Google: Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Fiber

Google Fiber is certainly way out there.

Google Fiber Is The Most Disruptive Thing The Company's Done Since Gmail

All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month, Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. ...... Google was able to get prices so low, in part, because it designed and built all the hardware for the system itself. This is a good reminder that although Google wasn't a consumer electronics company until recently, Google has actually been designing hardware for its data centers for more than a decade. It was this data center efficiency that allowed Gmail to offer way more free storage than competitors back in 2004....... just like Gmail unlocked an enterprise business, Fiber could unlock a whole new business as an ISP and TV provider..... Now, we just need Google to roll out Fiber to the rest of the country.

If Google can figure out a way to use snooping technology to serve well targeted ads it could make internet access ad supported, and it could take top speeds to all corners of the world. It would not be limited by Fiber. Heck, it could use satellite technology as necessary.

This is the single most important thing Google could do. At globally universal broadband, Google surpasses the nation state in power. It also becomes a trillion dollar company in the process.

That "5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream" free deal is a big deal.

At 1 GB, YouTube has no more disadvantages to traditional TV. Video ads fetch more.

Related articles

• Google Outlines 1Gig Internet, TV Service Planned For Kansas City
• Google Fiber launches in Kansas City, promises 1000 Mbps up and down
• Google Fiber to bring 1000 Mbps speeds, TV, free Internet to Kansas City
• Google launches Fiber service, details packages, equipment
• Google unveils Gigabit Google Fiber Internet and TV service starting at $120/month [Gallery]
• Google Fiber: Here's what you need to know
• Google Outlines 1Gig Internet, TV Service Planned For Kansas City
• Google redesigns the TV with Fiber TV: a new DVR, mobile apps, and voice search
• Google to broadband providers: 'Here's how you build a superfast network.' - CNET
• Google Fiber Is More Than Just Fast Internet
• Google Fiber: everything you need to know
• Google Fiber: Start wetting the bed, cable companies
• The race for fiber is on
• Google's Crazy 1000Mbps Fiber Internet Connection Is Out Today [Video]

Soccer Secrets

PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies

Many readers will have watched the final of the Euro 2012 soccer championships on Sunday in which Spain demolished a tired Italian team by 4 goals to nil. The result, Spain's third major championship in a row, confirms the team as the best in the world and one of the greatest in history. ...... Spain's famous strategy of accurate quick-fire passing, known as the tiki-taka style. ..... a quantifiable representation of a team's style, identifies key individuals and highlights potential weaknesses. ..... think of each player as a node in a network and each pass as an edge that connects nodes. ..... the Spanish team pass more often..... image captures 417 passes by the Spanish team versus 266 for the Netherlands. ..... That the goal keeper was the Netherland's best connected player itself speaks volumes. ..... Players with a high betweenness centrality are crucial for keeping the momentum of the game going ..... the famous PageRank algorithm which measure's a player's popularity, as judged by the number of passes he receives from other popular players. ..... adding another node to represent the opponents goal and would record the number of shots .... measure the accuracy of passes .... The defensive strength of a team could also be incorporated in the model by tracking passing interceptions and recovered balls .... a way of collecting and analysing the data in real time to produce a network-based analysis of a game as it happens ..... In terms of data analysis, football has always lagged behind more statistically-friendly games such as American football, baseball and cricket, because it lacks the long pauses during which data can be gathered and analysed. That looks set to change.

Related articles

• PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies
• Soccer Teams' Strategies
• Soccer Strategies Analyzed Using Network Theory
• Spain's Soccer Team, a Champion for the Facebook Age
• Mathematicians use network theory to model champion Spanish soccer team's style
• PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies
• Spain Falls to Japan: Biggest Olympic Soccer Upset Ever?
• Spain's 'Tiki-Takanaccio' Proves Boringly Effective
• Announcer Believes Spanish Soccer Team's Success A Result Of All Of The Sex
• Japan stuns Spain in men's soccer

The Moon Does Not Have Water

Full Moon view from earth In Belgium (Hamois). Français : Pleine Lune vue de la Terre en Belgique à Hamois. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But it has energy.

