Exclusive: Google To Go Nuclear. Google has acquired a company that has created a new process for highly efficient isotope separation, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The primary use of this technology, say experts we’ve spoken with, is uranium enrichment. Enriched uranium is a necessary ingredient in the creation of nuclear energy, and one source we’ve spoken with at Google says that this is part of the Google Green Initiative. The company will use the new technology to enable it to design and possibly build small, mobile and highly efficient nuclear power generators. “Google has already begun building an enrichment plant,” says a high ranking IAEA source. As GreenBeat points out, “Google finally decided to launch a dedicated unit of the company for designing and building its own solar panels, wind turbines, energy efficiency devices, etc. GreenBeat first broke the story (first titled Google Has A Big Alternate Energy Announcement Forthcoming) after seeing multiple tweets about the impending announcement.
Google Japan releases the new keyboard drumset for one stroke in. Ever tried writing in Japanese? No, right? Well it’s really hard. There are like lines and little circles and things. Well, Google Japan just released their new drum-based interface to type in Japanese. Google Translate tells us: Q. TEXTp saves YouTube bandwidth, money. It’s great news that there are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, we support 1080p and HD uploads are rising quickly, but that’s also meant increasing bandwidth costs cutting into our bottom line.
And so, in our drive to keep expenses under control, we’ve decided that April 1 is the perfect day to take the important step of offering a new way to experience YouTube: text-only mode, or TEXTp. TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system -- and have the added benefit of promoting literacy! To give it a whirl, make sure you have the latest Flash player (10.0) and click here. Or you can select “TEXTp” from the pulldown menu on most videos, as so: Patrick Pichette, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Google. The free encyclopedia. Introducing The Do-It-Yourself CrunchPad Kit [Video] Those you you who’ve been following the CrunchPad project since we first announced it in the summer of 2008 weren’t too happy to hear about the recent…hiccups…that we continue to fight through.
But never fear, while we continue to clean up the mess that our Asian contractor left behind we’ve been hard at work on a new project that lets anyone create an iPad like device from any laptop screen. It’s called the CrunchPad Kit and it goes on sale now. Best of all, we’re selling this for just $49 as an introductory price. Once 800 have sold, or about $44,000 in revenue, we’ll be moving to a higher price.
The CrunchPad team has been working around the clock here at our Palo Alto headquarters to get the kit ready for full production in time for the delivery of the iPad on April 3. We know you want an iPad, but you aren’t as excited about that $499+ price tag. With the CrunchPad Kit, you can turn any laptop screen into a device that’s just as good, for a fraction of the price. A different kind of company name. Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture.
Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka. We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains. In fact, Topeka Google Mayor Bill Bunten expressed it best: “Don’t be fooled. For 150 years, its fortuitous location at the confluence of the Kansas River and the Oregon Trail has made the city formerly known as Topeka a key jumping-off point to the new world of the West, just as for 150 months the company formerly known as Google has been a key jumping-off point to the new world of the web.
Google canoodle in new waterways pilot | Leeds. How the new Google River View, which is being piloted in Leeds, could look Photograph: guardian.co.uk Web giant Google has chosen Leeds as the UK pilot destination for testing a river-based version of its popular Google Street View service, I can exclusively reveal. The service will map the waterways of Great Britain using a canoe-based camera. In a major coup for the city, it's expected the River Aire will be mapped this way, along with the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Leeds has apparently been chosen as the first place in the world to pilot the scheme as the city has "an interesting visual mix of industrial and commercial river landscapes, not to mention flora and fauna".
Launched in May 2007, Google Street View allows users to explore the world virtually at street level and has proved hugely popular. It is believed that images for Google River View will be taken from a modified nautical vessel using sail pro-flo image capturing technology. 4chan 2.0: Introducing 4chan 2.0 (bet...