One of the big reasons why Google is such a successful company is because of the way it drives innovation and how it generates great ideas out at the shortest amount of time possible. This month, as Google celebrates it’s 10th birthday, it unveiled yet another huge project as part of its push to help change the world by helping as many people as possible. Project 10^100, pronounced Project 10 to the 100th, asks any individual from anywhere in the world to submit their ideas until October 20, 2008, for ways to improve life and bring happiness to the largest number of people possible. And as a reward, Google has committed up to $10M to fund the 5 best ideas that come out of the initiative.

So how does it work? You can visit the link above for the complete details of the project. But in summary, Google will choose the 100 best ideas it feels should be included from the submissions. And then it will let users vote on which out of the 100 should be short-listed to the 20 finalists. A panel of judges made up of five to seven individuals who are experts in the required categories will then choose the FIVE ideas that will receive funding. The categories for the project include, but are not limited to, community, energy, environment, health, education, shelter and opportunities for people to better provide for themselves and their families.You can view the complete category list and descriptions for each, HERE.

Google said that the ideas can be big or small, and does not have to be technology-driven either. It just needs to have a very positive impact on the world. One of the examples of such an idea that is helping change the world was from a company that invented the Hippo Water Roller. It enabled millions of people to carry water across long distances using a relatively inexpensive 24-gallon container that could be easily wheeled on the ground. So what used to take a lot of time, not to mention a lot of pain, in moving water from one place to another was totally alleviated, and helped make the lives of thousands much easier.

I’m pretty interested to try and figure out what idea I could have that may actually help change the world. Who knows, maybe you have one too. The great thing about it is that Google enables you to do this now. We all know that sometimes great ideas are set aside because there’s just no way you could do it yourself. So with this initiative, Google tries to help change the world in the way that they can. As their tagline for the project says, goodluck, and “May Those Who Help the Most Win.”

In its most aggressive attack on Microsoft to date, inside sources with knowledge of the Chrome project said that Google is preparing to unveil its brand new browser for download as early as TODAY to try and loosen Microsoft’s stranglehold on the most vital piece of navigating software for the internet.

Google has constantly been trying to get more wallet share from Microsoft’s pocket by developing small-scale web-based applications to compete with the very dominant Microsoft Office portfolio (Word, Excel, and the like) but has been rather unsuccessful in breaking that barrier. But with this unprecedented move, which sources say have been rumored since ‘04, Google Chrome is unleashing an attack on Microsoft’s huge Internet Explorer browser market which surveys put at around 75%.

To combat Microsoft IE’s dominance in recent years, Google has been backing Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which grew out of the ashes of the once-powerful, now-irrelevant Netscape browser. It has now grown to an astonishing 18% of the market! Google pays Mozilla royalties for Google ad clicks that come from Firefox searches. But clearly, Mozilla’s efforts were not enough for Google, and seemed like a “delaying” tactic they had to employ to bide time for the release of its own browser. This is very significant as their core business is internet-based and what it lies on is not its own browser! Thus with the current beta release of Chrome, Google is declaring the browser critical and vital to its future, and in that regard, it is entirely right.

The efforts to do this have been well known within the company for a long time, and finally it has been launched and released today! I would expect it to be somewhat similar to what Mozilla Firefox did for version 3.0 when they launched Mid-June with a record-setting 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours, but it was pretty quiet and certainly not to the extent of that Firefox launch. But I was hoping it would be something less mediocre than blog announcements and hush hush word of mouth rumors. One thing is for sure though, Chrome has been unleashed!

All Things Digital: Boomtown released a bunch of comic strips explaining a few technical aspects of the up and coming open-source browser, while Google Blogoscope has released an overview of some features of the browser, all seemingly coming from improvements and related plug-ins from the browser it is supporting currently, which is Mozilla Firefox 3. I’m pretty excited to see what Google is going to come up with, so I’m going to download the browser right now. The download link is available below for those who want to do the same.

Related Articles:
Google Chrome Download Page
Technologizer: Ten Questions about Google Chrome
docstoc: Google Chrome Comic Book Download

The NY Times reported that Advanced Micro Devices plans to release processors with 12 cores, which changes its product road map and kills earlier plans to release 8-core chips. The 12-core processor, code-named Magny-Cours, will be targeted at servers and is due for release in the first half of 2010. The chip will include 12MB of L3 cache and support DDR3 RAM. AMD is jumping from a 6-core chip code-named Istanbul, due for release in the second half of 2009, straight to a 12-core chip the following year. Until last month, AMD officials repeated plans to ship the 8-core server chip, code-named Barcelona, in 2009.