Moon has enough helium-3 to power Earth for five millenniums

25 tons of helium-3 per year will more than suffice to meet mankind’s energy needs....... On Earth, helium-3 is measured in grams, while its reserves on the Moon are estimated at 500,000 tons.

Helium-3 - Wikipedia Hydrogen-1 and helium-3 are the only stable nuclides in existence that contain more protons than they have neutrons.... a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron .... sought for use in nuclear fusion research ..... The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years ..... The helion, the nucleus of a helium-3 atom, consists of two protons but only one neutron, in contrast with two neutrons in common helium ..... Its hypothetical existence was first proposed in 1934 ..... Helium-3 is proposed as a second-generation fuel for nuclear fusion in hypothetical fusion power plants, but such plants are still very early in their development -- especially since the first generation has not entered service anywhere, yet.

Helium-3 is a very rare gas with the potential to fuel clean nuclear fusion power plants. However, one of the problems is that the nearest supply of helium-3 is on the Moon.

Lunar Helium-3 as an Energy Source - The Artemis Project

Jun 27, 1999 .... The total supply in the U.S. strategic reserves of helium is about 29 kg ..... In their 1988 paper, Kulcinski, et al. (see ref note below), estimate a total of 1,100,000 metric tonnes of He3 have been deposited by the solar wind in the lunar regolith. Since the regolith has been stirred up by collisions with meteorites, we'll probably find He3 down to depths of several meters. ..... The highest concentrations are in the lunar maria; about half the He3 is deposited in the 20% of the lunar surface covered by the maria...... To extract He3 from the lunar soil, we heat the dust to about 600 degrees C....... We get most of the other volatiles out at the same time, so we'll be heating up the rocks anyway. (To get the oxgyen out, we'll turn up the furnace to about 900 deg C

Related articles

• Moon has enough helium-3 to power Earth for five millenniums
• Helium-3 and Earth's energy conundrum
• High-value isotope could draw prospectors to the moon
• Review: Iron Sky
• When the universe began
• Lunar boom: we'll soon be mining the moon
• Things to Learn: How Solar Fusion Works
• so why did the big bang make hydrogen? .... and why do the elements fuse to make other elements? .... in short, why did the big bang create process? ....
• "Nuclear slapshots" could propel a spacecraft to Mars in just weeks [Mars]
• Helium shortage leaving local businesses feeling deflated

Hit And Run

Moon Formed In Interplanetary Hit-and-Run Incident, Say Astronomers

It turns out that our interplanetary companion has a similar composition to Earth, including an iron core. The consensus is that this rules out the possibility that the Moon formed elsewhere and was later captured by the Earth's gravity. Instead, it must have formed from the debris created by giant collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized body..... a model consisting of about 500,000 particles in which the Moon ends up being made of some 10,000 particles ..... the conditions on Earth at the time of the impact, about 4.5 billion years ago .... the more energetic impact would have heated the Earth's mantle to temperatures of about 10,000 Kelvin and heated the debris that formed the Moon to higher temperatures too

Related articles

• Moon Formed In Interplanetary Hit-and-Run Incident, Say Astronomers
• Rogue planet that hit us to form Moon may still be on the loose
• What if we had a planet instead of a Moon? [Space Porn]
• If the earth had a second moon, could the moons ever cross? How and when?
• Ancient Mysteries - Re: Need help finding an experiment!
• Sun & Space Anomalies - Re: Interplanetary global warming?
• Astronomers Spot Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto
• Magical Photos of a Person Playing with the Moon
• Moon has enough helium-3 to power Earth for five millenniums
• Saturn's Moon Titan May Have Seen Earth-Like Erosion

Not Entirely A Lost Decade

Image via CrunchBase

Steve Ballmer is no Steve Jobs, and Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates. You needed a Steve Jobs to spring forth the iPhone and the iPad. And those two have taken Apple into the stratosphere. You can't fault Steve Ballmer for not having come up with the iPhone or the iPad, although he has made some strategic mistakes even in those two spaces coming in as a latecomer.

