Google's wonder wheel

A new feature, one of several, in Google's results page is a Wonder Wheel. I came across the name Hype Igoe, a boxing writer on the pages of the book I'm currently reading, Tunney: boxing's brainiest champ and his upset of the great Jack Dempsey, by Jack Cavanaugh. Googling him led me to an entry on the blog of a Canadian cartoonist, Yesterday's Papers.

Clicking on the Wonder Wheel hyperlink shows a wheel with spokes: hype igoe in the center, with names on spokes: Joe Louis, San Francisco Examiner, Cyber boxing zone, Jack Dempsey, Jim Corbett, Gene Tunney, elevator operator, hypodermic needle.

The last two are, seemingly, erroneous. Nonetheless, in the entry in Yesterday's Papers on Hype Igoe, there is this: “It was Dorgan who helped popularize the label “Hype”, which Igoe had hung on him by a 300 pound Negro elevator operator. The operator took one look at the slender 15 year old copy-boy back in the days when he was working for the San Francisco Examiner and observed: “Mr. Igoe, yo ain’t no bigger than a hypodermic needle.””

Hype himself originated the phrase "to hype," as in standing behind his fighters "hyping" them up for the slugout.

So, there are the connections, but they make little logical sense.

Geniuses at Play, on the Job

Unless you’re just off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you’re already aware of the product that made Google famous: its Search box. It’s become the card catalog for the Internet (and a whopping moneymaker for Google).

But any time you cram some 20,000 of the world’s smartest people into one company, you can expect to grow a garden of unrelated ideas. Especially when you give some of those geniuses one workday a week — Google’s famous “20 percent time”— to work on whatever projects fan their passions. And especially when you create Google Labs (labs.google.com), a Web site where the public can kick the tires on half-baked Google creations. Some Labs projects go on to become real Google services, and others are quietly snuffed out.

Such innovations — and a number of smart acquisitions — have led to hits like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar and others.

But they have also cultivated a vast jungle of lesser-known features. Unfortunately, it’s so vast, you’d need a professional tour guide to help you find the gems.

Hello, my name is David. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

Google's energy ideas

This company is amazing. Makes sense, of course, that it has an interest in energy, considering how much energy it must use in its server farms.

October 28, 2008, 7:44 am

Google’s Energy Ideas Might Emerge Under Open Source Licenses — Or Not

By Miguel Helft

Bill Weil (left), Google’s “Green Energy Czar,” and Dan Reicher, the company’s Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, straddle the solar-panel-covered roof at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last week. The company has big energy plans. (Photo: Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)

Much of what Google is planning as it considers forays into the energy business is a tightly guarded secret. True to form, the company likes to reveal little about its future products until they are ready to be unveiled.

So the task of understanding exactly what the company is up to involves a bit of reading between the lines.

“We can’t really talk too openly about what we are doing just yet,” said Ed Lu, who works in advanced projects at Google. Mr. Lu, a former NASA astronaut, said he could only talk in general terms. “The big area that we are looking at is energy information,” he said.

At Google, Mr. Lu is often referred to as “Ed the astronaut.” He has flown two Space Shuttle missions, spent six months on the International Space Station and orbited the earth about 3,300 times.

He chose to explain Google’s thinking with an analogy. Buying electricity today, he said, is a bit like going to a grocery store where the items have no prices and where you get billed a month later for your purchases. Some engineers in Mr. Lu’s team, are working on tools to turn energy buyers into more informed consumers, he said.

“We see that there is a need here that isn’t being met,” Mr. Lu said. As often is the case with Google, the company plans to introduce a product first and figure out how to profit from it later. Asked when the first Google energy information product would be ready, he said: “We are pretty close. It’s pretty exciting.”

Meanwhile, William E. Weihl, green energy czar at Google, said engineers on his team are doing research and development work in solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies. He described the work, in part, as a hedge against the possible failure of outside companies in those fields that Google has invested in.

As to how Google would commercialize its own energy research — and the intellectual property that rises from it, Mr. Weihl said, “We could potentially start a company to commercialize the IP technology we develop.” Or, he said, Google could also take another approach: Offering up the technology under an open source license, so that others could benefit from it –- and so that Google could benefit in the from of cheaper energy.

He later added: “If there seems that there is a good bet to place by doing it internally, we might do that.”

Down on the server farm

Found this fascinating item through Google reader. It discusses servers, Internet computing. These two sentences jumped out at me:

Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

Microsoft catch up? Legacy of the decision of years back, I think Bill Gates's view, that Internet computing would not catch on.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume.

That shows how computing is equal to industrial activity, as I see it.

Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape.

Google taps another untested path to wireless

James B. Stewart called Google this generation's premiere company.

In its partnership unveiled Wednesday with Sprint Nextel Corp. on a next-generation wireless network, Google Inc. has tapped yet another route to ensure itself a prominent place in the mobile-Internet marketplace.

Although WiMax has demonstrated great promise, it is as yet a largely unproven technology nearing a crucial turning point. For Google, which will invest $500 million into the endeavor in exchange for a place as the "preferred" provider of search services, it's one in a series of strategic bets meant to land it on the cutting edge of wireless communications, albeit without having to slog through traditional channels.

Doing things differently.

Under one strategy to get there, Google has been developing its own mobile phone software infrastructure called Android, a considerable undertaking that has the already engineer-heavy company tapping outside developers and expertise.

In addition, earlier this year Google successfully gamed a federal spectrum auction by bidding up a nationwide license coveted by Verizon. The effort triggered so-called "open access" rules so that, while Verizon ultimately won control of the auctioned airwaves, it has been mandated to allow outside devices and applications to use it as well -- including those powered by Google.