Game Review : Google Ingress

Android Only Game
Uses GIS or Google Maps API/ for geo-caching game
Healthy for you- makes players walk from portals to another. You have to be within 40 m of a portal to recharge,capture of attack it. Makes you really walk a lot.
Addictive and Immersive with impressive follow up media story.
Can be used as base template for other games , and social experimentation
Uses Points, Badges, Leaderboard of gamification
Encourages direct face to face social interaction
Has in game chat facility
Zero in game currency . So no coiners or cheaters here

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meuh4lKkH61rax78x.png

Google Crisis Map and India’s Cyclone -a great application of GIS /Spatial Data

Google Crisis Map is a good example of how technology can be used for the good of making people live, even though it originally was derived from other applications.

http://google.org/crisismap/2013-phailin

Mandatory Screenshot

–Boingo Mobile’s Hotspot locator is a great example of a way of making GIS make money without being evil.

Google releases new R package for Big Data #rstats

From the Google Open Source Blog–

HistogramTools is a new R package I have released that uses RProtoBuf to read in a compact protocol buffer representation of binned data and includes a number of helpful functions for manipulating, plotting, and measuring the statistical information loss due to the binning. In addition to protocol buffers, it also supports importing aggregate performance data directly from DTrace output.

AND
We rely on several open source tools to make our work easier. The most common tool we use for statistical analysis of the performance, availability, and resource needs of our internal systems is the R programming language.

Nice job!

With Revolution Analytics being supported and funded by Microsoft and Intel and RStudio being founded by an ex-Microsoftie, I think Google does need to step up their R game though. They take and take from the open source community yet barely fund the minimum back to projects like FOAS or R-Core (http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html)

Come on Google – share more stuff with open source R than you do with the NSA!!!

1)  https://decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Ajay- What are the major alliances that REvolution has in the industry.

David- We have a number of industry partners. Microsoft and Intel, in particular, provide financial and technical support allowing us to really strengthen and optimize R on Windows, a platform that has been somewhat underserved by the open-source community.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire

After the sale of his company, Allaire became frustrated at the difficulty of keeping track of research he was doing using Google. To address this problem, he co-founded Onfolio in 2004 with Adam Berrey, former Allaire co-founder and VP of Marketing at Macromedia.
On March 8, 2006, Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft where many of the features of the original product are being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar.On August 13, 2006, Microsoft released the public beta of a new desktop blogging client called Windows Live Writer that was created by Allaire's team at Microsoft.

Google Drive connects Apps in a few clicks includes Markdown,Notepad Apps

I really liked the work done here- this is both great design and great code.

You can simply connect a whole lot of Google Drive Apps in just a click.

Some examples you can now do in Google Drive-

Fusion Tables, Edit Pictures, Design T Shirts, Write Notepad .

Check out the screen shots and see it your self,

1) Go to https://drive.google.com/

2) Click Create – Red Button-Top Left

3) Connect More Apps

4) Select Your App

5) Create a new App type (like a new T shirt design or Text Document)

Examples here are Notepad, and a Markdown Editor

and

. That’s right

I counted some 150+ apps. Especially liked AutoCad, Markdown, Docusign, Zoho, Notepad and even the Music Player that can be connected. Also some new templates that I am yet to check – esp for PPTs.

Does give some permissions to be clicked though! Now if they could only connect Google Plus to Google Drive so we can work collobratively that would be a ++

Google introduces Analytics Academy for e-learning

I really liked this and promptly signed up at https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course

I of course passed the test some 2 years back-Google Web Analytics IQ test (but its only valid for 18 months)

Digital Analytics Fundamentals

This three-week course provides a foundation for marketers and analysts seeking to understand the core principles of digital analytics and to improve business performance through better digital measurement.

Course highlights include:

An overview of today’s digital measurement landscape
Guidance on how to build an effective measurement plan
Best practices for collecting actionable data
Descriptions of key digital measurement concepts, terminology and analysis techniques
Deep-dives into Google Analytics reports with specific examples for evaluating your digital marketing performance

View lessons from experts

Watch or read lessons from digital analytics advocate Justin Cutroni, all at your own pace.
Test your knowledge

Apply what you learn in the course by completing short quizzes and practice exercises.
Join the learning community

Engage with other course participants and analytics experts in the course forum and on Google+.

What if Google decides to make Google Contact Lenses

From the Gamification course in Coursera- what a brave new world this could be if we could create minute contacts of Google Glass?

Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.

Understanding the Google Cloud

Google has a lot of services, so I really like this simple explanation of them. Though I may want a clickable , one more level of detail to make it interactive (esp Google cloud SQL vs Google Big Query- love in a tech documentation??)