Internet pollue davantage l'atmosphère que l'Inde

D'après un nouveau rapport de Greenpeace, internet et le cloud data storage sont un véritable problème environnemental.  En fait, si internet était classé comme un pays, il serait le 5ème plus grand pollueur du monde, derrière les US, la Chine, la Russie et le Japon.   La principale raison est que ces data-centers et fermes de serveurs sont bâties dans des régions où l'électricité vient de centrales alimentées au charbon.  En effet les compagnies du secteur de la techonologie de l'information comme Facebook ou Yahoo! construisent leurs data-centers près de ces centrales parce que leur énergie est moins chère, mais selon Greenpeace, la note est payée par l'atmosphère.

Aujourd'hui, les serveurs qui hébergent internet et toutes les données du monde consomment environ 2% de l'énergie de la planète.  Mais ce chiffre augmente de 12% par an et Greenpeace plaide pour que des réflexions soient entamées pour changer les sources de cette énergie.

Par exemple, selon ce rapport Facebook utilise du charbon pour 53,2% de ses besoins en énergie tandis que Google et Microsoft reçoivent des félicitations pour leurs initiatives écologiques comme l'achat de turbines à vent en Iowa et à Dublin.

Tandis que quelques compagnies ont compris que la source de l'énergie est un composant de la "propreté" des données, fait partie de l'approche "verte" et ont montré un engagement à rechercher des sources d'énergie propres, le secteur dans un sens large a encore tendance à définir "vert" comme "plus efficace",

dit le rapport.  Ce manquement à s'engager pour l'énergie propre soutient la demande pour l'énergie "polluante" et ralentit les progrès de cette industrie à devenir vraiment "vert".

L'escapistmagazine rapporte aussi que selon Wordstream un seul email génère 0,03 gramme de dioxide de carbone à chaque fois qu'il est envoyé sur internet.  Cela veut dire que les 63 trilliards de spam emails qui sont envoyés tous les jours émettent autant de dioxide que 1,6 millions de voitures.

Et si l'on compare lire une page sur internet à envoyer en email, alors vous faîtes partie du problème.  Alors soyez attentif à vos dépenses en énergie!  Lire ce billet relache 0,3 grammes de dioxide de carbone dans l'atmosphère.  Bonne Journée de la terre!

Le Google Zeitgeist 2010 est arrivé !

Et oui, c'est à nouveau cette saison de l'année... avec le mois de décembre arrivent les sapins de Noël, les bêtisiers et les zeitgeist.  Celui de Google est toujours spécialement attendu puisqu'il donne un aperçu de ce qui a intéressé la planète pendant l'année.  En fait, il sera fascinant de la comparer avec le zeitgeist de Twitter dès que celui-ci sera publié.  Une année de recherches sur les sujets qui ont fait l'actualité et une année de tweets sur les sujets dont on a parlé.  Logiquement, on peut s'attendre à forte corrélation.

Le Zeitgeist 2010 de Google est basé sur l'étude cumulée de milliards de recherches effectuées autour du monde.  Il faut relever que non seulement Google a une version française, mais il y a même un zeitgeist pour la France.  Les événements mondiaux qui ont attiré l'attention des internautes sont la coupe du monde, le tremblement de terre d'Haïti et la marée noire du Golfe du Mexique et bien sûr les les plus fortes progressions incluent Chatroulette, l' iPad, et Justin Bieber.

Cette année  pour la première fois Google a aussi pubié une visualisation en  html 5 de son zeitgeist qui permet de voir les recherches par emplacements sur la planète et de comparer différentes recherches. 

Nouvelle app de Google : convergence des pubs print et du web

Google Goggles, l'application pour téléphones mobiles de Google qui vous laisse faire une recherche sur le web à partir d'une photo prise avec votre smarphone, vient d'annoncer le lancement d'une opération marketing testant la convergence des pubs print et du web.

Google a annoncé sur son blog qu'il travaillait avec Buick, Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile et Delta Airlines "pour étendre leur marketing offline au web mobile."

Le résultat ?  Des pubs print, des posters et autres qui seront reconnues par l'app Google quand on les photographie et permettront aux utilisateurs d'accéder à des pages web spécialement créées pour ces pubs.

"Les gens googlent toutes sortes de choses tous les jours, y compris des pubs," dit Shailesh Nalawadi, Chef de Produit chez Google, dans cette  vidéo de présentation."Cela a attiré notre attention.  Pourquoi ne pas offrir aux marketeurs l'opportunité de connecter l'expérience offline à une expérience digitale sur un téléphone?"

