The future of mobile

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors<br /></span><br />There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16. And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead (somewhere <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Gould">Chester Gould</a> is wondering how he got it backwards). So it's safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product ever invented.<br /><br />However, have you ever considered just exactly how powerful these ubiquitous devices are? The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago (assuming you even had a PC; most mobile users never have). It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly at low temperatures), and light meter (to determine screen backlighting) on the more basic phones; a location sensor, accelerometer (detects vector and velocity of motion), and maybe even a compass on more advanced ones. And most importantly, it is by its very nature always connected.<br /><br />Project out these trends another ten years. You will be carrying with you, 24x7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else. So what are you going to do with it that you aren't doing now? Here are some possibilities:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Smart alerts: </span> Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention. This is already happening today -- eBay can text you when you've been outbid, and alert services (such as Google News) can deliver news, sports, or stock updates to you. In the future these applications will get smarter, patiently monitoring your personalized preferences (which will be stored in the network cloud) and delivering only the information you desire. One very useful scenario: your phone knows that you are heading downtown for dinner, and alerts you of transit conditions or the best places to park.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Augmented reality:</span> Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful. For example, do you really want to know how much is that doggy in the window? Your phone, with its GPS and compass, knows what you are looking at, so it can tell you before you even ask. Plus, what breed it is and the best way to train him.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Crowd sourcing goes mainstream:</span> Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries. When everyone else is doing the same, you have a world where people from every corner of the planet are covering their experiences in real-time. That massive amount of content gets archived, sorted, and re-deployed to other people in new and interesting ways. Ask the web for the most interesting sites in your vicinity, and your phone shows you reviews and pictures that people have uploaded of nearby attractions. Like what you see? It will send you directions on how to get there.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sensors everywhere: </span>Your phone knows a lot about the world around you. If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now. Weather updates can be based on not hundreds of sensors, but hundreds of millions. Traffic reports can be based not on helicopters and road sensors, but on the density, speed, and direction of the phones (and people) stuck in the traffic jams.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tool for development: </span>Your phone may be more than just a convenience, it may be your livelihood. Already, this is true for people in many parts of the world: in southern India, fishermen use text messaging to find the best markets for their daily catch, in South Africa, sugar farmers can receive text messages advising them on how much to irrigate their crops, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa entrepreneurs with mobile phones become phone operators, bringing communications to their villages. These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The future-proof device: </span>Your phone will open up, as the Internet already has, so it will be easy for developers to create or improve applications and content. The ones that you care about get automatically installed on your phone. Let's say you have a piece of software on your phone to improve power management (and therefore battery life). Let's say a developer makes an improvement to the software. The update gets automatically installed on your phone, without you lifting a finger. Your phone actually gets better over time.<br /><br /><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"><b>Safer software through trust and verification: </b> Your phone will provide tools and information to empower you to decide what to download, what to see, and what to share. Trust is the most important currency in the always connected world, and your phone will help you stay<span style="border-collapse: separate;"> in control of your information. You may choose to share nothing at all (the default mode), or just share certain things with certain people -- your circle of trusted friends and family. You'll make these decisions based on information you get from the service and software providers, and the collective ratings of the community as well. Your phone is like your trusted valet: it knows a lot about you, and won't disclose an iota of it without your OK.</span></div></span><br />Now, if we can just train it to do your laundry ...<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Andy Rubin, Engineering Director<br /></span>

The future of mobile

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed ...

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Changes in Phoenix

At Google, engineering is everything - no great engineers, no life enhancing products, no happy users. So we've spent a lot of time structuring our engineering operations to make the most of the exceptional talent that's available across America - developing local centers that give engineers the autonomy and opportunity to be truly innovative. These principles have served us well as we've grown, so when the model fails, it's doubly disappointing.<br /><br />We opened our Phoenix office in 2006 and hoped that it would develop to support many of our internal engineering projects, the systems that make Google, well, Google. But we've found that despite everyone's best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fragmented. So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google. We will therefore be closing our Arizona office on November 21, 2008.<br /><br />We'd like to thank everyone involved in this project for their energy and enthusiasm: our engineers; the engineering community in Arizona; Arizona State University; the city of Tempe; and the greater Phoenix area. We are now working with the Phoenix Googlers to transition them to other locations, or to identify other opportunities for them at Google.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research</span>

Changes in Phoenix

At Google, engineering is everything - no great engineers, no life enhancing products, no happy users. So we've spent a lot of time str...