But I think Microsoft might be able to do with gestures what Apple has done with touch. 3D computing might see a better day for Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer's number one failure though is the corporate decadence at Microsoft. There is too much red tape in Redmond. That is something Steve Ballmer is capable of rectifying but has not. Most of the lost decade sting he has earned through that inaction.

Steve Jobs paid Ballmer the ultimate anti compliment by calling him Sculley.

Ram Charan

The strange existence of Ram Charan

What he does is hard to describe. But the most powerful CEOs love it enough to keep him on the road 24/7 and make him the most influential consultant alive. ...... Dubai ... After 12 hours of isolation on the flight from J.F.K., Charan is back in business, deep in private conversation with a client in New York City. .... the last thing he cares about is where he is. As long as Charan is with a client - or can get one on the phone - he's home ..... alone at the top of his profession - not a consultant so much as a guru, a corporate sage, with unparalleled access to boardrooms across the globe and intimate, enduring relationships with an array of powerful CEOs ..... Jack Welch: "He has this rare ability to distill meaningful from meaningless and transfer it to others in a quiet, effective way without destroying confidences" ...... Dick Harrington: "He probably knows more about corporate America than anybody" ..... Ivan Seidenberg: "I love him. He's my secret weapon" ..... John Reed: "He's like your conscience ... "Just when you sort of think you have everything done and you're feeling pretty good about yourself, he calls you up and says, 'Hey, Reed, did you do this and that and the other?'" ...... Jack Krol: "When I was chairman and CEO of DuPont he'd show up at the house Sunday morning at nine, and we might spend three or four hours, and all of a sudden he'd disappear. He would go anywhere at any time that you asked him to meet with you. Business is his whole life." ...... Having uploaded himself into the global economy, Charan circulates, continuously, with something like the speed and efficiency of capital. ...... Charan never stops. He sleeps in a hotel every night ("Professor Charan, welcome home," is how the doorman greets him at the Waldorf on Park Avenue) ....... John Reed: "I got in the habit of having him over for Christmas because he had no place to go. He was going to sit in a hotel room. That's hardly right." ....... Before he was a consultant, Charan lived in dormitories. Before he was a professor and a student, he lived in YMCAs. Now he doesn't live anywhere. ...... never learned how to drive ........ a day rate that clients say can top $20,000 ...... "I use the time sitting in the terminal ....... I have never missed an appointment in my life. ..... does regret, however, not accepting an offer from American Airlines in the 1970s to buy a lifetime first-class upgrade for $100,000. ...... his lifelong passion for the Indian vocalist Lata Mangeshkar ....... Charan has no goals ..... "Purpose before self." ...... For the next five hours Charan walks his charges through a detailed analysis and discussion of Emaar's draft succession-planning template. "A leader who does not produce leaders is not a great leader," he says. "If you agree, I'd like to put that in." ........ "What are the three to five most crucial natural-talent items that each person has? It has to be specific, and very clear and repeatable...... Steve Jobs.... this human being has a talent to figure out what the consumer really wants..... he has the will and the talent to find - no matter where it is! - the right technology that will deliver what they want ..... he has the talent to create demand at the right time." ..... Throughout the afternoon Charan discreetly shares from his store of anecdotes ...... sometime in the late '70s when Grove got a call from a Tektronix engineer who wanted to work at Intel and was willing to take a 10% pay cut. "And they were a $200 million company at the time," says Charan, "very small. Tektronix was $5 billion. That's brand!" ...... Monday night he flies to Madrid, Tuesday night to Frankfurt, Wednesday morning to Miami. After that, he doesn't know. ...... Charan's roots are in a small city near Delhi in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. (I can't say which city because Charan has relatives there and worries about kidnapping.) ....... While they had everything they needed to survive, they had no more than that. No plumbing, no electricity, no luxuries of any kind. The children pumped water from a well. They did their nightly homework on the floor in a flickering circle of light from a mustard-oil lamp ....... He counted the rupees in the till at the end of the day, inspiring a lifelong appreciation for the "blood" of business. ...... "Any company I go