Google Wave enters Apache Software Foundation's incubator program.

Google Wave is dead. Long live Apache Wave. The announcement is here.

With this announcement comes a host of technical information and videos on the Wave Summit Talks page.

For example, here is a video about building and running a "Wave-in-a-Box":


This seems like the best possible result for a once-promising Google technology that has since fallen out of favor.

Geo, Google APIs, Google Wave video from Google I/O 2010 released

As promised, Google has published the remaining videos from Google I/O on its Session Videos page.  The new videos are concerning Geo, Google APIs, and Google Wave.

Here are some sample videos.

Where you at? Connecting your users with the places around them:

Presentation PDF here.

Map once, map anywhere: Developing geospatial applications for both desktop and mobile:

Presentation PDF here.

Waving across the web:


Open source Google Wave: Building your own wave provider:

Presentation PDF is here.

Bringing Google to your site:

Presentation PDF here.

YouTube API uploads: Tools, tips, and best practices:

Presentation PDF is here.

Google I/O video Fireside Chats and Tech Talks released.

Right on schedule, Google has released videos from the Tech Talks and Fireside Chats at Google I/O 2010.

As before, here are some of the videos that were released.

Fireside chat with the Android team:


Fireside chat with the Google Chrome team:


Fireside chat with the Google Wave team:


Fireside chat with the App Engine team:


Tech Talks- Go Programming:

Google I/O 2010 has begun! VP8 open-sourced! Keynote now online!

Google I/O 2010 is underway! For those of you that are not in San Francisco, here is the Google I/O agenda.

To save you the work of searching for it, here is the 2010 Google G/O Keynote. It was originally posted in twelve parts on their Google Developers Youtube channel. Twelve parts, Google? Really? Isn't this 10 minute limit on videos starting to limit you, seeing as you had to cut your keynote into a dozen parts? To give you an idea of how ADD'ed out society is, at the time of the first version of this post, part 1 of the keynote had 42,373 views, but part 12 only had 4,736 views. That's right, Google. Nearly 90 percent of your audience didn't watch all the way to the end.

Luckily, they have since released a full version, which is embedded below:

For those of you who did pay attention the whole way through, there were quite a few interesting announcements. Here are some of them:

HMTL5:

Google loooooves HTML5. They are looking to leverage it anywhere and everywhere. Google wants video to be everywhere, efficient, and open. Google is open-sourcing On2's VP8 under the WebM project. A nice surprise is that the OGG Theora people have agreed to embrace the new standard, meaning that we can hope to avoid codec flame-wars. They are working hard to provide a ton of APIs that interoperate with existing technologies like CSS to allow people to make the web a more video-friendly place.

Chrome Web Store:

Google is attempting to make web app store for web applications, similar to the app stores that exist for smartphones. They are looking to leverage the WebGL framework to leverage cool 3D apps, like Darkroom (from MugTug) and Lego Star Wars (through Unity).

Google Wave:

Google Wave is open-sourcing most of its framework, in the hopes that it will be the backbone of the collaborative web, especially concerning project management. Wave is now open. You no longer need an invite to get in. Just go to wave.google.com. They mentioned that Novell Pulse and SAP's Streamwork will be inter-operable will Google Wave. They are also working hard at making it easier to embed waves into existing web site.

Google Web Toolkit/Roo:

Google talked about the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and its integration with Spring Roo to create rich web applications. It is simply amazing to see the power of the Java programming language on the web with these tools. And...integrated plugins for Eclipse! Is there anything that Eclipse can't do? Props to the Ben Alex for using Ubuntu for the demo!

Don't be evil?
In showing a demo of millions and millions of expense report entries, it looks like they had some fun with the data. You'll notice that I've circled "Money Laundering" as one of the Engineering department's activities. Hmm, isn't that.... evil?

Google App Engine for Business:

Google announced the upcoming availability of Google App Engine for Business, along with a roadmap for implementation. They are aiming to make enterprise development and deployment much easier, including deploying apps under your own domain and controlling permissions for a large number of developers under the same projects.

I will try to get the Day 2 Keynote up as soon as I can.

Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Organizations announced!

Google has again announced the mentor organizations that will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2010.

For those that are not familiar with the Google Summer of Code program, here is Google's explanation from the Summer of Code 2010 website:

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

The complete list of mentor organizations for GSoC 2010 is available here, but I'd like to highlight some of the organizations:

• The Battle for Wesnoth - A free, turn based strategy game, open to customization and portable to a wide variety of operating systems (Win, Mac, Linux, Maemo, Amiga, Solaris, RISC OS, OS/2, etc.).
• beagleboard.org - group dedicated to developing powerful and open embedded systems. Makers of the Beagle Board.
• CoreBoot- A project aimed at replacing proprietary BIOS systems with open, modifiable ones.
• Drupal - Open source web content management. The framework that runs whitehouse.gov, linux.com, linuxjournal.com, and other large websites.
• Etherboot - Organization responsible for gPXE, an open source network bootloader
• Rockbox - An open source firmware for mp3 players, developed from scratch.
• The Linux Foundation - Organization that employs Linus Torvalds. It promotes, protects, and standardizes the use of Linux worldwide.

It is wonderful to see so many great projects will be receiving support through Google's Summer of Code this year. I look forward to the innovation that results from this influx of talented coders to high quality open source projects.

