Google searches for ideas

2008-09-25T04:19:00Z

Alfred Siew calculates the effect of US$10m raised to the power of 100.

IT HAS been a busy month for the Internet giant.

Only on Tuesday, it launched its much-awaited foray into mobile phones, even as it celebrates a short but trailblazing 10 years of existence this month.

On Thursday, in typical Google style, the company is asking for ideas to change the world, through a new project called 10100.

Part of Google's 10th year celebrations, the plan - Project 10100 - is to award US$10 million (S$14 million) for up to five ideas that can help as many people in the world as possible.

The company will identify 100 best ideas and then ask Internet users to vote and select the final 20. From here, a panel of judges will narrow down to five ideas for funding.

How can US$10 million change the world, you ask, when a hundred times that amount had failed to stop the famines and wars in Africa?

Google says it’s not a publicity stunt, that the money’s not aid money, but a way to tap on the collective brainpower of Net users.

What kind of ideas? Google gave the example of the Hippo Water Roller, a simple device that lets Africans roll a barrel of water along the ground over different terrain, instead of having to balance it on the head, as they usually do.

The device, which lets its users carry more water and more efficiently, is the kind of stuff one identifies with Google, and indeed the Silicon Valley from whence it spawned.

I’m talking about something impossibly simple, incredibly practical.

That, in essence, is what made Google its money. Its website, as it was a decade ago, is still little more than a text bar where you typed in a term to look up stuff.

But behind the façade, a number of technologies work together to understand what you are looking for when you type, say, “Android”. That, by the way, is the name of Google’s new mobile phone software, as well as a robot designed to mimic a human.

The smart thing about Google’s search is that it can roughly pick out what you are looking for, whether it is the software or the robot.

As the company turns 10 as the world's most power Internet company, people are beginning to ask if it would one day dominate the Net like Microsoft dominated everyone's computer screens.

US antitrust regulators are considering a case against Google, which owns more than 60 per cent of the online search market there. And privacy advocates are asking if Google knows too much about Web surfers.

Still, those teething pains aside, Google and indeed other Web 2.0, or second wave of dot.coms, have come to represent what is good about Silicon Valley.

This is a place where dreamers (think Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students) can dream up a big idea, make it work and earn millions from it.

This is where millionaires are dressed in bicycle shorts and suits alike, and where bankruptcy and failure are part of corporate education, not the end of the road.

We’re not talking about pyramid schemes here. The Valley, as it’s called by those working there, has spawned Netscape, Hewlett-Packard and countless other technology firms that have changed lives.

From this famed San Jose area, one finds not just innovation but optimism.

That, in a quirky way, shows in what Google is doing with this “change the world” project today. It’s a dream, but who knows, the world’s problems can always be solved with a small start.

Tech-travaganza at Comex 2008

2008-08-28T11:44:00Z

Alfred Siew describes how Comex 2008 has made it easier for shoppers to spend.

FROM large TV screens to laser printers, people cart away anything on their trolleys at Singapore’s quarterly computer fairs.

This week’s Comex show, which starts today and runs until Sunday at Suntec City, is no different. The crowds were in force as the doors opened at noon, ready to snap up the bargains on cameras, LCD TVs and laptops.

Anything to make that sale.
ST photo: Stephanie Yeow

Though the crowd seemed thinner than the last show in June, at least on the opening day, the bargains are anything but.

New laptops, for example, Sony’s Vaio models, came with more memory bundled in, so they could run faster.

Other rivals like Toshiba threw in freebies like external hard disks and shopping vouchers to entire buyers.

Besides computers, home electronics – particularly TV sets and audio equipment – were going for prices unheard of outside the show.

One of the bargains of the show is a behemoth 46-inch full-HD LCD screen from Sharp that goes for $1,999.

Previously, that price could only get one a smaller 40-inch model.

Representatives at Audio House, which is selling the Sharp TV sets at its booth, say it has sold about a dozen such models at the hugely-discounted price in the two hours of the opening.

Another attraction of such shows is the bargaining that one can engage in.

Buy a TV set with a home theatre system, for example, and you can bargain for the second item at $100 or $200 less.

Indeed, some retailers are privately slashing prices. Bargain a little, for example, and a laptop could be had for $50 or $100 less.

Failing that, perhaps ask for a free mouse could be thrown in to sweeten the deal?

The only problem for such shows is the crush of humanity, and the lack of carpark lots in the area.

But this year, things seem to be more orderly.

For example, show promoters are made to stand some distance away escalators so they do not block the way.

And visitors need not use the notoriously overcrowded overhead bridge linking the crowd walking from City Hall MRT to Suntec City.

An underpass is now open, making it much easier to drag that trolley of goodies home.

The Straits Times Blogs - Alfred Siew

Google searches for ideas

Tech-travaganza at Comex 2008