to, the first thing I check is cash. How's your cash? Where's your cash flow? No blood, you got a problem right away." ...... In the lulls between customers, Charan studied. Using a system of his own devising, he condensed onto a single unlined page the essence of what he had learned that day in each subject. ....... "fear, anger, laziness - these are the downfalls of human beings" ....... You can always try gardening, she said. "I'll do that," Charan said. "But I can't go home because I don't have any money." ..... He completed all the reading and, as was his habit, summarized the notes for each case on a single sheet of paper, which he brought to class for reference during the discussion. ...... an eye for the role played by interpersonal relationships to solve a vexing problem. Charan says now, "That's where this whole consulting thing really began." ...... Within a year of arriving at BU, having finally achieved tenure, he concluded, "This is not for me," and stepped into the void. He rented an office in Dallas, in part, he says, because the climate reminded him of India, but really for its central location. Not that he's ever there. ...... He is very good at unpacking complexity, at paring business challenges down to their essential elements, often with reference to lessons he learned years ago in the family shoe store. ....... This is his 37th year working for GE, his 33rd for DuPont. He worked with John Snow for 15 years before Snow left CSX for the Treasury Department; he has been with Ivan Seidenberg at least 20 years, and with former West Virginia Governor Gaston Caperton more than 30 years. Caperton met Charan at a Young Presidents' Organization function in the mid-1970s and has been huddling with him ever since. ......... "He's helped me in business, in government, and in the nonprofit," says Caperton. ...... Charan's extraordinary devotion to his work ...... GE's Conaty jokes that while his company has extremely high expectations of its employees, "we do allow people to get married. We do allow them to have kids. We actually allow them to live in homes - even multiple homes, once they make some money with us - and we do allow them vacations and most of their weekends off." ......... Charan, however, has no discernible personal life. ...... "My wife got to the point where she couldn't stand it anymore, because Charan could not get out of talking about business." ....... Charan had triple-bypass heart surgery in 1999. After the operation he took it easy for 11 days, then went back to work. He couldn't fly for a while but that was fine - he loves trains. Most of his clients never knew he was sick. ....... Generalizing about what Charan does for his clients is tricky, but that lack of definition paradoxically is at the heart of his success. His method is no method. He is wary of abstraction and belongs to no school of management theory. "Converting highfalutin ideas to the specifics of the company and the leader - that's the trick," he once confided to me in an elevator. "The other part is working backward to define what the need is, and then searching for what helps. Then you bring it to common sense, and common sense is very uncommon." ........ no ready-made solutions ..... Charan brings observation, curiosity, and care. He lets his clients decide how to use him. Sometimes all he does is ask the right question ..... a three-item agenda following a script devised by Charan: What unique thing happened in your store last week? What issues did you face that kept you from serving your customers better? How can we fix those issues right now? Says Smith: "He made sure as we grew that we didn't lose sight of what was really important." ...... He always whips out this nice little pen he uses, real thin ink, and he starts drawing diagrams. He constantly is helping to provide depth to issues, not only answers. ....... Reed says, "Ram is a catalyst in the real sense of that word. He facilitates things happening but doesn't take part in them himself. And he is an immense source of energy. When you're trying to get large organizations to do things, energy is extremely important. He forces you to tell him what it is you want to do, and he forces you to really be clear in your own mind what those things are and what steps have to be taken ...... he starts out by basically forcing you to think with him and be very clear. ..... once you've agreed on everything you want to do, he calls you up every ten minutes and asks why haven't you done it yet ...... The planes were late. Charan never complained. ..... "It's going to be in India" is all he'll say about his coming serious philanthropy. "It goes a long way, a little amount there. To enable people to accomplish things." ....... he is no longer homeless. "I now have an apartment in Texas," he tells me matter-of-factly. ..... They think it's a big deal for me to have never bought a place