GrandCentral is now Google Voice!
Wow, after 2 years, Google finally does something about their acquired company, GrandCentral. This is currently only avilable for previous GrandCentral users. The official announcement is here.
The new application improves the way you use your phone. You can get transcripts of your voicemail (see the video below) and archive and search all of the SMS text messages you send and receive. You can also use the service to make low-priced international calls and easily access Goog-411 directory assistance.
As you may know, GrandCentral offers many great features, including a single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones, a central voicemail inbox that you could access on the web, and the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail. You’ll find these features, and more, in the Google Voice preview. Check out the features page for videos and more information on how these features work.
If you need an invite to Google Voice, sign up here.
Josh’s Verdict: Is eBay going to quit their Google AdWords campaign just because Google launched a competitive product, i.e. to Skype? Why not? They did that when Google launched Google Checkout, the competitor to PayPal.
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Monetizing Methods: Google AdSense
In the blog post series entitled Monetizing Methods, Josh will review and explain ways of making money online.
Google AdSense has to be the most widely used method to monetizing anyone’s website or blog. The application process is quick, easy and painless, and the program is available to (almost) anyone around the world. Heck, it’s even used on Josh’s Blog!
Quick Facts
PROS
- Completely FREE to use
- Easy Quick Application Process (within 24 hours)
- Large Acceptance Policy (They’ll likely to accept your application process as long as your website meets the requirements, see here)
- No selling required
- Easy Integration with other Google Products (e.g. Feedburner, Blogger and Google Knol)
- Clean, Easy to Use Interface
- Good Reporting Stats
Great, now make sure you know the Website Requirements. You’ll get rejected if your website doesn’t have enough content too, so make you sure you blog a few posts before applying for the program.
CONS
- Money only comes by Cheque/Direct Transfer (No PayPal, Google Checkout etc)
- Money has to reach a whopping $100 before you can cash out
- To combat fraud, there’s a waiting time of a month between the time you reach $100 and getting the cheque/transfer
- VERY small Commission
- Hard Work
Conclusion:
If you’re looking for a get-rich quick scheme, Google AdSense isn’t for you. Google AdSense takes a lot of time (and effort) in order to gain a few cents a day. The CPC (Cost per Click) highly depends on your Website’s Page Impression.
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Google’s Measurement Lab tests ISP Traffic Throttling
Google just announced that they have released a tool, partnered with New America Foundation and Planet Labs called Measurement Labs . This tool will give end users the tools to figure out whether internet service providers are interfering with their broadband connections by blocking or “throttling” certain applications.
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Fake Android on Sciphone Dream G2: Oh Why?
At Josh’s Blog, I personally have an open source belief, although I still rely on closed sourced programs and Operating Systems. So imagine my support for Google’s Open Source Andriod when it was announced.. I love Google and many of their Open Source ambitions.
And yet I’m sure the people behind Sciphone Dream G2 (no relation to The T-Mobile G1 by the ways) DOESN’T unserstand what Open Source. They ripped off the WHOLE Google Andriod look.
Back in November, I thought this phone actually had the real deal of the Andriod OS. But no. They had to RIP OFF a whole Open Source system. Just wow. Check out the video below:
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What’s New in Google Chrome v2.0
Do you ever feel some things are missing in Google Chrome? To be honest, I regarded these features for Chrome’s small footprint and the fast V8 javascript engine. Personally, as a web designer, I also like the WebKit engine better than Trident (Of course, the IE one) or the Gecko engine (Mozilla’s one). What else uses WebKit? Apple’s Safari. And the speed is just awesome. Anyways, thanks to Google Operating System for the tips below.
First of all, How do I get the new version?
1. If you don’t have Google Chrome, install it from google.com/chrome
2. Subscribe to the developer preview channel. This is required even if you’ve previously subscribed to the channel.
3. Force the update by opening the “About Google Chrome” dialog.
“The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail). The Dev channel can be very unstable at times, and new features usually require some manual configuration to be enabled. Still, simply using Dev channel releases is an easy (practically zero-effort) way for anyone to help improve Google Chrome.”
