phenotype business genotype
phenotype genotype business
business phenotype genotype
These three queries give different results.
In this Google blog post, Ed Lu of Google engineering discussed the Google Power Meter project:
Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use. We're tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a "smart grid," to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters." There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.
But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.
In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter , which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.
Watch the business pages this week, and you'll see technology giants like Google, Microsoft and IBM tripping over each other to announce their latest "smart" technology for tracking energy and emissions from businesses and homes. Their timing is as smart as the technology they hope to sell. The economic stimulus package that won approval in the Senate today includes $4.5 billion for “smart” grid technology and billions more for energy efficiency. Tech companies large and small were already busy behind the scenes talking to the new administration in Washington and sending testimony to state agencies to ensure that this new energy world President Obama envisions includes their software, equipment and applications. Their selling point is this: It's easier to save energy, cut foreign oil imports and reduce your carbon emissions if you know where your energy is being wasted. For businesses, that means having all the emissions and energy data – from resource acquisition to production to transit – in one easy-to-access place and continually updated for analysis.
Google, in typical Google fashion, wants to transmit your home's entire energy diet into an online app that can count the kilowatts for you. This morning, it introduced PowerMeter, a new online application that has the potential to track a home’s energy use, appliance by appliance, in real time. Of course, a computer application can’t do much without data. All those tracked appliances will have to have chips installed that can feed their energy information to a computer. Google still needs to work with manufacturers to develop that part of the plan. With PowerMeter still in beta testing, Google might seem to be getting ahead of itself. But by announcing the project now, Google is declaring a stake in the game. It's well aware of President Obama’s energy plans for the country, which include higher energy efficiency standards and the installation of 40 million smart meters in U.S. homes. Yesterday, Google urged the California Public Utilities Commission to write the state's smart grid principles in a way that would ensure consumers have direct access to real-time electricity use data in a standardized format – something applications like PowerMeter would need.
Google engineer Russ Morov, one of a few dozen beta testers, said that simply knowing where his power was going helped him cut his energy consumption by about 60 percent, primarily by replacing two 20-year-old refrigerators, his incandescent lights and the timing on the pool pump. He says he's saved about $3,000 a year. That’s probably high, however studies do show that people who are aware of where they’re wasting energy tend to reduce power use by about 15 percent .
A lot of smart people end up at Google. Even Hartmut Neven is there. Does that mean that Android will have face recognition, general object recognition and gaze tracking from the phone's camera? It sounds straightforward: upload the picture in the Google computing cloud, analyze it and download the results. No need to run the image recognition locally on the phone the way Neven used to.
What is the face recognition API called? All I can find is the face detector API.
What Other People Are Saying
Did Google Pull a Neven with Enkin? speculates that Google are going to use image recognition as a way for mobile camera phones to interact with the world, in particular by machine-readable codes on printed pages. I surveyed machine readable codes for printed pages in a previous post .
This speculation is interesting because I always thought the killer app for mobiles would be image recognition + machine readable codes on printed pages + OCR + speech recognition + location awareness, along with an engine to deduce useful information from the data . Maybe it's a more obvious idea than I thought. Don't throw out your copy of Duda and Hart!
This Google Mobile Blog just announced the most useful mobile feature I have heard of for a while. Here is a long quote from Jeff Hamilton's post:
You can start searching by voice with just the touch of a button. On the home screen search widget, look for the microphone button right next to the search box and the search button. Press that button, wait for the "Speak now" prompt, and then say your query. You'll soon see search results formatted for the Android browser.
Also, whenever you're in the Android browser, just press the "Menu" button and tap "Search". You'll see the same microphone button there too.
This makes doing successive voice-triggered searches -- and mobile web surfing -- easy and fast. Try speaking your favorite web sites, then tapping on the top search results to get to them.
Note that you can use the "Voice Dialer" app, which you can find on the main app menu, to search for your contacts with your voice to make a call. Or, simply long-press the green call button and follow the prompts on the splash screen.This sounds really useful and it should drive mobile phone usage forward, especially when combined with location enabled search.