Google Chrome OS released as open source

Some geeks were expecting big news about the release of Google's Chrome OS today, and it turns out that they're partially correct. Google did have a big announcement, but it wasn't the actual release of Chrome OS. The announcement is that the Google Chrome OS have been released as an open source project: the Google Chromium OS. Oh, and it's based on Linux. Google is preparing Chrome OS for its eventual public release in late 2010.
For those that aren't familiar with the Chrome OS project, here's a video explanation:

How, I hear you asking, "Chrome? Chromium? What's the difference?"
Basically, Chrome is made by Google. Google then takes the source code that was used to make Chrome, and releases it under the name Chromium, with slightly different artwork, but the same underlying technology. This allows everyone who wishes to look at the underlying technology to look at it, and develop new uses for it, such as a Linux or OSX version of the Chromium browser, or wider hardware support for the Chromium OS. Chrome and Chromium are the web browsers, with Chrome OS and Chromium OS being the OS projects that utilize the web browser as the basis for the operating system.

How will Chrome/Chromium look? Well, here's a video showing the current concept for the UI:

THAT is a sweet UI. I can't wait to see it in person.

Here's a video that explains the open source development process and how it relates to the Chromium OS project.

Want to see more videos? Go to the YouTube Google Chrome Channel!
If you're interested in helping develop this project, check out the Chromium Blog and sign up to receive updates from Google.
If you're interested in how this news was announced, OMG! UBUNTU! has a minute-by-minute account of the Nov. 19th Google press conference, as well as a paraphrasing of the Q&A session that was held afterwards.

Google Wave- first impressions...

I've been a Google Wave user for about a week or so (thanks for the invite, AJ!), and I'd like to share my first impressions of the innovative new tool.




Positives:
As far as collaborative communication is concerned, Google Wave really is impressive. We recently started a LUG (Linux Users Group) wave, and I think we've done more constructive communication on that wave in a couple days than we have done in the last six months on the mailing list.
Widgets are fun. I wish there were more of them.
Real time communication is a good feature.
Waves can be read across platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Handhelds. etc.)

Negatives:
Lag can be an issue, especially during real-time communication. Sometimes, clicking to reply (or clicking several times while waiting for the window to open) will cause multiple reply threads to open, which can be annoying to delete.
More widgets would be nice. I assume that that will increase over time.


I interacted with Wave on a Palm Pre emulator, and although I was able to load Wave and read waves, my ability to interact with those waves was less successful, since wave employs a fair bit of right clicking, holding and dragging in its interface, and I haven't quite figured out how to do those things in my Pre emulator.

Wave is a tool that I plan to continue using. It could be a tool that changes the way that people communicate, both in work and outside of it. The edges are still pretty rough, but I expect that Google will continue to polish it into a fine program.

Linux-based Android phones coming to Verizon.

Recently, Google and Verizon announced a landmark partnership to bring several Linux-based Android phones to the Verizon network, a great network that has seriously been lacking in high tech phones unlike T-Mobile (Android), Sprint (Palm Pre), and AT&T (iPhone), who have had high tech phones to peddle to their customers for quite some time.

Rumors contend that the first two devices will most likely be from HTC and/or Motorola. The current rumored list of upcoming Verizon phones includes the Motorola Sholes, HTC Desire, HTC Passion, and HTC Predator.

This is good news for Verizon customers, as it signals a movement in the direction of more 'open' phones, as opposed to previous policies that had been considered somewhat totalitarian. They are also promising "innovative applications" (Google Voice, perhaps?).

I will be watching these developments with interest as the phones are officially announced.

Google Wave

Google is poised to change the Internet again, and it will revolutionize collaborative communication and sharing. The way that Google will accomplish this revolution is through a tool called Google Wave, created by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the creators of Google Maps. Google Wave was built using the Google Web Toolkit.

If you haven't heard about Google Wave yet, do yourself a favor and go to wave.google.com to watch the informational video that was given at the Google I/O developer's conference.


A short description of Google Wave would be that it is a re-visioning of communication on the Internet to accommodate what technology and the Internet is capable of doing. Thinking in terms of electronic mail as an improvement on snail mail, Google wave is an improvement and combination of email, instant messaging, text messaging, and chat rooms like IRC. One Google developer describes it as "email on crack", which I would assume is a good thing.

The protocol will be an open protocol, and it will be natively multi-platform, including Linux geeks like me and developers on the ground floor of the development of this technology. Google has been very open about allowing developers to create using the platform and the surrounding APIs. In addition to the online collaboration, Google is also hosting in-person events, such as the upcoming Google hackathon which is occurring at 3PM on Friday, August 21st in Madison in cooperation with Madison Nonprofit Day.

If you don't yet appreciate the magnitude of this development, consider this: Google Wave will deploy not only on PCs, Macs, and Linux machines, but it will also come with a client for Android Phones and Iphones. If you had to choose between text messaging five of your friends about going out to a movie or starting one collaborative Google Wave to communicate with all of your friends at the same time from your phone, what tool would you choose?

Another cool thing about Google Wave: The name of the technology is a nod to Joss Whedon, as in the Firefly-verse (the fictional universe that is the setting for Firefly and Serenity) a wave is a real-time transmission of audio, video, or text. I am a big fan of Joss Whedon's works, and it's great that such a wonderful technology named after a fictional technology in one of his works.

Keep your eyes peeled, everyone. This launch will be very interesting to see unfold, as the applications are nearly endless, and the vast majority of this project will be open source to allow developers to innovate and create new uses for Google Wave as they see fit. Google really knows how to attract and motivate developers, and that bodes well for the future of this project.