Google Unveils Tool to Speed Up Searches (NYT)

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Google, which can already feel like an appendage to our brains, is now predicting what people are thinking before they even type.

On Wednesday, Google introduced Google Instant, which predicts Internet search queries and shows results as soon as someone begins to type, adjusting the results as each successive letter is typed.

“We want to make Google the third half of your brain,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, speaking at a Google press event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, added, “There’s even a psychic element to it.”

Google’s new psychic powers result in much faster searches, but the change might affect the many businesses that have been built around placing search ads on Google and helping Web sites figure out how to climb higher in search results to increase revenue.

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Nordstrom Links Online Inventory to Real World (NYT)

Retailers have been flailing about a bit in their efforts to get people to shop again, deploying all sorts of gimmicks and promotions to spur customer spending.

Wal-Mart hoped that deeper cuts in its standard rollbacks would be a draw, but then said the prices went too low. At Saks, perhaps customers would go for designer labels if the lines offered less-expensive items. And for Macy’s, how about inexpensive clothes by Madonna?

The secret, at least for Nordstrom, has not involved a piercing insight into a customer’s mind. Rather, it has changed the way that it handles, of all things, inventory. And that has brought the department store more success in improving sales than at most of its competitors, whose recent reports signaled that their consumers were still cautious.

The change works this way: Say that a shopper was looking at a blue Marc Jacobs handbag at Nordstrom.com. She could see where it was available at nearby stores, and reserve it for pickup the same day. More significant, if the Web warehouse was out of that bag, it did not matter. Inventory from Nordstrom’s 115 regular stores is also included. Maybe there was just one handbag left in the entire company, sitting forlornly in the back of the Roosevelt Field store — it would be displayed online and store employees would ship it to the Web customer.

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10 Life-Changing Benefits of the Internet Age (Work Awesome)

It is hard to imagine life without the internet.  Actually, I am old enough to do just that.

But it is amazing the effect that the internet has had on our lives.  Believe it or not, there are still many people who don’t even own a PC – but that number is dwindling each year.  It brings to mind all of the technological benefits of the internet age.  My life has certainly changed within the past thirty years due to the internet and it’s a fine time to reflect on the impact it has had over its lifespan so far.

1. Modes of Communication

I remember when there were basically three different modes of communication: face-to-face communication, telephone conversation, and snail mail.  Today, email is the preferred method of communication.  It is an indirect method that most people prefer.  Your recipient can either choose to respond or not – and you have conveyed your message without needing to have direct communication.  In the internet age we also have VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol – popularized primarily with the emergence of Skype and Google Voice), instant messaging and texting.  Texting has usurped email as the main type of communication with young people.  Instant messaging is still being used in the business world, while Skype and Google Voice are used for personal and business communication.

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Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter (Mashable)

When we first wrote about Foursquare back in March it had just hit the web scene at SXSW and was taking the social media community by storm. We instantly saw the potential of a location-based service based on your Twitter network with an added layer of social gameplay.

Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare () activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.

While no service is likely to achieve the same scale as Twitter in the coming months, Foursquare has all the right ingredients to be one of this year’s big hits.

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Tech Entrepreneur Peter Gabriel Knows What You Want – BusinessWeek: Tech Entrepreneur Peter Gabriel Knows What You Want (BW)

Have you ever gone to a Web site to satisfy some late-night craving for a song? Let’s say you were just really in the mood for something Eighties with lots of digital sampling and a thundering beat—maybe along the lines of Shock the Monkey by Peter Gabriel.You download the song and then, before you know it, the site says you might also enjoy Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. That’s about as helpful as saying, If you enjoyed Hamlet, you might also appreciate King Lear. How did fans of Shakespearean tragedy ever make such connections before the Internet?

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody came along with a better way of recommending music and video on the Web? Actually, someone has. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s Peter Gabriel himself.

The 60-year-old rocker, who is starting to look like a hipper version of a wizard from a Harry Potter movie with his close-cropped hair and goatee, is the front man for The Filter, a six-year old privately held company in Bath, England, that provides recommendation technology for such clients as Sony Music (SNE), Nokia (NOK), and thePlatform, a Comcast (CMCSA)-owned operation that serves video to the cable giant’s online properties.

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Facebook, Pandora Lead Rise of Recommendation Engines – TIME: Recommendation Engines: Can Computers Have Good Taste? (TIME)

Here’s an experiment: try thinking of a song not as a song but as a collection of distinct musical attributes. Maybe the song has political lyrics. That would be an attribute. Maybe it has a police siren in it, or a prominent banjo part, or paired vocal harmony, or punk roots. Any one of those would be an attribute. A song can have as many as 400 attributes — those are just a few of the ones filed under p.

This curious idea originated with Tim Westergren, one of the founders of an Internet radio service based in Oakland, Calif., called Pandora. Every time a new song comes out, someone on Pandora’s staff — a specially trained musician or musicologist — goes through a list of possible attributes and assigns the song a numerical rating for each one. Analyzing a song takes about 20 minutes.

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7 Tips for Managing a Remote Work Force (WWD)

While sites like oDesk make it quick and easy to hire remote workers, it can sometimes be a challenge to manage them. Besides the fact that you can’t always meet face-to-face and you can’t see what they’re working on throughout the day, I’ve found that managing remote workers requires a completely different mindset to managing in-office employees. And while it may be more affordable to hire remote workers for some tasks, it can end up more expensive in the long-run if you don’t know how to manage them effectively.

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10 Tech Trends for 2010 (TIME)

Twitter has never been about going to Twitter.com — the website itself is pretty barebones, a fact founder Evan Williams freely admitted in his March 14 SXSW keynote. The microblogging service has gone one step further with their announcement of @Anywhere, a platform to help publishers and web designers build Twitter features into their own websites. The service, which will launch with 13 beta partners including the New York Times and YouTube, lets Twitter users post messages and find new people to follow without ever needing to leave a partner’s website.

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The Internet of Things (McKinsey Quarterly)

In most organizations, information travels along familiar routes. Proprietary information is lodged in databases and analyzed in reports and then rises up the management chain. Information also originates externally—gathered from public sources, harvested from the Internet, or purchased from information suppliers.

But the predictable pathways of information are changing: the physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what’s called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects—from roadways to pacemakers—are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What’s revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed, and some of them even work largely without human intervention.

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The size of Mobile market

In Taiwan, there are more cellphones than people. About 7% of all   mobile data goes to movie information. And Google owns nearly 100% of the mobile search market. These, and more fun facts in this handy infographic !