Everybody and their grandmother today knows that two of the key players to watch out for new stuff (I hesitate to say innovations since some might disagree :p) are Google and Microsoft. But the question usually is, how do you know what they’ve each got brewing at their respective camps? Sure, you know about the overly hyped tech innovations from both sides months (if not years) before the stuff is even available. But what about the not so flashy stuff? The stuff which could be useful but might not have mass-market appeal? Where do you go to find out about those things?
The short answer is that you can go to Google Labs or to Microsoft Research :) But that is only half an answer. You know where to go now but do you know what you’ll find there? Sure, you can simply go there and find out for yourself. Or, I can give you a short preview of what you can expect to see there and you can decide if the trip’s worth it :p
On the Google side, you can get anything ranging from Picasa for Linux, Google Notebook, Google Trends, Google Related Links, Google Mars and Google Reader. “Oh sure, give me a list of meaningless links and don’t tell me anything about what any of these things do!”, I hear you say :p So let’s try to rectify that. Picasa for Linux is fairly easily explained even if you know nothing about its older brother, Picasa for Windows. Basically, Picasa is a freeware image organizer which allows you to organize, edit, print, search and share the images on your hard disk. Of course, Picasa for Linux is the Linux counterpart of the Windows software :)
While Picasa is for your desktop, Google Notebook is another one of Google’s innovations which takes your standard app/task and gives it a web-enabled twist. I’m sure you have used an information management utility or a web clipping utility at one time or another. These apps simply let you capture snippets of information from all over the place and store them in one easily searchable location. Google Notebook takes that concept and puts it online. So now, you have your information on the Google servers and you can access it from anywhere. (And yes, people who are scared of how much access Google has to their information will point out that this is another instance where we’ll be handing Google our private information quite freely :p)
Google Trends is simply an adjunct to Google’s raison d’être - their search facilities. Google Trends simply shows you what people are searching for and allows you to compare between two different search terms to see how they stack up. Similarly, Related Links is an adjunct to another venture of theirs – ad sense. Instead of simply providing ads related to the content being browsed, related links strives to display links to other content which might be of relevance to the content on a given web page. Currently however, there is no monetization to be gained by using Related Links.
To round off the list, Google Mars provides detailed maps of Mars while the Google Reader is another one of Google’s ventures which puts a web-twist on a familiar app – this time it’s the turn of your trusty newsreader. The Google Reader simply provides you with the ability to read any of your favourite news feeds from anywhere in the world by simply logging into your Google Reader account. Kind of “blah”? I guess it is :)
On the Microsoft side of the fence, you get stuff like GroupShot, PHLAT, Strider URL Tracer and MapCruncher. To be honest, unlike the offerings from Google, the Microsoft stuff sometimes seems a bit esoteric , or at least more niche market. However, I can see the potential in some of these apps to be something pretty useful. For instance, take GroupShot. I’ve been searching forever for an app that would allow me to create a panoramic image based on a collection of many separate images. The reason? I wanted to create level maps for a computer game by taking screen shots from various locations on a level :p Did I find something which could do this easily? So far, the answer has been “No!”. Either the app is expensive, or it has restrictions on the images which can go into the collage or it just won’t work. Now you get GroupShot and while I have not used it yet, it’s free and it appears to not have the limitations that I experienced with other software earlier.
As for PHLAT, it’s a new interface for something that MS has been talking about for a long time but never managed to get right till Google beat them to the punch – desktop search :) Ever since Google made desktop search a new buzzword, everybody has been coming out with desktop search engines and Microsoft has several in the works under different names and apparently to provide slightly different functionality. PHLAT is simply a frontend for Microsoft’s existing Windows Desktop Search but it has some unique features – like the ability to tag items so that you can search for them using tags rather than the contents of the document or file.
As far as Strider goes, I’m not absolutely certain that I understand the usefulness of the app. Sure, it allows you to find misspelt URLs and to root out typo-squatters but I’m still not sure how useful that app will be. If you use online mapping tools, MapCruncher however is going to be extremely useful. MapCruncher basically combine multiple maps together to get a better overview of a given area. At least, that’s what I understood it to be but since I don’t use that many online mapping services, I might not have gotten the full picture.
What is interesting to note however is that there are hundreds of other projects to explore at Microsoft Research and many more at Google Labs as well. If you trawl through all that stuff, I’m sure you’ll find a few more hidden gems :)
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