En fait la reconnaissance d'image n'a rien de vraiment révolutionnaire, vous avez tous déjà remarqué ces petits hiéroglyphes sur les affiches qui, une fois photographiés, vous amènent vers des pages web avec plus d'informations.  Je pense à Pixee par exemple.  En fait la nouvelle, c'est sans doute que Google ajoute un nouveau service à sa régie publicitaire.

Voici la vidéo de présentation de Google :

Le nouveau "instant preview" de Google pourrait redéfinir le web design

Le moteur de recherche le plus connu du monde vient juste de devenir encore un peu plus intelligent.  Google va sortir  mardi "instant preview" le compagnon de "Google instant", une fonctionnalité qui sera surement encore plus marquante pour les utilisateurs puisqu'elle offrira un aperçu des pages présentées dans les résultats de recherche, tout en y soulignant le texte correspondant à la recherche.   Comme le souligne Wired, cette nouvelle fonctionalité sera spécialement appréciée par les utilisateurs ayant des connexions un peu lentes puisqu'ils pourront avoir un aperçu de la page avant de cliquer sur un résultat.   Une bonne chose pour les utilisateurs.  Et encore meilleure pour Google.

Google fait de l'humour... sur ses cartes

Nouvelle petite blague de Google dont les développeurs sont pleins d'humour...  Allez sur Google Maps et recherchez l'itinéraire pour aller du japon à la Chine.... et lisez la direction 43....

A quoi pensait le monde la semaine dernière ?

Les média sociaux sont un bon indicateur de ce dont le monde parle (Twitter trends), des articles qu'il lit (Digg), des marques/personnalités qu'il aime (Facebook Fan pages) et des sujets qui l'intéressent (Google insights) . 

"Je suis le roi du monde ! " - Google

6.4%.  C'est la part du trafic sur internet de Google.  Nouveau record pour le géant dont la part a augmenté de 1% depuis janvier.

La Chine se lance dans la cartographie en ligne

Le Bureau de Surveillance et de Cartographie chinois (SBSM) vient de dévoiler "Carte du monde", une... carte du monde en ligne, approuvée et produite par l'administration qui, selon un officiel, "va rapidement devenir une marque chinoise reconnue pour les services de cartographie en ligne fiables."

Google teste l'ajout d'une dimension "réseaux sociaux" à ses résultats de recherche

Google est discrètement en train de tester l'ajout d'une dimension réseaux sociaux à ses résultats de recherche.  Cette nouvelle fonctionnalité, testée au compte gouttes sur google.com et pas encore disponible sur google.fr,  ajoute des teasers au parfum réseaux sociaux aux résultats de certaines recherches. 

Google vous offre un doodle pour votre anniversaire !

Google est célèbre pour sa page d’accueil minimaliste et ses doodles : des logos modifiés pour célébrer des évènements ou les anniversaires de personnes célèbres. Ce weekend, Google a annoncé qu'il allait commencer à utiliser un logo spécial pour l'anniversaire de tous ses utilisateurs, VIP ou non !

Comment est-ce possible, vous demandez-vous.  Et bien si vous avez indiqué votre date de naissance sur votre profile Google et que vous êtes logged in le jour J, la page d’accueil de Google sera personnalisée pour fêter votre anniversaire.  Et ça ne s'arrête pas là : quand vous cliquez sur le logo, vous arrivez sur votre page de profile où un feu d'artifice de confettis vous attend.

Voilà, maintenant vous ne pourrez plus dire que tout le monde oublie votre anniversaire.

Pourquoi Google doit devenir social ou disparaître

Google vient de nommer Marrissa Mayer à la direction des services de géolocalisation, ce qui prouverait qu'ils commencent à prendre le phénomène au sérieux.
Google a déjà raté la révolution sociale.  Ils devraient acheter Twitter pour réparer le problème, mais Twitter est énorme et engorge déjà des bénéfices donc le prix serait monstrueux.  Bien sûr il est toujours possible que le business modèle de Twitter ne prenne pas et que ce soit finalement une bonne chose.

Aujourd'hui, Goggle devrait acheter Foursquare pour se positionner en tête de la prochaine vague de développement d'internet : la géolocalisation.

USA in the Top 4 countries requesting the most data and content removal from Google and YouTube

This is the first time that Google publishes the number, per country, of government requests for data or content removal directed to Google and YouTube.
As stated in the results, the numbers maybe skewed as one request may concern dozens of urls, but the results are still interesting and slightly puzzling.

