Google Voice, an ingenious use of web-based voice communications service, allows users to combine a range of phone numbers under one standard, permanent Google phone number. Any linked phone number can be removed or replaced, and the service is free. All domestic calls inside the US are free, and sms is free. The service even converts voicemail to readable transcripts in an online inbox.

This last feature could mark a shift in the way voice communications interact with the Internet broadly. If indeed Google does achieve something of a paradigm shift by offering not only voice-to-text, and the ability to concentrate a range of numbers in one convenient inbox, but way for voice and text to interact comfortably, voice communication could take an increasingly important role in online activity, even where text and work-output is the aim.

The real potential for Google Voice will depend on every individual’s use of the technology, naturally, but it may also depend on how well Google integrates such services into its Wave platform. Google Wave is a bold reinvention of online messaging and word processing, merging the two into a real-time viral-capable content propagation platform.

View full article »

An attractive woman, 34-ish, drives a compact station-wagon, late model, over a still-cobblestone side street in the center of Madrid. She advances slowly, toward a red light, and talks on her cell phone. She seems equally concentrated on both activities. Driving an automobile is a potentially dangerous activity, in which one’s own life or the lives of others may be at risk, while a casual conversation is not so much that. Yet she seemed to give equal weight, her body, her manner, seemed to give equal weight to both activities.

Blackberry and Facebook come to mind: email in your pocket and the recorded, manifest social network. Microtechnology and software, combining to give us a boom in communications, are driving us to distraction with the lust to shore up and broaden our social networks. There may be something about this behavior that is inherently tied to how we, as human beings, socialize, and survive.

We are a social, talkative species. We rely on invisible social networks to shape our built environment, to feed us, to give us meaning. Most of us do not take part in the designing or building of roads, bridges, railways, skyscrapers, megafarms, or vehicles of any kind. And most of the people who do possess only a portion of the total knowledge required to successfully achieve such constructions. Most of us do not know how food or energy gets to the places where we consume it, and few of those who play a role know much more than those who don’t about the rest of the process. No individual can make a modern city bus, withut help of some kind, much less an airplane or an ocean-liner.

View full article »

Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer, likely to run a version of Mac OS X and to merge the touchscreen stylings of the iPhone and iPod Touch with the full functionality of the MacBook line, is expected to be aimed at revolutionizing the way print media deliver text to readers. If true, the device would again put Apple at the cutting edge of a field where Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and others, are trying to set the standards for e-book distribution and licensing.

After a summer of hullaballoo and expectation, and the hopes that the device would be introduced along with the new iPods at a September event, it now looks like the Apple tablet will be introduced sometime in early 2010. Reports suggest Steve Jobs has “reset” the tablet project multiple times, out of concern the projects presented were not offering consumers a distinct enough field of uses to warrant an entirely new field of computing and device manufacture.

Now, Gizmodo reports it has confirmed that Apple has initiated negotiations with major print publishers, including not only McGraw-Hill —a major publisher of educational materials—, but also The New York Times and others, with the aim of securing content distribution rights and format collaboration to deliver textual content to readers via iTunes.

View full article »