Awesome picture of Curiosity floating down to Mars

Seriously, NASA can do this...AMAZING!

A nation of fake people on Facebook

My address book gets messy but this is a massive pile of spam, duplicates and facade profiles for teens hiding from the folks.

Sure, there is probably a program to sift through them but there is some sad set of eyes out there with the job of perusing the wasteland.

83 Million Facebook Accounts Are Fake

Google Fiber: Thank You, Kansas City

Doubly excited for my hometown! Google Fiber "arrives" July 26.

Introducing the Leap

Now this is cool. Leap is a control interface for laptops and desktops. With the wave of your hand you can move a map, skip a song or change file directories. Add a pencil to the mix and now you have a stylus with which you can draw or even sign your name. If you have heard of Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox, this is essentially the same thing except far more sensitive and geared for all-purpose computing instead of just gaming.

Chrome is king.

Google's Chrome browser has just become the most used browser, unseating IE from its long time on the throne.

Facebook gone public. Good and bad or just bad?

As you probably know, because its has been on every news outlet ad nauseam (including my little corner, hah), Facebook has gone public today at 11AM EST. In a valuation worth over $100 billion dollars, this is a big day that should help define what social networking is really worth.

Google Search shows Bing the ropes. Introducing Knowledge Graph.

Google is pushing its definition of search once again. A while back we saw them make search personal. Now, Google is making their search knowledgeable with Google Knowledge Graph.

Official Google Blog Post for Knowledge Graph


When you use Google Search (now or as the rollout is completed) you will notice a few different things based on your query. First off, Google will try to apply context to your search. For example, if you search for John Hancock it will give you the option to narrow down to the building in Chicago, the financial company or the revolutionary.


Search now understands context in addition to the string of search terms you provide. It will know that searching "Tabby" should not only bring back pages that mention tabbies but it will also understand that a tabby is a breed of housecat and can provide related information before you dive into a search result.

To me, it seems Google is not only trying to make search better and more relational. They are also trying to do what Microsoft Bing has done with search, only better and on a broader scale. Bing focuses on what they think their users search for most. Bing is pretty good at surfacing related information when searching about things like restaurants, concerts and travel. Google, however, maps relationships with as much information as it can. The Knowledge Graph has cataloged over 500 million things from people to places. All those things have 3.5 billion attributes that Google can use to make sense of searches queries.

For the most part this seems like a good and natural evolution of search. There will be a lot of griping from the SEO people out there but such is the price of taking advantage of a system that needs to continually improve to stay relevant. Look for the Knowlege Graph results on the the right hand side of you search results next time you look up another useless fact to prove your point in a fruitless argument. You might just get to add that "Did you know" sentence that all your friends just love about you.

How to turn a cassette tape into MP3s | How To - CNET

My how the pace of technology makes age ever more prevalent. Older Millennials (yes, just the older ones), might recall cassette tapes. Heck, some of you might even have a few still lying around. I know I've got Right Said Fred sitting around somewhere along with some recording of my favorite songs as they played on the radio.

While Spotify and others do a fine job of letting me listen to that music today, there could still be some bootleg, remix or live show that you couldn't get anywhere else.

Here is a method for getting those tapes into digital form. It isn't easy but it is free.

How to turn a cassette tape into MP3s | How To - CNET

What Google's Project Glass will really look like.

Turn your commute into a game with Waze!

UPDATE: After acquiring Waze, Google is now integrating traffic reports, generated from the Waze app's users, into the Google Maps app. Still no signs of closing down Waze itself as there is no way to report incidents from Google's own app.

Google Maps Gets Waze Real-Time Traffic Reports | PC Mag http://bit.ly/14yvehz


Your commute is probably boring and leaves you feeling unproductive. What if you could score points and compete with your friends just by driving? Waze aims to do just that and more. Waze, in the most basic sense, is a free turn by turn navigation service for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. Two really great features give it a big leg up over the other options. First, it is a game where you get points for driving and finding road goodies. Second, it is a social navigation app. When you are playing the game, you are actually providing Waze with valuable information about road conditions, avearge speed, and additional map details. This information helps Waze to determine better directions for you and other drivers using the app. As you earn more points you rise in rank, relative to other Wazers, and are able to compare your road warrior status against your friends on Facebook who also use Waze. It is surprisingly addictive, expecially when you realize that you can play a Pac-Man style of game by driving over roads that require fresh data (your avatar turns into a Pac-Man and munches up the road). As you can tell, this is a very social way to approach GPS navigation. In addition to just passively providing data, you can also report traffic jams, speed traps and road hazards to warn other Wazers (you get points for those too).

I've been using the app now for a few weeks and am pretty happy with the results. Waze has been much better than Google Navigation at avoiding traffic jams and it provides surprisingly accurate ETAs when using the navigation. It only gets better as more people use it, so download it and start navigating better, together.

Download: http://www.waze.com/download/

Cord-cutting on the rise

The television watching landscape is changing dramatically with the coming generation of people who access media from multiple sources and don't necessarily rely on television for the majority of their entertainment. Neilson has recently published some numbers that show that more people are cutting the cord and people with broadcast-only TV are upgrading to broadband Internet before they even consider upgrading to cable television. This transition has been a few years in the making and still represents a small part of the population, however, this is indicative of a perceived lack of value in cable programming as well as a swell of content becoming available online. I'll admit that I still find it hard to find sports to watch but over time this has only made me realize that I spend too much time inside when I could be enjoying the game with fellow fans or rivals at the local pub.

Read More: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/nielsen-cord-cutting-and-internet-tv-viewing-on-the-rise/

Google+ full integration with Google Search

It is finally here and it is, probably, awesome. Your Google+ can now be accessed from Google Search. Basically this means that anything you could search for from within Google+ can now be seen in your normal searches. This includes pictures, posts and profiles. Additionally, and also maybe the most interesting, items that you have shared or were shared with you privately (within a circle) are also visible in results. So, if you were having a private conversation (with posts, vids and pics) on Google+ and later couldn't remember or just wanted to reminisce, then you could just search for that conversation and will, instantly, be able to catch up on the whole thing.

I think this is great. It cuts another step out of getting to Google+ when I want to know about something, from a social perspective. It is convenient, as it can display my private social results along with the public web results of the wide internet.

It doesn't look like it is active on my search yet. Hopefully, this rolls out quickly.

Check it out: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html