If it is no surprise that China bears a question mark, the names of the Top 4 countries who have requested way more data or content removal than the rest of the pack is less anticipated:

1- Brazil (291)
2- Germany (188)
3- India (142)
4- United States (123)

At the bottom of the list, one can find France, along with Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands with less than 10 requests. Accounting for the population size difference, the US government sends Google over 4 times more requests than France does.

An inquiring mind can't help wondering what this means in regard to the USA vs. France (and the rest of the world) approach to internet content and things like freedom of speech, laissez-faire etc. Or alternatively, it could show how much high level raw data, without context or details, can be misleading.

Ndlr: Hadopi is still so wrong for so many reasons.


Source: Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

THE FUTURE: Take A Picture Of A Word In A Foreign Language And Google Will Translate It For You

Google is working on a text translator for its experimental mobile app Goggles, the company announced today.

Google Goggles analyzes pictures taken with a mobile phone, then runs a Google search on objects it recognizes. When this feature goes live, it will also recognize text in pictures, and, when that text is in a foreign language, run it through Google Translate.

At the moment, the feature can only handle German-to-English translation, and Google says it "is not yet ready for prime time." Google won't be the first company to tackle this, however. Fotozio's PicTranslator for the iPhone already translates from 16 languages.

Here's a demo of the new feature in action:



Source: www.businessinsider.com

Google Maps suggest new places you might like

Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Source: http://mashable.com

Google Search now includes real time results from Twitter

It's been a long time waiting but here it is at last: Google has a new dynamic results category: tweets. It now includes in its search results a window where tweets tagged with your search keywords scroll in real time.
So Google did it again! True to their (public) mission statement, they now also organize real time content. This was the missing piece in their mission of organizing information. An increasing number of internet users were getting used to go to Twitter to get the latest news on a given subject. Now Google takes again the upper hand by aggregating all media forms in their search results.

They haven't included it yet in their search category menu though and it is still unclear how these results are ranked in the display order on the result page. Sponsored results are on top as usual but I have seen the tweets displayed at different levels in the results.

To be thorough, Yahoo! also includes Twitter results but they are not in real time: tweets seem to be batched.

and Bing doesn't index tweets yet.

Now the next logical question is: who is going to archive tweets? After all Twitter is a snapshot of the world collective thinking. Aren't snapshots worth collecting to remember what was on our minds at a given point in time?

Public Open Data arrive in Europe…. at least in London

A number of cities in the US have their own datastores, such as DataSF for San Francisco and the Chicago data store. The idea has rapidly gained traction since the introduction of Google Maps in 2005, which allowed people to attach sets of data with geographical information to a map in real time.

In London, the datasets that will be available include attainment, pupil number and schools data; fire incidents, ambulance rates, crime rates; carbon emissions, floorspace, vacant commercial offices, industrial stock data, abandoned vehicles, recycling rates, waste data, waste re-use centres, fly tipping rates, alcohol indicators, abortion rates, hospital waiting lists and admissions, excess winter deaths - and many dozens more.

The London Datastore, as it is called, will be fully open from 29 January. It will be the first such "datastore" for a city in the UK. The government is working on a similar site, called data.gov.uk, which is also expected to be unveiled this month under the auspices of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. He has been working inside the civil service since summer 2009 to unlock and unify datasets collected inside government: when it launches, data.gov.uk is expected to carry hundreds of datasets for free reuse.

In a statement, Johnson, Mayor of London, said: "The superb new London 'Datastore' will unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall. I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people particularly that held by the public sector and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.

"The US has led the way on this idea of setting their data free for anyone - students, campaigners, software developers – to use. Now it's time for Britain to get up to speed and I want London, as the greatest city in the UK, to be at the forefront of this revolution, that will not only increase democracy, but also provide a potential money-spinner for the city's hugely important software development sector."

Fund of up to £200,000 will help developers to create innovative use of 200 datasets in new free data initiative

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data - including previously unreleased information - about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create "mashups" of data to boost the city's transparency and accountability.

Channel 4 will also be offering up to £200,000 through its 4ip fund to help develop the most innovative uses of the data.

To announce the site, Johnson will take part in a live linkup on Thursday to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with President Barack Obama's chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who has overseen the development of the US government's "data.gov" project, which aims to put all US government data onto the web for others to use.

