Fast Pipe to Asia on its way!!!

At last a chance for people in Asia to rejoice (I’m so happy)!!!! Google and group of other companies have invested about $300 million dollars in developing a super fast internet cable (laid under the pacific)…

Improvement in net speed!

Apparently this cable can supports speeds up to 7.68Tbps (Tera bits per second)! WOW… SO this means it’s not long before people in Asia start seeing an increase internet speeds…

The Unity Consortium, consists of Google,  Global Transit, Bharti Airtel,SingTel, Pacnet, and KDDI, has nearly completed the testing of this new cable.

Reports say that Google gets 20 percent of the bandwidth for its own operation. All this seems fine till you come across news which says Google is leaving China on April 10th. (This may be bad for Google and probably china as well) but from my point of view (very selfish, I know) this is great news. Why? , you ask, well mainly for the following reason

• More bandwidth from the fast pipe (under Google’s 20%) will help Google deliver faster internet access to users in other Asian countries

Here’s what Google had to say,

The need for information is a global requirement. As the economies of Asian countries continue to grow, data traffic and the use of the Internet expands. Google is a global company and is committed to providing the best quality of user experience regardless of geography.

All this apart many of us were hoping Google would become an Internet Service Provider(ISP) (and bring out something like their fiber to home project in the US) but it looks like that’s not going to happen , not right now anyway.

It’s expected that Google will formally announce the completion of this amazing project next week… When will our speeds improve? (that’s the question for which i am still searching for an answer)

Google converting software to Open Source?

Google - our Hero!!!

Google always does something to ensure it stays on the front page!!! Most of the times this appeals to users , sometimes not!!! But this time they have certainly succeeded in amassing goodwill (especially among the programming/open source community)

How did they do this? – Google bought reMail in mid february. reMail is application for the iPhone which allows the user to download his/her mail to the iphone and thus make all mail available offline! This app gained a lot of popularity because accessing mails became faster, cheaper and quicker!

Google first did something really funny by killing reMail (removing it from the app store). This did not affect those who had already bought the app (as it requires only the iPhone and has no server).

They brought it back 2 days ago… How does this earn goodwill u ask me??? They brought it back alright but now its open source. Yup you read it right. Google bought reMail and gave the code to the world.

Here’s what Founder(of reMail) Gabor Cselle had to day about this

As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail’s source code helpful in your quest.

We know that Google never does anything if it doesn’t benefit from it, but I’m seriously clueless as to how this helps them! They did something very similar to this last year, Google acquired etherpad as it was going to shutdown and made the technology open source too.

Thats twice now.  Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope to god that this continues!

Whether this is good for Google I don’t know, but I do know that the open source community has something to rejoice about! Lets hope they keep this up and convert more such technology to Open Source

Who knows you the best? – Google???

Google knows you best

For quite some time now this thought has been lingering in my head… Who knows me best? the first few people who I thought it could be were my brothers, or maybe my mother… until i realized its probably none other than Google

First reaction – “So now the answer to my question.” Realization – “Sh*t”

Well its obvious if you think hard enough. Considering the number of Google products ranging from Search, mail, calendar, wave, buzz, blogspot, analytics, etc.. and the fact that Google themselves have said they store all information (including searches) for “personalization” or “research” its quite obvious.

In fact some time back Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in soup for making some comments about online privacy – gist of it all can be understood by one of his many statements

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

Leave that aside for a minute, remember way back when gmail was launched in 2004 Google was boasting about their ad system in gmail – subject based ads – which means ads based on the text in your mail, which finally implies something reads at least a few words of your mail.

How does all this fit you ask? Well lets take a quick example. I would talk to my colleagues only about work related stuff my ideas, my plans etc. Whereas with friends I’d probably talk about my next holiday etc. Now each of them knows only about one phase of my life. You go to Google and search holiday locations  and also about career prospects – WAM!!! … who do you think knows you better now??? colleague, friend or Google???

OK, by now some of you think I’m insane and tell me Google is a set of computers… but its obvious that some one at Google has access to that data… Its also a commonly known fact that the US government has for sometime now been asking Google to share its data…

I’m very late with this realization, and about a year back Gina Trapani editor of Life hacker made her move from Google to yahoo because she felt Google already knew her too well!!!

On the other hand here’s a recent article on someone complaining about Google’s privacy policy.

Maybe its about time all Google worshipers/followers/users stopped for a minute to think about this…

Does Google know too much??

Google Fiber – Super speed Browsing

I’m sure most of us curse the browsing speed (or download speed) we have at least 2 times a month.,… for those avid net freaks, I’m sure you always want more than what is available right now…

Guess what Google does it again… They are launching a service called Google fiber- whose main aim is to offer speeds of up to 1 Gbps… that’s 100 times faster than the American home connections and probably 500 times faster than my connection (OMG)….

This means downloading a 700mb video should take u a minimum of a few seconds and a maximum of a minute… (imagine that)…

They plan to role this out to select communities (in US i’m guessing)…

heres a clip on what its all about

Here’s what they describe their goals as

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

• Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
• New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
• Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Visit the Google Fiber Site and the google blog for more details on this project….

Personally i’m ready to move to the community chosen for this project!!!!