If you don’t like the new version, you can always downgrade to the most recent stable version by reinstalling Chrome.
Google Chrome‘s development is high-paced and version numbers are not very significant, but it’s weird to see a pre-beta release of Chrome 2.0, four months after Chrome 0.2. There are many new things in Chrome 2.0:
Form autocomplete, one of the most obvious missing features from the initial release
Full-page zoom, which resizes images and embedded objects too, not just text. It’s important to know the keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl – to zoom out, Ctrl + to zoom in and Ctrl 0 to go back to the normal view.
Autoscroll by middle-clicking on a page and indicating the direction
Profiles are a great way to separate Chrome’s settings in different categories: you could create a work profile with its own homepage, bookmarks and browsing history and profile for your personal projects. The great thing about Chrome is that you don’t have to close the browser to change your profile: just open a new window in a separate profile.
Support for Greasemonkey scripts (or user-scripts). To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome’s shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add -enable-user-scripts in the Target field. For now, you’ll need to place the scripts in c:\scripts, but the location will change in the next builds.
Other important improvements includes updates to WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine, a better implementation for SafeBrowsing (malware/phishing protection), new code for the HTTP network protocol.
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Google Street View Fights crime as well!
Google Street View may get a bad rap from some overzealous privacy watchdogs and conspiracy theorists, but it just helped police save a young girl who had been kidnapped over the weekend.
In the case, which involved a woman who allegedly kidnapped her granddaughter, Athol Police Officer Todd Neale managed to track down the missing girl by obtaining coordinates of her cell phone from the phone’s carrier. Neale contacted Deputy Fire Chief Thomas V. Lozier who worked with him in trying to figure out exactly where the missing girl was being held.
The two men found that the phone’s coordinates kept coming in within 300 feet of each other at an intersection in Virginia. Unfortunately they were located in Massachusetts, so they couldn’t just drive to the other side of town to take a look. So they turned to Google.
Using Google Street View, they virtually “looked around” the intersection, when they noticed a large building nearby where the pair might have been staying. They subsequently identified the building as a motel (again with Google), and then confirmed that the motel was nearby using Google’s satellite view. The pair notified the Virginia state police of their findings, who then found the 9-year old girl and her grandmother in the motel.
For the full story, check out this Telegram Article.
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Google Easter Egg: Google Chrome on iPhone?
Uh, oh. You remember that Google Easter Egg we mentioned earlier? The one that allows you to browse within the app. Well, we got to, you know – thinking (for once) about this little browsing within the Google Mobile App thing. Guess what. You aren’t using Mobile Safari – as far as we (an broswer detection pages we checked) can tell. Does Google have their own WebKit based browser built into the Google Mobile App?
Or might Google be using Safari’s Webkit engine and throwing off the browser detection scripts. We’re sure someone out there is smart enough to help out.
Mobile Safari on the left vs. Google‘s iPhone browser on the right. The browser detection plugin sees different versions of Safari for each browser. Theoretically, they should be giving the same browser versions if Google‘s Mobile App is using Mobile Safari to render pages.
Google‘s Browser also has navigation buttons and the ability to open in new windows (see bottom). So what does this mean? It kinda breaks the ol’ rules of the App store as far as we can tell.
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Google iPhone App has an Easter Egg!
Google put an easter egg in the menu of their iPhone application, but they hid it so well that no one stumbled upon it, so they simply decided to blog about it to reveal the gem.
If you have the Google Mobile App installed on your iPhone, go to the Settings tab, scroll to the bottom and keep swiping upwards until a secret option dubbed ‘Bells and Whistles’ appears (this also works in the foreign language versions of the app, and it will stay there once you’ve found it).
The hidden menu lets you change the theme color of the app and its default sounds to chicken or monkey noises. It also enables you to turn on a ‘Live Waveform’ which visualizes speech as a graph, and an effectively useful one that lets you opt to to open hyperlinks in the app itself.
Now go tell all your friends that you found it first!
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