Dubai: It sounds like science-fiction, but it is going to happen one day, soon.
The “smart gadgets” will tell us where to locate shoe-shelves, or baby clothing areas in big shopping malls. Or maybe in the future, it will tell us where to find our lost keys, and we will see a computer-controlled car driving a blind man on the streets.
Google, the search engine giant, is working on making the realm of technology’s fantasy a reality. Achieving some of the unexpected and unimagined is on the table.
“The internet will be capable of doing crazy things, and is expected to do so,” said Jack Menzel, Product Management Director for Google Search. He was referring to what some might describe today as “crazy” and “unbelievable”.
“In the future, it [internet] would have an answer to a confusing question such as: What is the coldest lake in the coldest weather temperatures in the highest temperature in July?” Menzel added in a presentation to a group of journalists from different parts of the world held recently at Google’s office in London.
But until then, Google has already something cooking, and they are thinking of going really far.
Google X, which a secret project by Google based in an undisclosed location in California, is working on several projects pertaining to future technologies, including a self-driving car, and the revolutionary Google glasses.
Google Glass, which is expected to be in the markets in the near future, displays information like a smart phone does, no hands are needed, and the internet interaction is done via natural language voice commands.
The glasses can translate voice, show directions, record and take pictures when they are asked to take pictures.
“We will be judged by our impact on the world,” said Astro Teller, from Google X with the title of Captain of Moonshots for Google X, through an internet conference.
The company is looking “into ways to help solving the problem of high number of deaths and car accidents on the road,” Teller said. Computers can drive cars, he noted.
“We start a lot of projects and we kill most of them immediately. Killing most of them is a good process,” he said without giving more details of the projects under scrutiny at the moment.
Today, Google applications can provide the user with scores of services and information, even without asking for. Services include the widespread use of maps and YouTube.
Other programs include Google+, a social media network which could also offer back-up albums for its users, and Nexus, which has “the highest screen resolution of any tablet in the market,” stressed Richard Turner, Director, Android EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Partnerships.
Among the future plans for Nexus, is for “computers to be much more accessible, and that “everybody has the right to get information, when you want it even before you ask for it.”
But still, the search engine still constitutes the flagship of Google. “Google search is adaptive to where you are and what situation you are in,” said 32-year-old Menzel. “If someone is shopping and wants to have a sandwich, the search engine will be able to locate the nearest place for sandwiches,” he said.
The complicated question of “where I left my keys?” sounds an unsolvable riddle to a machine today, but not for the future. “The point is that we are trying not just to help you getting to what is available for the entire world, but also help you innovate a life where technology have not gotten to, yet,” Menzel said.
While Google search tries to be as accurate as much as possible, he says, it seeks “the best result for the best efficiency of users as fast as possible,” Menzel said, noting the “it is actually surprising how similar the needs of people all over the world” are despite the fact they live in different countries and come from diverse cultures.
He added, “In order to improve the search engine, we take statistics and we try answering them and looking for patterns. One of the things we use to make search better is to look for inquiries that are not doing well, [for example] they are showing bad content, spam content at the top, and it was supposed to show images at the top, but it didn’t,” Menzel said.
The internet can show the user the traffic conditions in a certain area upon arrival, weather temperatures, translations service, and also could show the traveller the boarding pass, in some places.
“Where we are and where we will (be) is hard to predict,” said Matt Brittin, Vice President, Sales and Operations, Northern and Central Europe.
Thanks to modern technology, internet doesn’t only show people road directions to different places, including shopping malls, but also to the areas where the requested items are placed.
Google maps are among the most popular programs offered by the internet company. According to Ed Parsons, the Geospatial Technologist, there are one billion monthly active users for Google Maps, which the technology enterprise is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to a number of photographers to take pictures of the earth. Different resources were deployed in sourcing the data from different parts of the world.
The result, he said, was a globally accurate product. “So maps in India or South Africa, probably, are as accurate or no more accurate some western countries now because of the way that they have been created. So we want to get to a similar level of detailed position of everywhere in the world, and I think we are getting there,” said Parsons, noting that Google operates legally in different countries and does respond to legal restrictions when they arise in some countries.
Maps are being updated once or twice a year, and in case of certain amendments on the ground, maps are updated within days, “it is a dynamic tool for restaurants and cafés on daily bases”, Parsons said.
“I think we are doing a pretty good job every where,” but yet, “different countries around the world have different challenges for us,” he noted.
While in some countries there are no street addressing systems, the fact that businesses change so quickly in another country constitute a challenge where a record shop last week could become a café this week.
“It is different challenge,” he said.
Speaking of the internet’s impact on the economy, Brittin noted that it is the small companies that are showing their products on the internet. “Nearly 8 to 9 per cent of the GDP in UK are services and products that are bought online, and 10 to 15 per cent of GDP growth in Europe,” he added, giving an example of a British woman who used to sell satchels and sell them online. Many years later, her fortune is estimated in millions and she employs 20 people.
Doing business over the internet is growing also in the Middle East.
Another example of growing business of the internet, Google experts noted, is the presence of many young women who offer tips to wear make-up. They are attracting the sponsorship of big companies in the field of beauty and cosmetics.
