An Introduction to Google Wave

Google Wave was born out of the notion that while email and instant messaging work well, they were both created a long time ago. As the lead developer puts it - “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.” Indeed it is.

Nearly everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web these days, but imagine if you could tie those together with a wiki - and then add real-time playback functionality, on-the-fly language translation and drag-and-drop file sharing. Google Wave does all this and a lot more.

Read the rest of this entry »

How Big is the Internet?

Not surprisingly, there are several ways to answer this question. One way to think of the size of the Internet is to count its users. China recently announced that they have reached 298 million users - a number just shy of the entire population of the United States. Using this same methodology to count all Internet users, we can estimate that there are about 1.6 billion Internet users - or put another way, about 24% of the world’s population.

Read the rest of this entry »