• Google just made a lot of people happy.  For what seems like ever, I’ve been hearing people continually ask why biking is not an option on Maps.  Well, in true Google fashion, they waited until they got it right.
• Today they’ve added the long-awaited feature to Google Maps along with “extensive bike trail data.”
• You can even choose routes that avoid hills….Yes! Now you can be non-lazy and lazy all at the same time!
• Pedal yourself over to the official Google Blog for further details on the new feature.

• Well, it looks like Mashable truly has taken the crown of social media/web 2.0 blog king. Google has given Mashable their own personal ads to promote Google Buzz for a hefty profit, while TechCrunch (seen below), gives up real estate to acquire users of Google’s seemingly hot new Friendfeed app. This is one of the few or only times I have ever seen Google create personal ads, cross-promoting a brand to increase adoption of new products. Have you ever seen this before? Google must have seen huge value in the manila colored banner that both Mashable and TechCrunch have become so accustomed to using for promoting new content or trending topics throughout their site. The difference is, Mashable got their banner back and is profiting from sending their users to follow them on a service which undoubtedly is helping build their brand.

• Ladies & Gentleman…finally there’s something worth writing about.  After literal years of rumors and predictions, Apple has unveiled its tablet-based computer, appropriately titled the iPad.
• Watch a quick video overview of it here.
• Price starts at $499 for the 16GB WiFi ranging all the way up to $829 for the 64GB WiFi & 3G.
• Does this signify the soon-to-come death of Amazon’s Kindle?  Will the device be widely adopted by the health industry? ….only time will tell, but surely it will be exciting to see.

• Apple recently filed a patent for technology that allows users to move an image by moving their hands or body. So instead of using a mouse, you simply turn your head to see behind an object. Beyond saving my wrists from the soon approaching carpel tunnel from typing all day, this technology would be great for doctors viewing X-rays, MRI scans, etc.

• To help visualize this, Houston Neal of SoftwareAdvice has put together a clip of this in action. Thanks for the tip Houston.

• I know, I’m sick of the Apple tablet rumor mill as well, but I couldn’t let this story slide by. It even brought me back to blog for a day, breaking my 3 month blog hiatus while I work on my Y Combinator startup.
• While the whole tech news world sits around waiting to see what the official deal with the Apple tablet is and if anyone is going to buy this thing, Apple has been quietly ensuring the instant success of their tablet device. How? Apple has been going around targeting their first major paying customer for the device, which is not the average consumer, but the Healthcare industry (sorry fan bois, you’re not first priority here). This is a move widely overlooked by the media, since Apple has generally tried to own the consumer arena, and besides the film industry, hasn’t dominated enterprise. Well, now that they own the music, mobile, laptop and every teenager market, the medical industry is the next up to take over. [What's my intel? My Dad plays golf with Cedas-Sanai hospital execs, who say they have been getting frequent visits from Apple about a new device in the last 6 weeks].
• Let’s talk this out. First, this makes perfect sense. The iPhone has already served as a great platform for medical applications. Companies like LifeScan have an app for users with Diabetes. Epocrates is another medical app which  let’s doctors view continually updated clinical data, check for drug-drug interaction, identify pills by physical characteristics and perform medical calculations such as BMI and GRF (pictured*). Then we have iChart, a “personal medical assistant,” which stores everything from patient data to charts and lists of medications in a streamlined, organized fashion (oh, and it regularly updates with new medical data pulled from healthcare networks).  The problem with the iPhone is that it is too small to handle all of this data, not from a processor standpoint but just overall screen size. The tablet can pave a whole new way for medical applications and the way we interact with our doctors. You can certainly bet the iPhone will interact very well with the tablet, so syncing information back and forth with your doctor via both devices should be a breeze.
• Second, there is already a huge market here with real competitors (not just a Microsoft Courier). In 2007, a company called Motion Computing Inc. launched a product called C5, a tablet computer for doctors that claimed to eliminate the clipboard, scanner and cart-mounted computer on wheels often used in hospitals today. The product is widely used today, but it’s dated, weighs over 3 pounds and sells for $2199. Even at the highest speculated price, Apple’s tablet will cost only $1000.
• Third, Obama. The President is on Apple’s side here with this one. He has made electronic record-keeping a key feature of his health-care reform effort (hint hint). Electronic records available through Apple’s tablet will save time, mistakes and lives.
• Come on. Did you really think Steve Jobs was going to make a grand comeback just so you could play Doodle Jump on a 10 inch screen? Also, Joe Wilcox of Beta News, yes the world IS ready for a tablet.

• Recently, a hacker leaked thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Hadley Climate Research Unit which point toward Global Warming being a hoax.
• Check these out, and you decide.

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• Sharp just announced a new record in solar cell conversion efficiency.
• The new material is a high-efficiency crystalline compound called indium-gallium-arsenide which assisted in bumping the  record from previous 31.5% to 35.8% efficiency.
• Well done Sharp, wonder who will push it over 40%, any ideas?

