PRAKHAR AGRAWAL’S TECH BLOG

Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.

Sir Richard writes:

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.

Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source.

Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel.

Okay, come on — seriously. Is this Virgle thing for real?

What, you doubt us? Well, yes — Virgle is real.

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Get started now:

Try gDay™

“I could never wake up on time to get to our team meetings. But thanks to the new Google Wake Up Kit, I’m always on time now!”
Pedro C.

Do you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? The guys at Google do have, too. In fact this problem became so serious at times that it sometimes resulted in lacklustre attendance at team meetings. To help solve the problem they have created an innovative solution called the Google Wake Up Kit.

In combination with the kit, you can receive a new type of notification from Google Calendar, called the “wake up” notification. This notification is relentless in ensuring your timely awakening from restful slumber.

The “wake up” notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters. Learn more