Google Science Fair 2011 boasts big names, big prizes (video)

Dust off the baking soda and bust out the vinegar, because Google's throwing a science fair. That's right, the internet giant is taking the time-honored tradition of hastily constructed teenage science experiments online. Entrants must be between 13 and 18 years old and submit their projects (in English) via Google Sites by April 4th. Once the projects are in, a panel of real-life teachers will select 60 semi-finalists. From there, the pool will be narrowed down to a group of 15, who will attend an in-the-flesh fair at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, this July. The big event's judges include CERN's Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Google's Vint Cerf, and Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis. Grand prize winners in three age groups will receive a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos islands, and some stuff from LEGO and Scientific American. On second thought, maybe the baking soda volcano isn't such a great idea. (Rube Goldberg-inspired promo video after the jump.) 

Google To Pull H.264 Video Support from Chrome Browser

Support for the popular H.264 video codec will be dropped from Google's Chrome browser in favor of Google's WebM technology. The H.264 change won't be applied to Chrome for a couple of months, but the short notice may cause problems for web designers and developers. Firefox also has dropped H.264 support.
Google gave developers advance warning Tuesday that it will withdraw support for the popular H.264 video codec in its Chrome web browser, though the change isn't expected to take effect for a couple of months. The goal is to put Google's resources squarely behind WebM -- an open-source video technology unveiled by Google last year that is already supported by Adobe Systems, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and more than 40 other publishers, software and hardware vendors.
"We are changing Chrome's HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project," noted Chrome Project Manager Mike Jazayeri in a blog for developers. "Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future."
Adding Unwanted Complexity
The move will have an unwelcome impact on web-page designers, since it will compel them to use a different codec when converting their existing H.264 videos into content compatible with the new HTML5 standard for web design.
"Web-site owners who have content in H.264 will face the task of having to convert that content if they want to have it viewed by new releases of the Chrome browser," said Al Hilwa, director of applications development software at IDC. "It is definitely more complexity for such web sites, as they now have to mange even more format fragmentation amongst the browser makers."
Some industry observers believe that Google's withdrawal of H.264 support has little to do with promoting open standards and more about not having to pay codec royalties to rivals Microsoft and Apple, which hold some of the essential H.264 patents marketed by the MPEG LA patent-pool organization. "Given that Microsoft and Apple have solid support for H.264, this may be back to the future with HTML wars," Hilwa said.
Though Chrome only holds about a 10 percent share of the global browser market, Mozilla's Firefox browser likewise doesn't offer H.264 support. Therefore, more than a third of the world's browsers will no longer be directly supporting this video-coding standard once Google terminates support.
"Google has made a big investment in buying On2 and releasing WebM, so they may have decided that they need to push the process along faster," Hilwa said. "This definitely puts a high premium on having technologies like Flash, which will support both codecs."
A Question of Timing
Google's WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to more than 20 partners as well as proven in silicon, noted WebM Product Manager Jani Huoponen and Engineering Manager Aki Kuusela. "We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011," they wrote in a blog on Monday.
However, Google's announcement of a relatively short time frame for the impending switch may not sit well with developers. "It seems to me giving a couple of months' notice of dropping it is way short in the software world, and they may end up having to backtrack," Hilwa said.
Hilwa also noted that Google is currently working on integrating Flash into its forthcoming Chromium OS. "Perhaps what they mean to say is that they will rely on Flash to support H.264, but if that is what they are saying, they sure picked a fine way to say it," Hilwa observed. "There are many questions left unanswered, and I am sure there will be more clarification and adjustment to come."

Wave to Google Wave as Google shuts it down

Hailed by the social-techno-geek community as (almost) the solution to the world's problems, Google Wave is unfortunately going to be abandoned (official post), just shortly after exiting beta mode. Google said that Wave has failed to attract users in a meaningful way, and can't justify pursuing the work on this product, at least in its current form. Still, Google hails all the technological advances that came with Wave. Obviously, not all products developed in the lab can become mainstream, and we would agree that Google Wave did push the boundaries of real-time communication. However, there was also way to much hype around this product, and about the added-value that it would bring to collaborative work (Google Wave to change everything... maybe not). In the end, it was probably too complicated and too Google-centric for its own good. It’s just hard to collaborate, if you’re not using it.

Malicious Android Wallpaper App Collects Your Personal Data

Android users who have been regularly downloading apps from the Android Market might want to take note, as mobile security firm Lookout claims that a malicious app has been downloaded from the Android Market by millions of users. The app, developed by Jackeey Wallpaper, seems fairly innocent, and offers a variety of wallpapers for the user, but aside from that, it also quietly collects information such as SIM card numbers, text messages, subscriber identification, and voicemail passwords, all of which is sent to www.imnet.us, a site that is linked to Shenzhen, China. The app's behavior was discovered as part of Lookout's App Genome Project, which aims to study content on Android and iPhone apps. Hopefully Google will take note of this and maybe take some steps to resolve the issue and prevent similar incidents in the future.