Time traces

Google has agreed to license imagery for their mapping products from a satellite due to launch on September 4th. This new satellite can take detailed imagery for an area the size of Delaware in one day. What does that mean? Well, you could get high resolution pan-sharpened imagery for the entire country in around 30 days. Impressive.

The level of detail will be approximately 50cm per pixel — that’s just under 20 inches. If you want to see what that looks like, take a look at this. Imagine having a Google Maps/Earth content that is this detailed, 100% complete and updated once a month — that’s powerful stuff.

“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation. It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.” — Kate Hurowitz (Google)

And for bragging rights, Google’s even got their logo on the side of the rocket as pictured above.

Google recently launched a new translation tool for iPhone that turns your device into a free (plus data costs) and very good pocket translator. That got me thinking though — Google has the technology, and ability to make this application far better than any other pocket translator, and a lot more useful than it is already.

[image from Google]

It’s no secret that Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411 to build their speech recognition capability. In fact, they have already implemented the fruits of their trained speech recognition engine in YouTube for political videos — but why does it have to stop there? Imagine being able to speak a phrase in English, and have it automatically translate it for you rather than having to type it? It could work the other way around too — when translating into languages with completely different character sets, why not have it speak it for you? Down the road, perhaps it wold be interesting to have your device listen to a conversation and provide real-time conversation logs in the language of your choice.

Mobile translation devices have the ability to change, and significantly improve the way we communicate with each other. Mind you, machine translation is far from perfect, but it’s getting better, and if anyone can create a way to make every language 100% understandable by everyone, it will be Google.

If executed properly, Google Translate for mobile devices could very well become the non-fiction version of a babel fish.