Map Reveals a Web of Oil Imports

Credit: Rocky Mountain Institute

For an illuminating look at the web of oil imports that we depend on, check out this interactive Google Maps-based infographic at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization that promotes technology for energy efficiency.

The map features a timeline starting in 1973. As a cursor moves along the timeline (click the "play" button to automate the cursor's movement, or control the movement yourself by clicking and dragging the cursor), the world map above it changes, showing how much oil is flowing to the United States, and from which countries. Changing a setting (under "Map Units" in the left column, select "Dollars") shows how much money is flowing out of the United States, and to where. You can select a specific oil crisis (buttons below the timeline) to see the segment of the timeline related to that crisis.

You can also click a button (left column, "ANWR") to see the size of the potential oil flow from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. When oil consumption was low in the late 1980s, after the oil crisis of that era triggered a massive drop in consumption, it looks substantial. But in 2008, it looks vanishingly small.

One of the most salient things illustrated by the map is just how long oil prices stayed low after the oil crisis of the late 1970s: long enough for people to forget the lessons of that crisis and start buying big, heavy cars again, and get truly addicted to oil.

Robotic Moon Race Heats Up

At a press conference in Mountain View, CA, this morning, entrepreneur Michael Joyce finally unveiled his team for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the moon with a $30 million prize purse.

Joyce registered for the competition back in November 2007 but has kept the details of his "Mystery Team" under wraps until now. A year (and some heavy recruiting) later, he has announced his team, dubbed Next Giant Leap. It includes MicroSat Systems, a small spacecraft company formed in 2001 that has mostly built satellites for defense programs; Draper Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit lab that builds guidance and navigation systems for spacecraft (it's currently working on such technology for NASA's Orion vehicle and the Ares Rockets); and MIT's department of aeronautics and astronautics, which includes former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman and David Miller, head of MIT's Space Systems Laboratory.

"We believe we will accomplish our goals of not just winning the grand prize, but making a reliable, repeatable transportation system for commercial use," said Joyce at the conference. The Next Giant Leap team is without a doubt highly qualified for the challenge, but it will not be without tough competition, particularly from Astrobotic. The Astrobotic team is lead by William Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor behind the driverless SUV that triumphed on a course of urban and suburban roads in the DARPA's Urban Challenge last year. Already, the CMU-based team has built a robotic spacecraft called Red Rover, and it's working with Raytheon and the University of Arizona with the aim of launching within the next two years.

So far there are 12 teams entered in the competition. To win the $20 million grand prize, a team must successfully land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, rove across the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images, and data back to Earth. There is also a $5 million second prize and $5 million in bonus prizes.

Google Makes Texting Simple

I've sent more text messages today than ever before in a single 24-hour period. Admittedly, "more than ever" actually means about 10 but, thanks to Google, this may only be the beginning.

I'm just a few years too old to be truly fluent in text messages, as far as I can tell. I don't like triple-typing, I don't own a smart-phone with a nice keypad, and the predictive text on my Motorola leaves a lot to be desired. So, unless I'm in a library, I am likely to respond to a text with a phone call. It just seems easier. On the other hand, I am chained to the computer as only a geek can be, and am available by instant message easily 16 hours out of the day.

Most of my family is not this way. They check their e-mail accounts once a week so there's no way to send them a quick message. That's why I was thrilled to see that GoogleLabs now lets me send text messages from Gmail and Gtalk.

Google Labs has a lot of neat little widgets, some silly, and some useful. For example, Mail Goggles is mean to stop potentially embarrassing late-night drunken e-mails by forcing users to solve math problems before the "send" button will activate. Surely, this is mostly a joke.

Forgotten Attachment Detector, on the other hand, which alerts you when it suspects you may have neglected to attach a file, could have saved me much agony in the past. Neat as these toys are, text messaging in chat made me literally write home.

It's not the first time a company has tried to unify communications this way. Not long ago, I wrote a story about similar technology called VoxOx. But Google has done things beautifully, in just the way that has made their webmail, feed reader, search, and all the rest so popular.

To send a text message from Gmail, I type in the phone number and click "Send SMS." When my friend replies to the message, it pops up in Gmail, or on Gtalk, and I can respond as if chatting through IM. I've already used it to plan my evening tonight.

I sometimes get nervous about how many of Google's services I use, but when they're this good, how can I help myself?

What's the Sense in Shutting Pownce?

The micro-blogosphere is abuzz with news that Twitter rival Pownce is to shut down for good on December 15. This was the first decision taken by new owners Six Apart, which acquired the company yesterday.