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Google in one more language

As we've <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/hitting-40-languages.html" id="ew4l" title="written before">written before</a>, one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what language they speak.<br /><br />It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-pirate">Pirate</a>.<br /><br />As you can see from this <a href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=pirate+talk" id="mefv" title="graph">graph</a> of the popularity of related searches from past years, we have reason to believe that this might be a timely addition:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqWWceb9EP3xEz_A2ExuCLkQ4wNLHWDOROjwG5Km0CCjpjLDe9tSYm4o-0Bzt__8CU_PLmVdQF7rNpAfDK2_Tij0_tRdScpvF5w5bkRBaZhbrDmMB2FzYjaEwFkge9GJjtN1_eXMCxEQv/s1600-h/pirate_talk.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247562142125022290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqWWceb9EP3xEz_A2ExuCLkQ4wNLHWDOROjwG5Km0CCjpjLDe9tSYm4o-0Bzt__8CU_PLmVdQF7rNpAfDK2_Tij0_tRdScpvF5w5bkRBaZhbrDmMB2FzYjaEwFkge9GJjtN1_eXMCxEQv/s320/pirate_talk.gif" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br />If ye're a gentleman or lady o' fortune yerself — or just want t' <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=talk+like+a+pirate&btnG=Searrrch" id="hh:l" title="talk like one">talk like one</a> — ye c'n set Pirate as yer preferred lingo usin' th' <a href="http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=xx-pirate" id="wskn" title="Likes an' Dislikes">Likes an' Dislikes</a> page, or cast yer <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=define%3Adeadlights&btnG=Searrrch" id="m7o4" title="deadlights">deadlights</a> on an <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-pirate&q=parrots&btnG=Searrrch" id="g0c7" title="example">example</a>.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Cap'n Pam Greenebearde</span>

Google in one more language

As we've written before , one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what l...

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The intelligent cloud

<span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20at%2010">their responses</a>. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors</span><br /><br />In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.<br /><br />As we're already seeing, people will interact with the cloud using a plethora of devices: PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, and games. But we'll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud. The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react.<br /><br />Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.<br /><br />What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.<br /><br />The impact of such systems will go well beyond Google. Researchers across medical and scientific fields can access massive data sets and run analysis and pattern detection algorithms that aren't possible today. The proposed <a id="jvpk" href="http://www.lsst.org/lsst_home.shtml" title="Large Synoptic Survey Telescope">Large Synoptic Survey Telescope</a> (LSST), for example, may generate over 15 terabytes of new data per day! Virtually any research field will benefit from systems with the ability to gather, manipulate, and learn from datasets at that scale.<br /><br />Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist</span>

The intelligent cloud

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed ...

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Shelter from the storm

Following last week's landfall of Hurricane Ike, thousands of Gulf Coast residents remain without shelter, and <a title="millions more without electricity" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7619389.stm" id="k6pd">millions more are without electricity</a>. As the Gulf slowly recovers from the <a title="powerful Category 2 storm" href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/09/aftermath-of-hurricane-ike.html" id="pk7q">powerful Category 2 storm</a>, organizations such as the <a title="American Red Cross" href="http://www.redcross.org/" id="qpcb">American Red Cross</a> have stepped up efforts to provide relief for those most affected by the storm. For these individuals, the Red Cross has set up a number of shelters, providing food, safety, shelter, and above all, hope. Working with the Red Cross, we've mapped the open American Red Cross Shelters in the states of Texas and Louisiana. These locations, updated every ten minutes, are available to <a id="us-8" href="http://mw2.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/disaster/ike/redcross_nl.kmz" title="Google Earth">view in Google Earth</a>, or via Google Maps:<br /><br /><br /><iframe marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fmw2.google.com%2Fmw-earth-vectordb%2Fdisaster%2Fike%2Fredcross_nl.kmz&ie=UTF8&t=h&s=AARTsJoldqxAj5Cbb4PjsIrDVt_Hw3OfuA&ll=31.316101,-94.768066&spn=9.004478,14.0625&z=6&output=embed" scrolling="no" width="640" frameborder="0" height="480"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fmw2.google.com%2Fmw-earth-vectordb%2Fdisaster%2Fike%2Fredcross_nl.kmz&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=31.316101,-94.768066&spn=9.004478,14.0625&z=6&source=embed" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255); text-align: left;">View Larger Map</a></small><br /><br />Previous <a id="pbgq" href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/" title="Google LatLong Blog">Google Lat Long Blog</a> posts: <div> <ul><li>KML of <a id="s8sa" href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/09/aftermath-of-hurricane-ike.html" title="Updated Imagery">Updated Imagery</a> </li><li>Track the Hurricanes in <a id="tx1y" href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/09/hurricane-layer-updates-for-ike.html" title="Google Earth's Weather Layer">Google Earth's Weather Layer</a> </li></ul> </div> <span class="byline-author">Posted by Jessica Pfund and Pete Giencke, Google Earth Team</span>

Shelter from the storm

Following last week's landfall of Hurricane Ike, thousands of Gulf Coast residents remain without shelter, and millions more are without...

