Apr 28

Google Sketchup and Google Desktop: Brain Edition

Google, Nerd, Ponderings 2 Comments »

I just downloaded Google Sketchup and went through their tutorials. I did two years of work with 3d studio max creating animations for jury trials and I gotta say this is interesting. From a 50,000-ft strategic view, it seems perplexing why Google would release a 3d modeling application when they’re typically thought of as a search company. And yet when you look more closely this move is hugely-consistent with John Battelle’s assessment of them building a massive database of intent.

If you think about what Google really is- they’re not a search engine company at all. They’re not even an ad company. They’re an information broker that is making their commission through different angles by hooking people up with the knowledge they seek. Their mission statement says their goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” By their own words they want to become the librarian for the card catalogue of everything that currently exists. But realistically their goal is more ambitious than that: it’s to know exactly what everyone wants at any given moment that does not yet exist for them. If the analogy of energy in its kinetic vs. potential states can be extrapolated to “information as energy,” Google is far more interested in the “potential” side of the equation. In fact I would argue that they are closer to Joseph Campbell and Karl Jung in their motivations than they are to Rupert Murdoch in terms of desire to create a real-time map the world’s collective intelligence at any given moment and broker the info exchange vs. scraping profiles on Myspace and targeting users with personalized ads. Of course they’re a public company now so it’s not entirely up to Google anymore what Google will become…

The SketchUp program from a tactical perspective is the distillation of the basics of a 3d modeling environment without the animation capabilities. It’s extremely friendly, simple, intuitive and their quickstart tutorial is solid. Compare the toolset from SketchUp on the left to that of 3dsmax on the right:

sketchup 3dsmax

It’s reminiscent of the way Flash first felt as a vector drawing program after having used the more-powerful-yet-complex Adobe Illustrator for so long. The most interesting promise of this 3d app is not just in that it reduces the barriers for the layperson to be able to model fictitious things – it’s greatest value is in its integration with google earth. It will allow people to imagine things and overlay them where they would exist in the real world (or the “big room” as my buddy Dave calls it) and then share these dreamed objects with others. The teaser example graphic on their homepage shows an animation of a 3d model planning of a wooden deck evolving on the back of a house presumably tantalizing the viewer with the prospect of conceiving new home additions and overlaying these dreamed additions on reality via google earth. WOW- so Google essentially wants to:

  1. know what your dreams are (exactly how you envision that log cabin you want to build in the mountains)
  2. and where you want to manifest them (30 yards away from the creek and just south of the rock outcropping- lon/lat GPS coords…)

Understandable now why this app is compelling and very consistent with their strategy…It’s them giving a virtual lego set to the world and watching what people make with it – a more open-ended way of asking “what do you really want?” Armed with that intelligence they will have all the essential ingredients to broker info that helps get you there and doesn’t just satisfy your sterile web searches but that hones on the emotions and the passions that are driving your searches, and THAT (any salesperson will tell you) is where the the true power is in being able to close a customer.

The real question is, “which will be the first bionics company that google purchases?” And once that happens, how far off is it until the release of “Google Desktop: Brain edition?” There have been huge advances in bionics recently and scientists can now patch into the visual and motor cortex and to the point to facilitate sight in blind people, hearing in deaf people and even instill telekinesis in monkeys (no joke – listen to the podcast to hear how they’ve done it). My question to you is: if you could upgrade your brain to jack directly into google’s information database but the tradeoff was that they got to index your brain, is that a pill you would willingly swallow?

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Dec 02

Using Gmail’s contact export feature to mine correspondence for LinkedIn connections

Google, Nerd, Tutorials 1 Comment »

If you use Gmail and are on LinkedIn, here’s a neat trick you can use to “excavate” your gmail correspondence for LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn already has an Outlook toolbar that will scour your sent folder in Outlook to do this (which is great if you use outlook as your email client but unfortunately there has been no equivalent for Gmailers that only use the web interface). Well now there is.

You may not be aware that Gmail automatically records the name and email address of anyone to whom you send a message in your contacts. There’s now a feature that allows you to export these contacts in an Outlook CSV file which you can then upload to your LinkedIn account. It will then show you who of those contacts is already on LinkedIn and allow you to invite those people to your network. Here’s the exact steps to make it work:

  1. In Gmail, click the “Contacts” folder on the left. Then click “Export” on the upper right. Choose the Outlook CSV option.
  2. Now go to your LinkedIn account and click on the “My Contacts” tab. Choose the “Other Contacts” sub tab and then click on “upload contacts” in the upper right.
  3. Follow the instructions to verify the contacts are correct. Now when looking at your contacts you should see something like this:
  4. Follow that link and you should see a list of all your contacts that are currently on LinkedIn. Now you just invite them to join your network.

