google

I'm SURE I read that headline somewhere else, but I can't for the life of me remember where. Anyway, this is a very cool Google service that Nora pointed me to. They've just launched in beta form what I think is their very coolest search tool yet: Google Translate. As they say in their offical blog, Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). Or Russian. Or Chinese. Or Arabic.

This is so cool! As the authors of this blog entry (there are 3 of 'em) also note, although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English. We've been aware of this for some time at The COW, The numbers can shift quite a bit, but it's been a long time since we saw all English-language countries COMBINED equal more than about half of The COW's traffic. It's currently at about 54%, which is quite a remarkable testament to the "world" part of the COW's name.

Equally cool to me is how useful this is for English speakers who want to reach out a little.  I mentioned Russian, Chinese and Arabic above, because those are the examples you can find at the actual Google Translate page.

Again quoting Google's blog, While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access.

Yep, it's true. Take it for a spin and see for yourself.

Google's official blog is a must read. Period. I say that Google is on its way to becoming the most important software company on the planet. Even if they turn out not to win every fight, they're setting the terms of the fight. Making every game a home game tilts the odds in your favor. So if you want to see what's coming, here's where you look.

Another of the very many blog entries I'm behind on is this one from May 23, on taking control, specifically, of your health records. Do you know what's in yours? I go to a doctor pretty regularly, I see him writing stuff down...but I have no idea what it actually says. I have no idea who else has seen what's there.

More important to my long-term care, I have no real way to connect my needs to the best people to address them. I have no way to evaluate the assumptions my doctor has made for my treatment. And, as a big fan of community-based problem solving, I don't have easy access to the best communities for addressing my conditions or concerns.

Google's idea is to, first, give me access to my own records in standardized, meaningful fashion. How else can we evaluate the care we receive and its alternatives?

Now, Google gets slammed for peering into everybody's business, but that's beside the point. They're the first ones to lay this out as part of their goals. Here's a fantastic place to start checking that out, actually a link to an editorial their Global Privacy Counsel wrote in the Financial Times. There are a bunch of other interesting links on that page, including one that looks at the role of personalized search in the enterprise. Most of them are, of course, links to blogs, by far the best source of news on the internet.

 I think the arguments for personalizing online information around medicine in particulare are extremely compelling.

Here are "the three core principles of a future health care system:

(Not exactly related to this, but sorta, is that I think Google's computers are more reliable than my own for securing those records. Ever lost a hard drive and all the info on it? I thought so. Ever lost anything in your Google apps -- gmail, calendar, etc.? Didn't think so.)

Anyway, if you care about your health (sorry, the marketeer in me says stuff like this), you should check this out. These are the notes from Google VP Adam Bosworth's address to a medical information society. I found 'em downright inspirational:

It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities, reliable unambiguous computable medical data and safe systems for trust and authentication and controlled access will dovetail with the consumer needs for discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being treated, and how they will mange their diseases or recovery, this consumer awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data, and inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.

A very different health world than the current one? I'm in.

Kaltix? Ganji? Neven Vision KK? Endoxon Ltd.? Any of these ringing any bells? These are among the 24 companies that Google has bought recently. Have any idea what they do? Thomas Shmitz of SEOCritique lets you test your knowledge by matching two lists: the names of the companies and what they do. I'm telling you now, you're going to flunk this test. By a long shot.

Two of the 24 are gimmes for most of us: YouTube and Picasa.

(If you don't know Picasa, you should check it out. It's Win and Linux only, but a cool little online art program. It's also what inspired Adobe to put a free version of Photoshop on the web. From what I hear, Photoshop is a cool little art program too.)

The rest of them are complete strangers to me. I felt like an idiot even looking at the test. Even if I can't match them, it's interesting to see what Google is up to.

For example, the Google phone looks like it's crawling toward reality. Maybe. As Shmitz describes this entry on the quiz:

Operated under a cloak of secrecy, so little is known about its work. Rubin and Co. have sparingly described the outfit as making software for mobile phones, providing little more detail than that. One source familiar with the company says at one point it had been working on a software operating system for cell phones.

Three of the acquisitions have been made around mapping. I'll be honest, I'm not at all impressed with Google maps. They're not terribly accurate, and they print for poo. I assume that improvements are forthcoming.

Another intersesting one:

Deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.

Face recognition technology is an integral part of what I call the "Hollywood OS," that stuff you see in the movies and on TV that has nothing to do with any particular computer OS...since none of them can actually do that stuff.

Not that face recognition software doesn't exis; it does. The German Federal Police and the Super Bowl use it regularly, and have made some arrests. OTOH, a number of casinos have tried it, and the results have been pretty much useless.

 Anyway, you're going to have fun with the quiz, even if you just take a tour of the company descriptions. While the answers will eventually be posted, for now all you'll find is a list of scores that people have posted. Most of them are pretty poor, and looking at the number of them actually listed, it looks like most visitors are as cowardly as I am.

A final note: our boy Tom has been around for a while. He was an Assistant Systems Operator for GEnie, a predecessor of AOL, and served as editor of GEnie Lamp, a periodical for Apple II computer users.

Ah, the Apple II! Apple grew massive market share that began dropping like a stone with the introduction of the Mac. Not passing any judgements here. I'm just saying.