• Google wrote this fluffy piece about an hour ago regarding their launch of AdWords Comparitive Ads. Don’t be fooled, beware. Google describes it as:

“Today we’re excited to begin testing a new feature of AdWords called AdWords Comparison Ads, which lets users compare multiple, relevant offers more easily. Comparison Ads is part of our continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to our users and to help you, our advertisers, reach the people who are most interested in your products and services.

AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for “mortgage.” Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.

With Comparison Ads, you can also target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads. To see how it works, let’s use our mortgage example. Users searching for “mortgage” on Google.com may see a promotion from Comparison Ads prompting them to select the type of loan they are looking for and to compare various rates”

• Don’t be fooled. This is Google’s soft way of saying, “We recognize how many millions of dollars we have been generating for lead generation companies through our engine. Now it’s our turn”. Google is going to attack the mortgage industry first as you can see by the screenshot below, which shows an example of Google comparing mortgage rates from different lenders they have now partnered with. Such a service cuts out major players in this industry such as Lending Tree, who I’m sure you have all heard of. They have been in a heated lawsuit with Google moving into this space since this time last year, when I first heard of this bold attempt. Just how big is this for Google? Well, I can’t say for the mortgage industry because it is not my expertise, but I can give you a comparative example if  Google were to jump into an industry just as powerful, Insurance. NetQuote, one of the industry leaders in providing leads to qualified insurance agents across the country, buys consumer traffic off of Google in hopes that they will fill out one of their forms and that information is then sold off to brokers. NetQuote sells each lead to 5 different agents for $15 a pop. They are generating at or over $100M in revenue a year from lead generation. Google can slip right in and generate this business right away at a fraction of the cost (NetQuote’s biggest expense besides employees is to pay Google). So, now we have mortgage, insurance and I’m sure just around the corner: comparison travel, dentists, doctors, colleges, etc. Pretty much any lead gen driver in the industry right now has something to fear, so long as they are using Google as a major platform to drive their business of buying traffic and reselling forms. No one is safe anymore.

• This is big.  Not just blogosphere big…..this is complete cultural shift big.
• Yale Physicists have for the first time in history made a definitive measurement of a “persistent current.”
• This persistent current, they describe as a “small but perpetual electric current that flows naturally through tiny rings of metal wire even without an external power source.”
• That’s right folks, a completely sustainable form of energy has been discovered.
• For years, these kind of studies have been covered up and slandered as fringe science and the work of conspiracy theorists, but now, with a school like Yale putting their name behind it, there’s no telling what’s to come next.  Exciting.

• George Soros, Hedge-fund manager and billionaire just went green.
• He recently announced that he would be investing over $1 billion of his own cash into clean energy technology.
• Of course, he’s doing this because of the profitability of it all, and what hedge-fund manager would do it for anything else?  Although, he did mention that the investment should “actually make a contribution to solving the problem.”
• Congrats Soros, you’re a winner, now just convince your friends to stop being cheap bastards and do the right thing as well.

• T-Mobile and AT&T both currently plan on announcing the Bold 2 — also known as the Onyx — on October 21. Not impressed by the latest design, but ditching the track ball in favor of the new touch ball is a big plus for Blackberry fans. Before the new phone drops, RIM plans on releasing this gem below. An all white Blackberry Bold.

• Looks like we’ll be seeing Rock Band on the iPhone / iPod Touch relatively soon.
• From the above shot, looks very similar to Tapulous.  Do you smell an app war?
• Another interesting thing the post point towards (via MobileCrunch) is that Verizon has something to do with it.  Which further contributes to my suspicion that Verizon will launch their service based off the 700 MHz spectrum when they get the contract for the iPhone in 2010.
• Your thoughts?

• If this isn’t a sure sign of another Gmail success story, Google Wave invites are going for sale on eBay for upwards of $25. The first auction for a Wave pass went for $157. Not a bad deal for the seller who just had to sign up early for the Beta (which I signed up the first day and have still yet to receive mine. What’s the deal Google?)

• On July 7th, Fred Lalonde, the founder of openplaces.org announced in a tweet that Apple had bought the company that produced the Maps API that his company used in their software [CW]. Pushpin is the name of the software API that Openplaces uses and it is made by a company called Placebase. How did everyone find out? Simply a Tweet from the former founder which said “Apple bought PlaceBase – all hush hush.  Pushpin site taken offline.  Hyperlocal iPhone?”
• How do we know it’s true. For starters, the former CTO of Placebase is now an engineer at Apple as well and the site has been pulled offline. Here is what Om said about the company last year:

Waldman thought differently. He decided to compete with Google and other free mapping services by doing two things: One, by offering customizations and tons of features that integrated private and public data sets in many diverse ways. (He knew it would be a while before Google would get around to offering customization). His other twist was to offer a way to layer commercial and other data sets (such as demographics and crime data) onto the maps using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). The product is called PushPin.

• Here’s a video of Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman demoing his product at an O’Reilly conference last year. A good example of the software in use is http://policymap.org.  Like Openplaces, Policy Map uses the Pushpin API that Apple purchased as the underlying technology in its mapping product.