Depending on how you use your LinkedIn account, you may want to be more or less stringent with who you invite. I treat mine fairly sacredly and only connect with the people that I personally know well enough where I would feel comfortable vouching for their capabilities.

This method boosted my contacts ten-fold and I discovered a bunch of people that I deal with daily who are already on LinkedIn. HTH

-sean

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mar 26

Google Desktop: the ‘Helmet Cam’ for your computer

Google, Nerd, Uncategorized 5 Comments »

I’ve had my Treo 650 for just under a month now and I’m in love. My friend Benny convinced me to get one and he was right – this is the first PDA convergence device they finally got right. I was reading a forum post on TreoCentral.com and this guy was referring to it as “my precious.” I can totally see Golem salivating over this phone if it were in LOTR – “one phone to rule them all.”

Every day since I’ve had it, I’ve discovered a new feature I really like. I would love to see someone calculate the person-hours of time that went into designing this particular phone, there is so much they aced on the interface. I know some people like the convenience of receiving email on their phone – I find it decidedly inconvenient since I’m already too “wired in” as it is and being out of the office is the only escape from super-connectedness. I remember having had a BlackBerry back in the day and how bad it sucked having to receive and respond to email wherever you are – I mean you wouldn’t want the postman to follow you around and tap you on the shoulder everytime a piece of snail mail arrived, much less be accountable for responding immediately to that communication… no plausible deniability of “i didn’t get that memo” when every email comes right to your phone. So basically I don’t use the email features of the Treo. But Cingular’s MMS system has the capability to send email through their gateway so it’s an option if you need to.

All in all I dig my setup right now: I use Yahoo for all personal mail (can’t beat their spam blocking and I’m hooked on their personal organizer features and the public calendar). I use their free Intellisync software to hotsync all my contacts, notes, tasks and dates with my Treo. I use Gmail for all listservs I’m on (roughly 10 I think) and I have the free Google Desktop Search running in the background at all times to index every piece of content that comes in or out of my laptop. The Gmail does a great job of indexing my lists and for every other piece of communication, GDS is like a “helmet cam” that records everything I read or write 24/7. With their recent release of a full 1.0 product, GDS now supports PDF’s, Firefox and Thunderbird as well as ID3 tags on MP3’s and other file formats- plus there’s a third-party plugin to index Trillian chat sessions so all my IM’s (yahoo, MSN, AIM and ICQ) are indexed as well. Powerpoint, Excel and Word docs are all supported which is key in the legal tech industry when you have to hunt down a specific detail someone’s asking for. With so many disparate communication channels and a barrage of info we deal with everyday, I was having the problem of “where did I read that… was it an RSS feed, on a web site, in an email – oh no someone IM’d me that URL…” It was getting to be a scavenger hunt through web history and emails every time I needed to track down a simple reference. Now I have one place to search and I know that GDS will return accurate results immediately (it even makes a little screenshot thumbnail for each result for visually-oriented people like myself).

Other tid-bits for the Treo that probably demand entries unto themselves:

  • SoundRec – is a free app that turns your Treo into a dictaphone. very cool
  • SD Memory Card – I got a $50 512MB expansion card from Fry’s and I now have almost a CD’s-worth of storage on my treo. That translates to either 7000 photos at 640x480px or 3hrs of video at 320x200px.
  • Chess Everywhere – this ingenious program allows you to play chess with a friend over your phone. I don’t know what protocol it uses (SMS maybe?) but it let’s you play against a buddy or find a random human opponent.
  • PdaNet – exactly what I was looking for – turns your treo into a modem for your computer. It works with a USB cable or Bluetooth if you have it. Simple to use and it does exactly what it claims. Genius.
  • AvantGo – is nothing new but it’s good at what it does. I find the web browsing on the Treo to be slow enough where it’s only worth it if you need it in a bind but not for leisure reading. AvantGo however caches the content you specify to your device when you hotsync. The coolest thing is their “autochannel” bookmarklet that you can use to grab a copy of a web page you’re on and send it to your phone.

It pretty much is the ideal customized setup for what I want. I can’t imagine improving anything on this phone at this point except for adding support for 802.11 wifi but then again, I just snagged this nifty gadget from PCTEL – it’s a wifi detector that goes on your keychain and alerts you if it finds a hotspot. The trouble is I don’t know if my keychain can physically fit another gadget. My girlfriend always says “honey, you are such a dork” when I start talking about this stuff – I’ve always defended myself but occasionally I’ll have this moment of clarity when I’m emtying my pockets at the end of the day and think “wow, you know I guess you’re right.”

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