Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around. We all remember the twitterfone and the cinch blogtalkradio concepts and we're still thinking on how huge their impact will be in the info-included community.

It's been over a year since Tim O'Reilly, the great web2.0 visionary and O'Reilly media books founder, noted that google was actually harvesting and harnessing precious voice-recognition data from their Goog-411 phone search. It's also been a year since Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned that 2008 was all about "mobile, mobile, mobile". Well, all those signs were foretelling the biggest thing I've seen ever since google reader and twitter came along: voice-search in your mobile web-able phone, voice-search in your iphone that is. Frankly, if anyone was doubting between getting a blackberry, a nokia or an iphone for christmas, just go and get an iphone, really. Or maybe an Android device, if you like to take chances.

But enough, here's my quick review:

Voice searching is lightning fast like 1-2-3. One, slide and tap on the google mobile app icon from your iphone launcher. Two, raise your phone near your ear, wait for the sound signal and voice your query: "lolcats". Three, wait a few seconds, get the results, tap on the image tab and be amazed with those cute furry cats. PERFECT!!



More below, you get a full screenshot tour of the voice-search experience! On the left-panel, you can see how the goog mobile app keeps a quick list of your past frequent queries for a quick tap; otherwise, voice and text searching are easily accessible. On the middle-panel, you can also quickly access to all your other google services (Google earth too? Yup, google earth too). On the right panel, you can see how voice search is optional and how you can add your google domain, in case you have one.



On the triptic below you get a 1-2-3 a-few-seconds experience. One, talk. Two, wait. Three, done. It should take in all, oh, about less than 7 seconds.



The next triptic below shows you the type of instant results you might expect. The green text string is google's voice-to-text resulting query. Below you can see the results. Note that you get a one-tap refinement if you're looking for images, local search or news. Easy. Pretty slick, don't you think?



The texting search is also top-notch, while google suggests and provides with different kind of contextual search related to your iphone contacts (synced with gmail), to your location on the map, or simply to regular search. Here's a contact search from my over 500 contacts for a quick call or email.



And below, here's the local search experience for the nearest new pizza place in photos. Note how in the middle-panel google suggests me with relevant keywords for my search, thus saving me my precious thumb-typing energy:




Even though mobile search on the iphone is really like riding a rolls-royce, there do are some relevant details that can be improved:
1 - Voice search does not relates with the text search contextual results, thus I cannot call for "Johnny" from my contacts, or do something like a "Call Johnny", or even a "Find Johnny".
2 - While searching for pizza near lisbon, or for the weather in lisbon, I must explicitly call for "pizza lisbon" or "weather lisbon". That's dumb, the google app should implicitly provide me first hand with pizza within my current location whenever I voice "pizza", or "weather", respectively.

So, the google mobile app is GREAT, it's game-changing, it's disruptive, it's clean, it's slick, it just works, even my mother or my 3 year-old nephew will be able to use it, and it's going to set the new standard of mobile search. Mobile searching is going to be even more contextual and relevant relative to who I am and where I am, because it has close access to my most personal stuff like my contacts, my recent phone-call history and my present location. The next step could be ... where my friends are? IMO, the next big thing coming soon, will be the pocket-pc/phone ubiquitous experience. Google, Apple... thank you.
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Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal.

Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho.
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?

I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.

Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.

And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...

I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year.

One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted.

Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march.

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
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