Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Watch this abridged version of Google Wave presentation at Google I/O 2009.

Google Squared (link will be live by the end of May 2009) is the new project from Google that is soon to come out of Google’s R&D showcase known as Google Labs.

Google Squared will deliver search results in spreadsheet format. So what? you may ask. Well, look at the video demo above. Each search query will return an appropriated table of search results which has its own set of columns, i.e. common attributes that are associated with the (prevailing) topic of your search. In a nutshell, Google Squared turned unstructured nature of Internet into structured data. Now that’s big news since it comes from the company that knows about searching information on the internet more than anyone else.

I believe that Google Squared will finally bring the Web 3.0 a.k.a. semantic web to life. Imagine all sort of creative uses of this structured search data by semantic mash-up applications that will allow you to discover information about “any” given topic in a step-by-step fashion or about a pre-selected set of topics in a step or two. All this by combining topic attributes and Google Squared search results with other online resources. After all, having search result metadata (i.e. Google Squared spreadsheet columns) that are related to search results makes search data structured and easier to manage algorithmically and computationally, i.e. using additional software layers on top of this data.

On a side note, even though Wolfram Alpha will be pushed outside the limelight as a result of this new Google’s project. I say this even though I’m aware that Wolfram Alpha is not a direct competitor to either Google Search or Google Squared with its announced capability to offer precise answers to questions that have them based on data on the internet. Google Squared has already become a hot topic in its own right on Google Trends.

I hopeexpect Google will release an API for this at the same time cause I would love to try it out on my Android phone. Yes, I’m becoming a bigger Google (services) fanboy every day and for good reason(s). :-)

The video above was a demo organized for Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch.

3D immersion prototype worth $600,000 from IDEO Labs.

Drool! 8-)

Google App Engine for Java available - Campfire One: App Engine Redux (pt. 1)

Google App Engine availability for Java is positively great news for Java developers everywhere. This move will not only make Java a more compelling platform but will also make it easier to develop and host web applications based on Java platform. Now you can create end-to-end Java applications where even client side can be implemented using GWT (Google Web Toolkit), i.e. without touching JavaScript and its cross-browser quirks.

Furthermore, with Google supporting Java in its own cloud I believe it is also good news for the future of Java platform in general. You probably know that Sun Microsystems may be acquired by some company (IBM or HP or… ?) that may decide to switch off some of the R&D within the Java platform which, again, may not be a bad thing considering Sun’s stance with OpenJDK (“openness”), OSGi (indecisiveness), JavaFX (closed source) etc.

Real-time face detection in Flash

Yes, you read it right… here’s some technical details:

• The underlying library is a AS3 library Marilena
• it is based on Intel’s OpenCV open-source face detection library
• more examples are available here

If you have a web cam handy, you can try out the demo as well. For some reason, I haven’t managed to make the demo work with my dumb Logitech webcam. Let me know if works for you.

Another cool live demo from Google I/O conference in which you can see how Google Street View works on a mobile device sporting an improved Google Android mobile platform.

Adding an extra kick to the presentation, this devices has an built-in compass that works perfectly with Google Street View. What other application do you see with this compass? :-) 

Here’s something for all of you mobile gadgeteers and geeks out there - a video clip showing live demo of the improved Google Android mobile platform. This one came from the Google I/O conference which takes place yesterday and today (May 29th).

Enjoy!