusion by shifting the contents of a user's hard drive to the Google servers. The PC would be a simpler, cheaper device acting as a portal to the web, perhaps via an adaptation of Google's operating system for mobile phones, Android. Users would think of their computer as software rather than hardware.

It is this prospect that alarms critics of Google's ambitions. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a charity defending computer users' liberties, did not dispute the convenience offered, but said: "It's a little bit like saying, 'we're in a dictatorship, the trains are running on time.' But does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?"

Google refused to confirm the GDrive, but acknowledged the growing demand for cloud computing. Dave Armstrong, head of product and marketing for Google Enterprise, said: "There's a clear direction ... away from people thinking, 'This is my PC, this is my hard drive,' to 'This is how I interact with information, this is how I interact with the web.'"

Google's PowerMeter to let users track electricity usage

The New York Times is reporting Google will announce a free web service tomorrow called PowerMeter that'll let users track energy consumption in their homes or business, provided there's a means to upload the data. That part of the equation's gonna be up to other companies to create compatible devices, and while no manufacturing partners have been named, we'd suspect strange bedfellow GE will probably jump aboard pretty quickly. The service is expected to roll out in the next few months. Ready to give the boys in Mountain View even more access to your life?

Update: The official site has launched. According to the FAQ, PowerMeter is currently in closed beta. There's also a video about the program, which you can peep after the break.

AdSense launches AdSense for Mobile Search

If you have a site with a lot of mobile traffic, you might want to check out the latest addition to the AdSense family, AdSense for Mobile Search.  Instead of using your own mobile search tool on your site, you can instead use the Google Mobile Search tool, and share in any generated revenue when your visitors click an ad in those mobile search results.

From Google’s Mobile Blog:

Today, we’re happy to announce a new AdSense product for both mobile network operators and mobile website owners across the globe. AdSense for mobile search is a quick and easy way for carriers and mobile publishers to embed a Google search box on their mobile portals and web sites. Whether they are day-dreaming of Hawaii or trying to find the perfect Valentine’s day gift, mobile phone users will get instant access to Google search including comprehensive web search, local, image, and news results — all formatted for their phones. Mobile operators and website owners share in the ad revenue generated by searches originating from their sites.

AdSense for mobile search is a Google-hosted solution, which means users will experience the same speed, reliability, and innovation that they’ve come to expect from Google. And even though the results pages are served by Google, the pages can be cobranded with publishers’ logos and linked back to their sites.

Here are some screenshots from the blog:

The program is in beta right now, but you can apply here.

Reading Gmail Offline

Web-based mail is great — until you don’t have an Internet connection. To ease the separation anxiety, Google recently introduced a feature called Offline Gmail, which downloads a copy of your mailbox and all the recent messages when you do have Internet access, and then keeps it all available in your Web browser for when you don’t.

To turn it on, log into your Gmail account on the Web, click the Settings tab and then, in many browsers, the Labs tab. Click the Enable button for Offline Gmail and then the Save Changes button.

To start downloading your mailbox, click the new Offline line on the mailbox page. Google has more information and a video about Offline Gmail at snipurl.com/bdil0.