The fact that the new owners are making virtually no effort to hang onto the Pownce community suggests that they see no business sense in running a standalone micro-blogging service. Undoubtedly, Six Apart, which runs the blogging services Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox, only wanted Pownce for its software and expertise.

Pownce's blog post announcement is full of hunky-dory acquisition language, but it's a thin veil for utterly abandoning the service's users:

"We're bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we'll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all ... Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."

But why throw away an engaged community? The offer to export posts to blogging services seems almost insulting. Micro-blogging and blogging are very distinct for me, and the offered export file is nothing more than a data dump. This blog post makes a good point: Even Google, which was widely criticized for buying Jaiku and then leaving it languishing, didn't completely close the service down. What are the chances that, after effectively being evicted from Pownce and handed their posts in a suitcase, any users will come back in 2009 to see what new tool the Pownce team has built?

Whatever the logic, it could be good news for other micro-blogging services. Several are already scrambling to welcome Pownce cast-offs. I first heard about the closing of Pownce on Identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service that I use. Within moments of the Pownce announcement, founder Evan Prodromou put up a blog post promising to build tools to let Pownce users import their posts into Identi.ca, and also to add support for Pownce developers, by the end of the week.

How Google Plans to Take Over TV

Can Google conquer television? Yesterday, I talked with Keval Desai, product manager for Google's TV Ads unit, and he did a pretty good job convincing me that it can.

"TV is becoming like the Web," Desai says. From an advertiser's perspective, he has a point. In the 1980s, a popular TV program like The Cosby Show might have captured half the viewers in the entire United States; today's most popular shows, like American Idol, are lucky to capture a fourth of the whole audience. The difference is that there are dozens of channels now, each catering to a different set of viewers. As Desai notes, this is a lot like the Web: the audience is out there, but it's split into small bits consuming a wide variety of content.

So Google's TV Ads system works much like AdWords. An advertiser selects keywords and sets a spending limit for each day (per thousand people who see the ad). The system then figures out where and when the ad should be placed. Google is borrowing another trick from Web advertising: a soon-to-be-launched feature that lets advertisers search for shows based on audience demographics (a feature inspired by Google's search-based ad targeting).

The service is clearly aimed at a different kind of television advertiser. In addition to a simplified user interface, TV Ads includes instructions on how to visit Google's marketplace and find someone who can help make an advert. Indeed, Desai says, the plan is to draw in advertisers who don't normally put ads on TV and, as a complement, bring ad dollars to networks that don't normally have broad recognition.

The TV Ads interface already lets you select target shows based on audience age and gender information, which is in turn based on data from a partnership with Nielsen. But Desai told me about a partnership that will take this farther. A satellite-TV company called Echostar, working with credit-reporting company Equifax, will cross-reference shows watched (using its own data from set-top boxes) with income and buying habits (using Equifax's data). This will let Google offer shows to advertisers that will reach, for example, people with household incomes greater than $100,000. Desai stresses that all this data is made anonymous, so it certainly won't be possible to target specific households with ads.

I wonder how long we'll have to wait for that.

Test-Driving Google Voice Search

Google (finally) released its new voice-search application for the iPhone today, and I had the chance to take it for a spin. Instead of typing in search queries using the small (and slightly annoying) keyboard, a user speaks her search, and the software takes it from there.

So, just how good is it?

I was a little concerned at first, because the people who tried before me hadn't had much luck. One coworker said, "Find pizza," and Google helpfully offered the Flying Pizza restaurant in downtown Dayton. One of my editors, who recently arrived from the United Kingdom, asked for "pictures of Boston" and received "sketches of Buffy."

Things went much better for me. My own nondescript accent, which has been homogenized by travels from one U.S. coast to the other, seemed to suit the application just fine. I had great success searching for "Star Wars" and "movie times at the Loews in Boston Common." Then I tried "Thai restaurants in Allston." As the top result, Google offered me Thai restaurants in Austin, TX, but using the iPhone's GPS capability, it also figured out that I might have meant something a bit closer to my current location in Cambridge, MA. I expect that most people will use the application for location-based searches such as finding restaurants, so it's good to see those features working well. By tapping the search box, I could easily scroll through several alternatives and choose one.

Overall, Google Voice Search is pretty neat. The speech recognition is impressive when you consider that I didn't have to go through any of the training that's usually needed for such applications. Even so, I did manage to confuse it from time to time. For example, when I searched for the old television show The Dukes of Hazzard, the application curiously returned some information about Jesus.

Video by Brittany Sauser