Latitude is a new feature of Google Maps for mobile, as well as an iGoogle gadget, that allows you to share your location with your friends and to see their approximate locations, if they choose to share them with you. You can use your Google account to sign in and easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses. Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app.
We've gone to great lengths to put this on as many smartphone devices as possible from day one so that most of the people you know will be able to use Latitude right away. There are two primary ways to use Latitude right now:
On your mobile phone: visit google.com/latitude from your phone's mobile browser to download Google Maps for mobile with Latitude. We currently support most of the popular smartphone platforms: Android, Blackberry, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile, and we are hoping to see Latitude on the iPhone soon. It will be available through Google Mobile App, and you'll just need to download or update the app from the App store to find Latitude in the Apps tab.
On your computer: go to http://google.com/latitude from your browser and add the Latitude gadget to your iGoogle homepage. What's neat is that if you've installed Google Gears or if you're using Google Chrome, you can choose to automatically share your location from your laptop or desktop computer -- no smartphone required!See also
I read this CNet Australia article which said in part:
Google's Android mobile platform wasn't robust, Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo said in an interview published yesterday, where he also disclosed he owns an Apple iPhone, among other handsets.
"We are looking at it," Trujillo said in the interview with ZDNet.com.au sister site CNET News.com, responding to a question about Android. "But the platform isn't at the stage where it's really robust. We are looking at what's being said about it in the blogosphere, and we're looking at testing it."Which just goes to show that telco executives have a different, and presumably better informed, view of new technologies than people like me who know a few people working on those technologies.
"They (Google) can hire smart guys, hire smart people, blah-de-blah-de-blah," Mr Ballmer said. "I don't really understand their strategy, maybe somebody else does. Turning up to an investor meeting saying, 'we've just launched a mobile operating system with no revenue model, yay!' – I wouldn't do that," he said. "I don't get the business model."Meanwhile those Android folks keep on developing very useful stuff .
This post has been moved to Blogger Bugs . It was copied (ctl-c, ctl-v) from Google Docs. The original is here and the hand corrected blog post is here . Interestingly one Google app can format this HTML correctly and another Google app cannot. I wonder why Google Docs and Blogger have different editors.
The WSJ says T-Mobile USA plans to begin selling the first smart phone powered by Google Inc.'s new mobile software late next month ... The phone's manufacturer, HTC Corp.... says it expects to ship 600,000 to 700,000 units of the smart phone, dubbed the Dream, this year... T-Mobile, a Deutsche Telekom AG unit, is expected to announce the phone Sept. 23 ...HTC, which is based in Taiwan and is a large provider of phones for Microsoft Corp.'s mobile software, declined to comment
Here is a round-up of the news articles from this morning. Look at the blog list at the bottom-right for more.
Cnet: "Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces" The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.
Enter the feed name as https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
This worked on Newsgator for me
Further Reading
Which aggregators support Gmail?
http://forevergeek.com/geek_resources/gmail_rss_feed.php
RSS Background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)
http://www.rss-specifications.com/
Google's Engineering Philosophy
1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location
For contrast see my top software development practices.
Further Reading
In 1922 Henry Ford wrote in My Life and Work
I believe that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5%. of the energy he expends.... Not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to a logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense.... It is waste motion— waste effort— that makes farm prices high and profits low.
Anyone who works in a modern office and has visited a medical practice or hospital in the USA in the last 5 years realizes how medical records have failed to keep up with office technology. Paper records are maintained in each hospital and practice. Medical record adminstration may have kept up with Henry Ford's dictates on efficiency in 1922 and even up to the 1960s but since then they have lagged.
Of course software developers and executives have known this for years and software companies have developed products for medical record administration including the biggest software companies.
The Gold Rush has Started
Steven Levy's Newsweek article on online medical records explained how Microsoft
and Google have created products for storing and organizing people's medical information. Both these giant companies are difficult to compete with but medical records is a large area and it is interesting to explore the opportunities of working with or around the giants. So we end up selling shovels to the goldminers.
Selling Shovels to the Gold Miners
The questions we need to ask are
