KAMEIR

OK. Now THAT’s funny

Reported by the Wall Street Journal back in July of 2008, Google just announced on the Google blog. According to the official website this is Google’s effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies. By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google’s unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses.

Oh – and this time around it’s not an April Fools joke.

I just downloaded the speech-enabled search from Google to my BlackBerry flippy. The app brings text search results requested by voice queries (which has been available on the Apple’s iPhone since last year). 

The voice input is activated by holding the send button and utilizes thea user’s location to deliver local results. This will work even if the BlackBerry doesn’t have a GPS chip because Google has integrated its My Location feature into the voice app, and this determines where a user is based on cell tower and Wi-Fi triangulation.

This is just the latest move by Google to expand its presence into the mobile space, as CEO Eric Schmidt has said mobile advertising will eventually generate more revenue than ads on the normal Web (therefore we will devote one of the next SANDIOS round-table to it). 

The voice recognition works really well (even for people with somewhat of an accent . I just wish that it would also read back the results. Isn’t the whole point that I don’t even want to look at the screen?

Christine Varney was appointend by President Barack Obama to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust team.  That might present a huge problem for Google, as Varney last year stated that Google “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Varney further said that Google’s domination of Web-based software is similar to the antitrust issues Microsoft faced in the 1990s. Vanrey did praise Google for obtaining its monopoly lawfully and organically, but still warned of the dangers of consolidating the cloud computing, which refers to software based on the Internet rather than on a personal home computer, in one company but the fact remains that she has a very close eye on the search giants every move.

More scary to me is that for hte majority of people in the US Google is de facto the (entire) Internet: they only see what they can find in a Google search, given the fact that Google indexes maybe 15% of published pages that’s a really small bumber.

I passed one of Google’s street view cars on El Camino Real in Del Mar about an hour ago (see picture from my Blackberry). That reminds me: if you have not seen the clip by the Vacationeers - check it out below.