.::REALITYRECALL::.

I’m surprised this hasn’t come out sooner: Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones that scans products, books, movies, business cards, bar codes, artworks—a ton of stuff. It's like Google robot eyes in your phone.

While it's not pixel perfect in its judgment, what's impressive is its depth—unlike apps like ShopSavvy or SnapTell, Goggles aims to search everything, even if it admittedly isn’t great at IDing food or pets or cars. Yet. Plus, it’s got integrated augmented reality powers, so it’ll show you nearby businesses without you having to touch anything.

Considering Google’s rollout of QR codes to a bunch of places, clearly, they're planning to splash big with visual search before some upstarts get the ball rolling—I figure it's only a (short) matter of time before we see it on other smartphones besides Android 1.6. [Google]

Canada added 79,000 jobs last month as the country’s unemployment rate dipped 0.1 percentage points to 8.5 per cent, with the largest job gains coming in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.

I met my first serious girlfriend after my first divorce—yes, there are more of both—through a proto-Facebook created at Google. It was 2004, and it's name was Orkut. But social networks go back to 1995.

Click to zoom in

It all started with Classmates.com, which apparently has 50,000,000 users now. On the top of the pyramid is Facebook and its 300 million users, followed by MySpace’s 263 million. In the middle you have a huge constellation of sites, most of which I just can’t recognize. Trombi? Vampirefreaks? Bigadda? Cafemom? Geni? Itsmy? Qzone? Xanga?

Please, stop saying words. [Focus—Thanks David Keyes]

Windows only: If you use Windows Media Center to manage your movies, TV shows, and music, then you need to grab Media Browser, an open-source plug-in that displays your downloaded media and all its associated metadata and artwork in one slick layout.

After installing the free, open-source Media Browser plug-in, it only takes a few minutes to zip through the one-time setup wizard and choose which media you’d like the tool to aggregate for you. Then fire up Windows Media Center, and the Media Browser option will be listed among the Center’s native Movie, TV, and Music choices.

Although there are plenty of other Media Center plug-ins to choose from, and a couple of weeks back we highlighted the similar My Movies 3, this one gets high marks for the way it aggregates a wide range of recorded or ripped media and presents it with just enough eye-candy to make it pretty without being cluttered. It’s also open source, and with its low price of free, very easy on the wallet.

Media Browser only works on Windows Vista and Windows 7. What kinds of plug-ins improve your Windows Media Center experience? Kick around your ideas in the comments.

Windows: Earlier this week we highlighted how to download National Geographic’s stunning desktop wallpapers in one fell swoop. That method required some command-line work and didn’t grab 2007 images; NatGeo Wallpaper Downloader snags every 2007, 2008, and 2009 wallpaper with point-and-click ease.

Just download the app, point it toward the folder you want to download those wallpapers to, and let ‘er rip. NatGeo Wallpaper Downloader is entirely portable, so you don’t need to install anything to use it and you can easily pop it on your thumb drive to give the gift of awesome wallpapers everywhere you go this holiday season.

NatGeo Wallpaper Downloader is a free Windows download. If you’re on Linux or OS X, the previously mentioned method should get you there (minus the 2007 images) with a little more legwork.

The Hockey Night in Canada All Access Cam will make its debut during Friday’s telecast of the Montreal Canadiens’ centennial anniversary game against the Boston Bruins.

Google today launched a new, free DNS service—called Google Public DNS—aimed at making your web browsing experience even faster. Here's how it works:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with DNS (and it's cool if you are—as long as DNS is working, most people never need to know what's going on), Google offers an explanation:

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names – e.g., www.google.com – into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers – e.g., 74.125.45.100 – that computers use to communicate with one another.

Google Public DNS, then, aims to replace your ISP’s default DNS with a (hopefully) faster, safer, and more reliable alternative. Google Public DNS isn’t the first freely available alternate DNS we’ve seen. Previously mentioned OpenDNS is an excellent DNS alternative (it boasts keyboard shortcuts, parental filters, and more), but—for better or worse—we're guessing that even more people may be interested in Google's offering.

To set up your computer or router to use Google Public DNS, hit up Google’s instructions (they’ve got specific instructions for Windows, Mac, Linux, or your router).

I swapped my DNS to Google’s service earlier today and so far my page loading seems to have a spring it its step, but you know how these things go. If you give it a try, let’s hear whether things are feeling snappier for you in the comments.

Update: Reader Manu writes in to share the results of his Google Public DNS testing, and Google’s DNS looks pretty blazing—particularly for international users. For folks in the U.S., OpenDNS looks like it may still be a touch faster—at least according to Manu's results.

About 30 per cent of young people in the U.S. have been involved in some form of ‘sexting’ and nearly half of those say they don’t see it as a serious problem, a survey suggests.

If you dug how Google’s experiment with a single-word homepage looked, you'll be pleased to know that the search service's homepage is indeed sticking with that look—kind of.

