According to their corporate blog, Google has aquired Keyhole.

If you’ve never tried this product, it’s quite impressive. It’s similar in concept to NASA’s World Wind, but with a much more refined interface and supported infrastructure. Basically, you start out looking at the Earth, and you can zoom to any level, search by address or place name, etc. It provides endless hours of “hey there’s my house” fun. On the practical side, it’s useful for checking out real-estate & vacation spots, and I’m sure Google has lots more in store for us.

Robert Scoble blogged that he was invited to Google’s Kirkland (i.e. Microsoft’s back yard) house warming. The interesting part is that he points out the date, so only a moderate amount of research would be needed to crash the party. He even titled his post “Let’s see how many people I can sneak into Google’s house warming”.

Ok, this isn’t based on fact or rumor. This is pure speculation based on a thought I had last night about something I believe would be useful and marketable.

Here’s the idea. Google partners with RIM or PalmOne to create a co-branded Google-Communicator, based on the BlackBerry or the Treo. You hit the Web button, and it takes you to an optimized Google search page. Hit the Email button and it takes you into your Gmail account. Tie this together with aGPS, and Google Local and you’re just a few chicklet clicks away from finding the nearest Pizza joint.

We know that Google is looking at this market space because of Google SMS. The questions is how far are they going to take it?

James Kendrick provides a verbose description of his ideal Tablet-style PC. I agree with almost everything except the joystick. Instead of a joystick, just make the screen “finger compatible” for the quick stuff.

O’Reilly has a good write-up on the features and workings of Google’s newest Beta, the Google Desktop.

So far it hasn’t done anything too useful for me (it’s been on my machine for about 2 hours), but I can think of plenty of times in the past when I wish I’d had this capability.

The one situation where it won’t help is when I can’t remember which computer I left something on. Now if I could tie together all the machines I use, and use the indexing to search accross them, that’d be awesome. Then let me build search groups for my teams at work, including servers. Then let me build family groups, friends groups, etc., the possibilities are endless.

Rockford Lhotka has a lengthy but interesting post about the history of programming languages, and the benefits of having competing languages.

From the Google Blog: Google is now offering SMS (Short Message Service) searches. You send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL) and it sends the results. Types of information available include Business listings, Residential listings, Dictionary words, Prices (from Froogle), Phone area code/zip code lookup, and a calculator that includes unit conversions!

Ok, I’m not sure exactly what kind of search engine traffic the above phrase is going to attract, but I laughed out loud when I read it, so I had to link…

Anyways, its from a post by Ed Kaim that starts out talking about Microsoft ISV Empower program (which he describes with the above phrase) and then drifts laterally and finished up talking about bovine plastic surgery. Well actually, he’s talking about phone numbers, but he does mention bovine plastic surgery. If you have any questions about that, call 1-UR-PURTEY-OX, I’m sure Ed can explain better than I can…

Related Links:

http://www.phonespelling.com/ <-- Lots of results

http://www.dialabc.com/words/search <-- Graphical results

http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2004/04/05/107986.aspx <-- Microsoft's CalvinH tackles the phone number problem

Congratulations to Scaled Composites!

Lots of Video & Info on the X Prize Website.