ViReal

People have wondered for years what Google might be up to with all that dark fiber it had bought up around the country. Now, we may have an answer: delivery of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps. That's right: 1Gbps. Google has just announced a trial run of its new scheme, and it's asking city, county, or state officials to let it know if they're interested in a pilot project. In its initial phase, the fiber optic network will serve anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 people. As for the speeds, they make cable's DOCSIS 3.0 and Verizon's FiOS look like also-rans. Google promises 1Gbps home connections, which have previously been the province of boutique builders like Paxio in San Francisco. The goal is to use the system as a high-speed testbed for next generation apps and deployment techniques. "We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive 'killer apps...

GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages. The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign ...

Google is trying to one-up Apple, showing off designs for a new tablet computer based on its Chrome operating system that would be a direct rival to the iPad. Just weeks after launching its own iPhone competitor in the US, the Nexus One, Google might soon extend its competition with Apple further as it seeks to push its search and other products on to as many devices as possible. Google's user interface designer, Glen Murphy, published mock-ups of a Google tablet on the search giant's Chromium.org website, along with a video of how users would interact with the device. Late last year Google announced Chrome OS, an operating system predominantly for small netbooks that would be based around the web browser, providing quick boot times and easy access to Google's array of online services. The first Chrome OS netbooks are due to arrive this year, but Google is now considering extending the platform to other devices including tablets, desktops and even big screen TVs. Chrome OS ...