The page shows just the logo, elongated search bar, and two buttons when you first arrive, and then the top-level menus fade in when you interact with it. It may not show up right away, but after a hard refresh—or cookie wipe—you should start seeing the new effects.

If you’ve ever wondered how Google goes about testing and re-re-designing a page layout, hit the link to read up on how 10 different designs, some of them almost practical jokes, led to the Mountain View firm’s decision. And tell us what you think of Google’s semi-new look in the comments.

Google’s not the only one in the game when it comes to wild mapping tech, and while Microsoft’s excellent collection of bird’s eye photos has never gotten it quite the attention of Google’s Street View, the hope is that lasers and its much-lauded Photosynth tool can do the trick. Microsoft has done up a Street View-style canvassing of 56 US cities with cars that not only snap photos but include range-finding lasers to map out the architecture in 3D. The Silverlight-based viewer for this view (dubbed Streetside) is similar in interface to Google Maps, a tad slower, and rather visually impressive. In addition, Microsoft is leaning on its Photosynth technology to collect navigable panoramas of scenery and even building interiors. Finally, Microsoft has tacked on “apps” of sorts, little overlays that include traffic cameras, restaurants, a Twitter API and so forth. All of this coupled with an improved version of the bird’s eye view is quite a visual treat, but the Silverlight requirement and non-Google-ness of it all might keep away the Bing-averse among us. But really, with all this tit-for-tat going on between Microsoft and Google, we have to wonder what sort of stone age we’d be stuck in if we didn’t have these two behemoths going at each other like this. The “Beta” is live now at the source link.

[Thanks, Aimee]

Microsoft giving Bing Maps a 3D overhaul, tacking on apps for good measure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A basic human desire is to look for life beyond Planet Earth. We look at the stars wondering if a tentacled creature is gazing back at us and we ponder if life on Earth was spawned by alien bacteria hitching …

Designer Damjan Stanković has a novel solution for street pollution, and it doesn’t involve biofuels made from bunnies or boxy concept cars. His Red Dot Award-winning Eko traffic light brings the progress bar to the streets, eliminating those frustrating 90 seconds that we endure at intersections.

Stanković is not, however, attempting to assuage your annoyance at having to wait; instead, the progress bar is intended to show motorists exactly how much time will pass before the light goes green. During this lull, drivers can shut off their motors to conserve gas and prevent idling emissions.

Continue reading Traffic Light Counts Down To Green, Promotes Eco-Awareness

Filed under: Web

Traffic Light Counts Down To Green, Promotes Eco-Awareness originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox: If you need a simple screen recording tool but don’t want to install an extra application just for the task, the CaptureFox extension brings screen recording to Firefox.

Once you install the extension, a small icon is placed in the right hand side of your status bar—for those of you who have banished your status bars for extra screen space, you can hit CTRL+SHIFT+U or open it from the Tools menu instead—clicking on it pulls up the menu you see in the screenshot above.

After you select the settings you want, you can begin capturing. The capture can be limited to the Firefox windows or cover the whole screen and you can select your video quality, frame rate, codec, and filename. Check out the video below to see it in action.

If you’re looking for a stand-alone or web-based screencasting tool, check out our recent Hive Five on best screencasting tools. Have a tool for screencasting you couldn’t live without? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

You can visit the CaptureFox site at the link below for additional information or jump right to the Mozilla Add-on page for CaptureFox here. CaptureFox is free and works wherever Firefox does.

If you use Zoho for its customer relationship platform, Zoho Mail, or as a secondary document space, but keep some files in Google Docs, the web suite has made it very easy to upload and attach documents from Google’s service.

It’s not officially announced yet, but a wiki page and Zoho Show presentation show off the new Google Docs uploading powers that many Zoho products have added. We’d say that “nearly every” Zoho product has added Google Docs uploading, but there are so many tools at Zoho’s platform that we’d be remiss to even try and cover them all.

Here’s how Zoho shows off its Google Docs integration:

Are you a Zoho user who also digs Google Docs, or vice-versa? Tell us how you use Zoho and Google to get things done.

Well, we’ve known for a while that Google was throwing considerable weight behind HTML 5, and that one of the purposes of the markup language is to do away with plug-ins for Internet apps, so it makes sense that eventually Gears would go the way of the Dodo. But so soon? Linus Upson, the man in charge of both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS engineering teams, has announced that the company is done developing the software. “We are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears],” the man said in an interview with PC Magazine. “We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don’t want to break anything out there.” If you listen to this guy, it sounds like this was the plan, all along: “When we started the Gears project, three years ago… we did it because we couldn’t get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications.” He then details the mind trick: Google ships Gears, and suddenly browser vendors are “very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications,” paving the way for the capabilities in the next version of HTML. Clever, Google. In the same interview, Upson stated the company’s plans to move all its apps to standards-based HTML 5 APIs. Now that it’s convinced the world that it wants — nay, needs — rich Internet applications, we hope that the company will promise to use its powers of persuasion for good, and not for evil.

Google halts development of Gears, makes room for HTML 5 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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