AMD is also planning to release a 6-core chip code-named Sao Paulo in 2010. The chip will include 6MB of L3 cache and support for DDR3 RAM. Sao Paulo chips could meet the need of systems that don’t require 12 cores, Allen said. The new chips will be more power efficient as they will be manufactured using the 45-nanometer process, an upgrade from the 65-nm process currently used to manufacture Barcelona (architecture in the picture below).

Even with AMD’s altered road map, Intel will remain formidable. Intel shipped 78.5 percent of chips in the first quarter of 2008, while AMD held a 20.6 percent market share, a slight gain from the 18.7 percent market share it held in the first quarter of 2007.

I guess jumping the gun would pretty much term what AMD has done here as they talk about technology they will roll out in 2010 while we’re still in 2008. Seemingly befuddled by how they can’t seem to gain more solid share in the race against Intel, this seems like a marketing “ploy” by AMD to bring people into the hype of a very future-based 12-core technology. Currently, at the 4-socket, quad core level, which equates to a 16-core server today, companies (at least here in the Philippines) are just realizing the potential of the 16-core platform. Virtualization has really not taken off just yet, and it may be a year more before the market here matures to move into that realm. If we talk about worldwide though, a lot of corporations have already matured in this space, and that outlook for a 32-core system would be very significant. But again, that is technology 2 years down the line.

While AMD has just recently launched Barcelona, it seems to me that this is quite a distraction to that announcement. And in the end, I’m sure the guys at AMD realize that even with Barcelona, they are still not at par with Intel as their competitors had come out with their 4-core processors on Nehalem quite a bit before this recent AMD release. So the logic of exciting everyone with a potential 12-core processor down the line is understandable, but I’m pretty sure Intel also has this in the works and are not as excited to talk about it just yet as they do not need to.

If we take a look at how it has been in the past years, Intel will probably come out with theirs even earlier, and with a better architecture as they look to incorporate the main advantages AMD has over them currently. Nehalem for Intel has already been announced for the 4-core front quite a few long months before AMD’s current equivalent in Barcelona, and it is going to be 8-cores for a single processor die in 2009 for their second phase. Let’s see how all this goes as AMD tries to grab more share from Intel in the up and coming months.

When online chatting became popular way back in the days of ICQ, it was a joy to be able to do the simplest things like send a file online to a friend. Now, a whole new breed of chat applications have proliferated, and there are quite a few good ones too. I have been using Skype for quite a while now for free calls outside the country along with Yahoo Messenger for chat, but it wasn’t until today that I found out about ooVoo!

ooVoo is a free, standalone desktop chat application that has both text and video chat capabilities. It can handle as many as six people in one video conference as well as a dozen in the integrated voice chat conference. Users can drop in and out of conversations, and the video windows will scale automatically.

ooVoo also doubles as a video e-mail service where users can send each other video messages as long as a minute in length that are available right in the application or via e-mail. Users who get the e-mail are also provided a link that takes them to a live Flash version of the video, so they can access it while away from their home computer.  Isn’t that cool?

I went to the site and tried this out and called a few of my buddies from the US and it was crystal clear. The GUI is also a sight to behold (above) as most chat applications have really ugly interfaces. This one is quite different in terms of look and feel, and I’m surprised to have just heard about ooVoo today.

Click HERE to get to the download page, it is available for both PC and MAC users

March 26 finally came, and it was gone pretty darn quick! The good news… my fiancee liked the LV bag I gave her! Yippeeee! The bad news… I didn’t win the lotto! Surprise surprise! There’s another one on Sunday though, and I’m not giving up on 216 million pesos! It was a nice 3 day break for me, but it’s back to work again on Monday. In any case, I found something pretty nifty a few minutes ago…

If you’re one of those people who have Google as your default homepage, you must be sick and tired of how that page looks like every single day. To give Google credit though, the word changes in design depending on the occasion for the day or the month But if you would prefer a better looking page that has personalized settings for you based on the content you want, then iGoogle is for you.

I’m not sure how new or how old this is, but today is the first time I have seen it. What’s great about it is that you have a ton of content to choose from, and you can personalize it based on RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as the news blurbs you see here. As I live in the Philippines, I’ve selected the top newspapers to feed me the headlines everyday. You can also add a few games, like I did on the right side like a daily crossword puzzle. You can even theme your Google page to suit your taste like the Solar System theme I used, and put on the usual sticky notes for things to do and see how the weather forecast is everyday. So pretty much a fairly simple application, but much cooler because you drive the content you want every time you open your browser.

This beats that white classic Google page anyday.