The government took a significant step towards making such datasets easier to use with the announcement by Gordon Brown in November that Ordnance Survey mapping data from 1:10,000 would be free for all use, including commercial applications, from April.

Johnson has been a strong advocate of open data, having campaigned in 2008 on the promise that he would introduce crime maps, despite misgivings of some senior police officers. The Metropolitan Police did however quickly implement] crime mapping in London, following the lead that had already been set by a number of other police forces around the country.

Source: theguardian.co.uk

Putting a Bar Code on Places, Not Just Products

If you walk past the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, or Cheeseburger Baby in Miami, the chances are that you will see a sticker in the window that has a Google Maps logo and a one-inch-square with a series of pixelated black-and-white cubes called a QR Code.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to send out 100,000 of these stickers, each with their own QR code, to a new demographic of businesses Google is calling “Favorite Places”. These favorites are based on search results from users interacting with local business listings on Google Maps.

Google Sticker A close-up of a Google sticker.

As Louise Story reported on the front page of The Times in April 2007, QR Codes have been around for several years across Asia. In Japan, for example, you can find the codes on food wrappers in grocery stores, helping customers get more information about calories or possible recipe ideas. The codes are also visible on bus stops, allowing access to up-to-date bus schedules, or in real-estate agents’ windows, allowing passers-by to click with their phones to view more images and floor plans of a property.

The idea sounds great on paper (or pixels), but because of privacy concerns in the United States, the process can be a little laborious in reality. First, you have to download the right code reader for your specific mobile phone.

Then, when you see a code in a store window, you have to start the correct code-viewing application, allow the application to access your camera, take a photo of the code, and then agree again to allow the application to use the image to open the particular Web page with the additional information. With all these legal hurdles, it can take 45 seconds or more to look up a code.

In Japan, by comparison, nearly all phones ship with an embedded QR Code reader, and the legal hopscotch doesn’t exist. Activating the code becomes a one-click adventure.

In most instances, when the experience works, it can be incredibly rewarding. In Google’s case, if you pass the myriad of legal warnings, you will be taken to an associated mobile Web page with rich information about a specific venue, including user reviews, a star rating, maps, contact information and a link to the Web site of the business.

Google is also promoting another great use of these codes by allowing businesses to share mobile coupons. You follow the same drill as above, but the end result shows a coupon on your mobile phone which can then be redeemed at a respective store.
Bits QR CodeThe New York Times A QR Code for the mobile version of Bits.

If you want to give it a try, you can download a code reader for your mobile phone and try out some codes on Google’s Favorite Places page.

Source: New York Times

The power of Social Media and UGC – Success stories

YouTube is probably the most famous example of the network effect power. It benefits from 2 closely interdependent factors: 1- the first mover advantage that allowed the company to 2- reach a critical mass of users. The paradox is that it's win-win situation: this critical mass gives as much power to YouTube than it does to the crowd. Users flock to YouTube because they trust their network, or at large the crowd, to find the best videos that are out there. They also find first hand information they wouldn't find somewhere else: it' the social journalism aspect. It's a snowball thing. And then great success stories happen with unknown people uploading a little video reaching fame and production deals. And that's the cherry top: who doesn't like a funny video or a great story where a John Smith gets a break.

Before telling you of 2 such stories reported by the BBC, I have to add that there is more than that to YouTube. First there is amazingly great content out there: I am thinking for instance about the TEDTalks videos. Second, there is so much content on YouTube that can you find tutorials about anything. People are stating to use YT as a Search Engine and that's where the Google/YT wedding makes sense. Search and content organization. Third, it's social and convivial, and a great sharing tool. Fourth, it's still under used by companies to reach their customers.

In conclusion, as promised, 2 success stories reported by the BBC.

- YouTube video leads to Hollywood contract
- Web makes Tajik migrant a star

Google Publishes Zeitgeist 2009

Google is probably the hidden master of the world. I mean if humanity disappeared tomorrow, it could be recreated using Google's knowledge. It is the biggest content repository ever dreamed of, it also organizes this content and in order to do that, it studies our queries to understand what information we are looking for. In fact it publishes every year what are the most researched subjects in the world and by country. It's a fascinating snapshot of what's on our minds.... Have a look: Official Google Blog: Zeitgeist 2009: the collective consciousness

Google on what the Web will look like in 5 years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said at last week's Gartner symposium in Orlando.

Highlighted comments include:

- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

- “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

- “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

- “We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?”

- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Watch the interview on YouTube

Source: www.hotelmarketing.com