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Since this is the only company worth talking about nowadays — and because there is so much conjecture about what they will do with that $4 billion they raised a few days ago, I would dare say that based upon their previous company acquisitions: Google will not buy AOL.

So far, their strategy has been to simply purchase start-ups or small private firms which specialize in key areas (e.g. semantic ad generation, Blogger, Picasa). I would not say they are misers, just frugal with their money (since the founders cited Warren Buffett as a key influence, perhaps his meticulous due diligence has rubbed off on them as well).

When I get a chance, I’ll try to rewrite some interesting email conversations I have had with an associate who is in the network design industry for a large IT services company.

Oh, and for the record: despite sponsoring at least 3 public hotspots (San Francisco, Mountain View and New York City), I do not think Google will become a WISP anytime soon either (if at all).

Report: Google gets 1,000 resumes for 50 jobs in China:

“Interest in Google has been particularly strong among university graduates, Lee said in the interview, citing the story of an applicant with a master’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University who, concerned that his programming skills were not up to Google’s standards, had applied for the position of cook’s assistant just to get his foot in the door.”

Not totally unheard of — some desperate CS graduates reportedly will do anything to work at ILM or Pixar, including janitorial services.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory:

“Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world’s leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God’s Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.

40 Things That Only Happen In Movies

5. Any lock can be picked with a credit card or paperclip in seconds. UNLESS it’s the door to a burning building with a child inside.

13. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear.

23. If being chased through a city you can usually take cover in a passing St Patrick’s Day parade – at any time of the year.

PLANET-DISSOLVING DUST CLOUD IS HEADED TOWARD EARTH:

“The good news is that this finding confirms several cutting- edge ideas in theoretical physics,” announced Dr. Albert Sherwinski, a Cambridge based astrophysicist with close ties to NASA.

“The bad news is that the total annihilation of our solar system is imminent.”
[...]
Some scientists say mankind’s best hope would be to build a “space ark” and hightail it to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.1 million light-years away.

“We wouldn’t be able to save the entire human population, but perhaps the best and the brightest,” observed British rocket scientist Dr. David Hall, when asked about the feasibility of such a project.

Classes at A&M are cancelled for Friday. The football game has been moved from Saturday to Thursday (gotta love the love of football in Texas, we’ll play no matter what). One of my professors recently taught at the University of Florida and has lived through a number of these… his recommendation to all of us, leave for Dallas.

For those unfamiliar with the geographical proximity of College Station and A&M to anything else: we are approximately, 95 miles north of Houston and 170 miles south of Dallas and 100 miles east of Austin.

The current trajectory has Rita hitting just west of Galveston/Houston from which it will then head north, passing close to the College Station area. So that means lots of puddles to splash in and good weather to fly kites.

And to give you an idea of the size this sucker is, someone on the Weather channel suggested that this was like a tornado the size of Georgia. That’s how we like things in Texas, big.

The Essence of Douchebag:

Detroit Tigers hat: Not that I have anything against the Tigers, but wearing this hat exhibits the fact that you are either from Michigan, or cheer for Michigan sports teams. Both are equally unacceptable. Everyone from and everything about Michigan sucks. Michigan, along with Wisconsin should join Canada. Or you could just move there. We wouldn’t care. And Canada wouldn’t notice that you’re wearing…

Apropos my article yesterday comes an article from News.com predicting and describing the same theme of Google creating “virtual” applications, accessible anywhere an Internet connection exists:

The notion of a network computer isn’t new. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has for years been saying “the network is the computer.” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison formed a company around the idea. It was called the “New Internet Computer Company,” and it sold Web surfing devices before shuttering two years ago.

But unlike Sun and Oracle, Google’s timing could be impeccable, Arnold argues. “Sun defined it. Ellison tried to build it. But Google owns it,” he said.

Not a week goes by now without some kind of service announced by Google (via stealth at times). Last night, in a jealous fit of rage, I shook a Magic 8 ball and conjured up the following predictions:

Google .Mac service emulation. If you have not already done so, be sure to look through all the services that Apple bundles with their .Mac web service. Is there anything listed that Google could not or is not currently developing? Google already offers services for creating homepages (Blogger), for organizing photos (Picasa), for emailing, transferring and storing data (Gmail), for viewing and searching video content (Google Video), for chatting (GTalk) and for talking with like-minded individuals in custom communities (Google Groups). The Google Desktop already organizes a number of files types in a manner to which is easily accessible via search, so scratch Spotlight. In fact, they have “virtually” created the ‘network computer‘ envisioned by Larry Ellison.

To this end, I predict that Google will offer a service whereby you can ‘Sync’ all your mounds of data onto their servers. Gmail has helped prepare them for some aspects of remote-data warehousing (as have all their projects). Apple already offers a couple of services (iDisk, Sync & Backup) which provide the functionality that Google will probably offer. They could even provide various levels of “backups” — e.g. real-time (which is already occurring when Google Desktop is enabled) or in increments once-a-day or once-a-week. Whether or not they charge is another matter entirely (I personally would have no problem shelling out some bling for this “backup” service). Note: this is arguably a bittersweet move, while on the one hand you no longer need to fret about losing data on your computer due to Windows mishaps or pesky spyware, your data is the hands of someone else (however, it is in their best interest to guard to and protect your data).

Recently, Google now requires that all Orkut users migrate to logging in with a GMail account. I suspect that they will also integrate Dodgeball with this social service as well (seeing as Dodgeball is pretty much bare-bones without it). And since Google Talk is integrated with GMail, we have one big happy family of One-Click always-on connections (of which Android and Google Wifi will no doubt, play some role as well).

Of course, they could prove me wrong by teaming up, as rumors of an Apple-iTunes-Google triumvirate abound.

Not-all-is-a-silverlining

I do think Google has dropped the ball in a couple of areas. The first is integrating a bloglines-type of RSS reader into Gmail. It is not technologically beyond them to do so, as Rojo has shown (both are based of AJAX). The other main stickler is Orkut. It is very impersonal compared to competitive offerings such as Facebook (formerly, TheFacebook). Perhaps Orkut can emulate the same feature set that has popularized college-based social networks (while there is a community for Texas A&M students in Orkut, I cannot find out who is in my classes, who has similar interests, or are in different clubs, jobs, high schools, etc.). In fact, not only is Google pushing the aforementioned automated services to university students through their ‘College Life‘ campaign, they actually advertise these via Facebook (look at the URL wrapper). Perhaps they will invest in Mark’s creation next?

Part 2 will discuss the back-end and how ultimately the open-source community could replicate and implement Google’s technology onto devices mentioned in my FCC article (think IPv6 and mobile devices acting as web-servers).

Google Expected to Target Phone Search:

What’s the next big killer app from search companies? Quickly and easily searching telephone calls for a particular word or phrase—in essence, to Google your calls—is a likely candidate. And it isn’t as far off as it might seem.

In the past two years, a number of customer service calling center operators for hire, some with thousands of employees working at the phones, have invested in the technology to identify inept operators and other measures of quality control.

While that’s far from a mainstream scenario, these pioneering commercial applications are nonetheless an important first step toward a future in which phone calls will be among the Web pages available by visiting Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

As an aside, I’m surprised one feature is still not being pushed by mobile service providers such as Cingular or T-Mobile: uploading contact information to a central server. Everyone I know has lost or destroyed at least one of their phones accidentally, losing many, if not all of their numbers/contacts. I would be willing to pay a small fee (maybe $1 or so) to update the database each month. If AOL can do it to a buddy list, why can’t Sprint?

Some more of this uploading notion at this older News.com story.