Hasta La Gadget!

You can’t turn back time and become the father of the theory of evolution, sorry. But, thanks to Google, Galapagos National Park, the Charles Darwin Foundation and iNaturalist you can pretend to be a 19th century British naturalist. Today, the Mountain View crew unveiled their 360-degree Street View imagery of the Galapagos Islands that it captured back in May. While you could certainly just drop the little yellow man down and start virtually strolling the paths of this volcanic archipelago with its countless unique species of flora and fauna, the groups have much more planned. For starters, there’s Darwin for a Day, a site created by the Charles Darwin Foundation and iNaturalist that asks for people to play armchair scientist. You explore the islands through Street View and, as you spot plants and animals, you can catalog them and take notes on their appearance. Those observations will then be reviewed by researchers on the island who continue to discover new things about Galapagos’ myriad endemic species.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Google Lat Long Blog

Google+’s Hangouts On Air is a nice feature for broadcasting yourself to the world, but it’s been a bit of a one-way street when it comes to interacting with your droves of adoring fans. Mountain View will be addressing that problem over the next few days with the rollout of Live Q&A, a feature that lets On Air hosts solicit, select and answer Qs you can A from up to one million simultaneous viewers. Those questions will be timestamped and added to the YouTube recording of the video, as well. The full version of the feature is coming to the desktop version of Google+, with read-only hitting Android devices.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Google+

Google added Snapseed photo editing to its Google+ apps on Android and iOS back in March, and now it’s bringing them to the desktop. The new tools include Auto Enhance, selective adjust editing, and filters, all powered by the Chrome browser’s Native Client tech. Not familiar with how that works? Google brought Native Client to Chrome back in 2011, and it allows developers to port code written in languages like C and C++ so it runs in the browser. Vic Gundotra said on Google+ that this is the Snapseed app built for Chrome, so we’ll see if more mobile apps and features follow it over.

If you’re not using Chrome you’ll have to live with basic crop and rotate editing tools on Google+, but even those have been shifted around to make them easier to find. Once the new options are available on your account (as usual, they’re rolling out slowly over the next few weeks) all you’ll need to do is select one of your photos in Chrome and hit “edit” to see them. Until then, check out the video demo embedded after the break.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Josh Haftel (Google+)

The rumors were on the mark — as part of a larger telecom plan, the European Commission’s Neelie Kroes has proposed regulation that would largely scrap roaming fees. The measure would ban all charges for incoming calls within the EU after July 1st next year, and give carriers incentives to drop many other roaming fees altogether. Companies would either have to let customers use “roam like at home” plans in EU countries or offer a choice of roaming providers with cheap rates. Outbound, mobile-to-mobile calls within member states would cost no more than €0.19 per minute.

The strategy also includes rules for enforcing net neutrality across the EU. The proposal bans internet providers from blocking and throttling content. Firms could offer priority services like IPTV only as long as these features don’t slow down other subscribers, who could walk away from contracts if they don’t get their advertised speeds. There’s no guarantee that the European Parliament will vote in favor of the new measures, but it’s already clear that the Commission is far from happy with the telecom status quo.

[Image credit: The Council of the European Union]

Filed under: Cellphones, Networking, Internet, Mobile

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Via: Dominic Laurie (Twitter)

Source: European Union

Inflight Wi-Fi sucks, but it’s about to get a little better. Gogo just announced it’s going to start using satellites to make its in-air Wi-Fi speeds six times faster. Which is to say: usable.

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