Here we go. Google launches its first UK 60-second ad to promote search and mobile.
The follow-up to last year’s “Parisian Love” (see below) uses the strapline “Search On” and is the first in a series that will be hosted on a special YouTube page.
Full copy and paste below if you really wanna nerd out.
(It’s worth it)
These speed tests were filmed at actual web page rendering times. If you’re interested in the technical details, read on. Equipment used:
- Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed
- 15Mbps Internet connection.
- Camera: Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at 1920 x 1080, films up to 2700 fps
- Monitor: 24″ Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process.
“Why does allrecipes.com in the potato gun sequence appear at once, and not the text first and images second? And why does it appear to render from bottom of the screen to the top?”
Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrecipes.com appears at once, and not with the text first and images second. Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.
“Why does the top one third of the page appear first on the weather.com page load?”
Sometimes only half the buffer gets filled before the video card sends its buffer over to the LCD panel. This is because Chrome on Windows uses GDI to draw, which does not do v-sync.
“The screen wipes are so smooth – how was that achieved?”
The screen wipes up in a gradated wipe because LCD pixels take around 10ms to flip and gradually change color.
There’s something really nice about taking something form the digital space and giving it physical form. Few privacy concerns maybe, but I like it as a concept.
Designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with this concept called Google Envelopes.
It’s so easy to forget about how much personal information we hand over to Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. My mind was sharply focused again today when I read today that MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale.
The truth is that we really have no idea how these companies will use our data for in the future.
Here’s a video which makes Google look a bit scary.
Google Buzz is easily the boldest attempt yet to build a social network by Google. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package.
Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz.
Google Buzz
Google Buzz for Mobile
Sounds overwhelming but can’t wait to give it a go.
I’ve just opened up Picasa for the first time in ages.
First thing I noticed was how lightening fast it is compared to iPhoto. It’s blazing!! But just scanning through the photos I noticed a small red pin next to images I’d taken with my iPhone.
Turn outs that Picasa now has a ‘Places Panel’ which uses Geotagging data to show where your photo was taken. Picasa will write the longitude and latitude to the photo’s EXIF metadata. You can also view the data (GPS Latitude and Longitude) of a geotagged image in Picasa by selecting Properties.
Last week Gizmodo spotted that Google has filed a patent entitled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising,” which in short allows them to paste media (adverts) onto the images.
Its interesting how the mouse in Street View follows the 3D space, we assume to allow any data to be tagged to buildings etc.
With data of course comes the ability to provide click throughs and advertising. We dont think it will limited to simple images however as video can also be embedded into panoramas as one of our previous examples shows.