Living in the 4th Screen

Exploring the use of mobile technology in education and life 
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Google Sales Chief Says Desktops Will be Irrelevant in 3 Years

The title and picture is from a post at www.gottabemobile.com . The article is an interesting read. I don't know how long it will take desktops to die, but I have to imagine that desktop sales are down year over year. Mobile computing is skyrocketing and that has to be putting a dent in desktop sales. 

How long will it take for desktops to die? I don't know. What do think?

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Filed under  //   Google   Mobile Computing  

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A new meaning to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words.

At the Mobile World Congress Google demonstrated a prototype of Google Translate using  Google Goggles. The application will allow you to snap a photo of a menu in another langauge and have it translated into your language. All this would be done using your phone, of course. Follow this link to view a demonstration of the product.
 
It will be interesting to see if this product ever makes it into consumers hands.

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Filed under  //   Cell phones   Google   Google Translate   world language  

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Call anyone in the world and speak their language with Google Instant Speech Translationtion

Geek.com is reporting that Google is working on a service that would instantly translate your speech into another language so the person on the other end of a phone call would here the conversation in their own language. This service will be targeted at cell phone users. According to Google the delivery date for this service is two years

Frank Och, head of Google translation services explained to Times Online:

We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.

If this service ever materializes will it make foreign language instruction obsolete?

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Filed under  //   Cell phones   Google   Google Translate   world language  

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Smartphones and Scientists - Perfect Together and what this means for today's high school student

This post on Nature.com explores the increasing use of smartphones within scientific laboratories. The article specifically mentions the iPhone and apps that are targeted for those in the scientific community.

With a seemingly unlimited number of apps available, the iPhone can be quite a handy tool. An increasing number of apps are targeted to scientists, and lists of must-have apps for researchers have proliferated. There are apps to calculate how to prepare solutions, view restriction enzyme information, search online databases for papers and even store downloaded papers. Well-known product vendors for biological research are also beginning to release laboratory apps for the iPhone. Promega has an app with product information, tutorials, protocols and unit conversion calculators, and Bio-Rad has a quantitative PCR app.

The article goes on to mention Google and it's open-source Android operating system and the potential that platform brings to the scientific community. Another area the smartphone is reaching into scientific circles is through the publishing of scientific journals for mobile handsets.

But for the present, the most immediate potential for these devices is in providing a painless way for researchers to keep up with their reading wherever they happen to be. Mass media publishers have embraced the iPhone for delivering their content, but there has been little activity in the scientific publishing arena—RSS news feeds notwithstanding. But the situation is changing. Several publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, have apps that will go live any day. The nature.com app will let you read full-text articles, view full-size figures and save references.

This article adds to the continuing proliferation of mobile computing and its encroachment into all areas of our life. In my mind this only begs the question, "What are the implications for current students sitting in our high school classrooms?" These students will be using mobile computing devices throughout their entire day by the time they enter the workforce. Mobile computing ubiquity and the fact that I find many students use their mobile devices in an irresponsible way and they know very little of the full potential these devices offer them, leads me to say there is a huge gap that needs to be filled with today's generation. Current high school students need training in the responsible use of all forms of electronic media and they need to be taught the positive ways these devices can be used to assist them in their daily lives.

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Filed under  //   Android   Apple   Google   iPhone   K-12   Mobile Computing  

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Google's disruptive approach to buying a mobile phone

Google recently announced the launch of their new smartphone, which they dubbed a "superphone". The phone is called the Nexus One. The phone is pictured above. The phone itself does not seem to be "wowing" the experts who have held one and run it through the ropes so to speak. The disrupting influence of the phone is not in how it functions, but in how it is being sold. They can be purchased directly from Google online. In their own words via their blog:
Android was developed with one simple idea: Open up mobile devices to enable greater innovation that will benefit users everywhere.

Well, today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.

Google created Android, the free open source mobile operating system, a little over a year ago. According to them there are 20 devices with 59 operators in 48 countries and 19 languages. Google believes Android allows devices to be built faster and at a lower cost. It sounds like Google is trying to get a mobile device into every ones hand. 
Ultimately I believe Google and Android will accomplish their goals in driving down mobile phone costs and making them available to more and more people. People in many countries all over the world will never access the Internet via a laptop or desktop computer, but they will using a mobile phone. 
Until the monopoly wireless carriers have over mobile handsets is broken, there will not be significant change in the way carrier plans are structured. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint will need to be forced to make significant changes in their wireless plans. I think Google's first attempt will at least will put a crack in the foundation that the wireless monopoly rests on. Time will tell.

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Filed under  //   AT&T   Cell phones   Google   Mobile Computing   Nexus One   Sprint   T-Mobile   Verizon Wireless  

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Near Instant Voice Translation from Google

On Monday, December 7th, Google held a major demo event at the Computer History Museum and unveiled some new features as reported in the NY Times. One of the features was near instant voice translation. Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google, spoke a full paragraph into his phone in English and within seconds the phone blurted out the translation in Spanish. Google plans to support all the world's major languages by the end of 2010.

via Mind Dump Blog

This has interesting implications for world language instruction. Overtime as more people walk around with mobile smartphones it becomes increasingly clear that you could use Google translate to carry on conversations with nearly anyone regardless of the language they speak. Will students lose interest in learning a foreign language, since they no longer see the need for it? If Google plans on rolling this out within a year, what will Google Translate look like in 5 years? 10 years? 

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Filed under  //   Google   Google Translate   world language  

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Here comes Google!

According to the Times Online in the UK, Google will be launching their own smartphone. The article states Google will offer free calls throughout the US and cheap international calls. The Google branded handset will run the new Android OS codenamed Flan, have a processor twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS, and a large touchscreen. Google wants their phone to be carrier agnostic.

The article in the Times Online goes on to say:

The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile.

“We’ve never had this situation, where a single vendor controls the entire stack, from the operating system right up to Google’s cloud services,” says Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Northeast Securities. “It changes the competitive and bargaining dynamics like never before.”

I have been saying since I started this blog that the mobile phone wars would heat up. That will in turn increase competition, drive down prices, and cause widespread adoption. I did not expect this to happen so fast and that Google would throw down the gauntlet in this way. This should be fun to watch. If Google can really pull off free calls from any where that could be another paradigm shift like the first iPhone was.

The implications for education are limitless. I still believe in due time school networks will be irrelevant. Students will just access the cloud via a cellular network and bypass the schools network all together.

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Filed under  //   Android   Google   iPhone   Smartphone  

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Google's CEO on Teenagers and the Future of the Web

In this interview with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, we learn what he thinks about the future of the internet and how teenagers will consume media. Schmidt thinks that Chinese-language content will dominate the web. He also says to look at how teenagers consume content today. He says they easily move from one application to the next with relative ease. He then reminds us that today's teenagers are tomorrow's employees.

Schmidt thinks in 5 years their will be no distinction between TV, radio, and the web. If what Schmidt says materializes how will this effect education. I have said in many posts on the blog that I believe smartphone growth will continue to expand exponentially and this will impact how schools use technology. If a student has a smartphone today he has unlimited access to data, video, radio, and all other forms of information without ever accessing the school network. How this will all look in 5 years is impossible to imagine. Schools need to prepare for the wave of mobile access that is hitting our educational shores now and will only increase in intensity each year. Below is a video of a portion of the interview with Eric Schmidt.

 

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Filed under  //   Eric Schmidt   Future   Google   Schools   Teenagers   Web  

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