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Google Maps for mobile now with Street View and walking directions

Today we added new features to <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/default/maps/index.html">Google Maps for Mobile</a> that will help you see a location, find out what people are saying about it, and learn how to get there on foot -- all from the convenience of your phone. Street View imagery, walking directions and business reviews are now available for BlackBerry and many Java-enabled phones. Read more on the <a href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/09/street-view-and-walking-directions-come.html">Google Mobile Blog</a>, and check out this video.<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3IXC5A1ZoV4&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3IXC5A1ZoV4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Michael Siliski, Product Manager</span>

Google Maps for mobile now with Street View and walking directions

Today we added new features to Google Maps for Mobile that will help you see a location, find out what people are saying about it, and lear...

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Partnering with GE on clean energy

Today we announced that we're <a title="joining forces" href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/google_org_ge_energyfactsheet.pdf" id="d1_0">joining forces</a> (PDF file) with <span style="border-collapse: collapse;">GE</span> to use technology, information and corporate resources to drive the changes necessary to empower consumers with better energy choices. We will focus on improving power generation, transmission and distribution – a combination of technologies that could be known as the "<a id="zkx7." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid" title="smart grid">smart grid</a>." (It would be fair to refer to electricity technologies in common use today as a "grid of only average intelligence.")<br /><br />The existing U.S. infrastructure has not kept pace with the digital economy and the hundreds of technology opportunities that are ready for market. In fact, the way we generate and distribute electricity today is essentially the same as when Thomas Edison built the first <a id="ir8i" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#Electric_power_distribution" title="power plant">power plant</a> well over one hundred years ago. Americans should have the choice to drive more fuel efficient cars – or even electric cars - and manage their home energy use to reduce costs, and buy power from cleaner sources, or even generate their own power for sale to the grid.<br /><br />We all receive an electricity bill once a month that encourages little except prompt payment. What if, instead, we had access to real-time information about home energy use? What if our flat screen TVs, electronic equipment, lights and appliances were programmed to automatically adjust to save money and cut energy use? What if we could push a button and switch the source of our homes' electricity from fossil fuels to renewable energy? What if the car sitting in our garage ran on electricity – the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline – and was programmed to charge at night when electricity is cheapest?<br /><br />This vision is what unites Google and GE. We’ll start by working together in Washington, D.C. to mount a major policy effort to enable large-scale deployment of renewable energy generation in the United States. We’ll also work on development and deployment of the “smart” electricity grid that will empower consumers, utilities, and technology innovators to manage electricity more efficiently and lower their carbon footprint. Finally, we'll collaborate on advanced energy technologies, including technologies to enable the large-scale integration of <a id="ft.c" href="http://www.google.org/recharge/" title="plug-in vehicles">plug-in vehicles</a> into the grid and new geothermal energy technologies known as <span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span style="border-collapse: separate;"><a id="qcx6" href="http://www.google.org/egs/" title="enhanced geothermal systems">enhanced geothermal systems</a></span></span> (EGS).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy4qMKIeCLX3x4MU6AIT7-7PELlfHzPQeg5vMng08SPQGf6YT_b6UoEAGjaYFahCXVIndjHNKpp9MBcwKWsucktPdEjp9CHI4A9FWuyjx4Hz2NAJku_iDk5_gRBqgqpapwq1dVs5ZRJ5rF/s1600-h/IMG_1127.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247089224660681378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy4qMKIeCLX3x4MU6AIT7-7PELlfHzPQeg5vMng08SPQGf6YT_b6UoEAGjaYFahCXVIndjHNKpp9MBcwKWsucktPdEjp9CHI4A9FWuyjx4Hz2NAJku_iDk5_gRBqgqpapwq1dVs5ZRJ5rF/s320/IMG_1127.JPG" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Eric Schmidt with GE's CEO Jeff Immelt at Google's Zeitgeist conference</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Update:</span> Here's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsf6t5hSWDM">the video</a> of Eric Schmidt and Jeff Immelt's talk at Zeitgeist '08. Also, clarified the last sentence in the second paragraph.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Michael Terrell, Google.org</span>

Partnering with GE on clean energy

Today we announced that we're joining forces (PDF file) with GE to use technology, information and corporate resources to drive the ch...

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