How much will Microsoft Surface cost?

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In case you have missed the live coverage, here’s a video recording of the Microsoft event where Steve Ballmer and co unveiled the new Microsoft Surface tablet. A downloadable version of the keynote is available at microsoft.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87f3d-aOOr8

How much wil Surface cost?

Microsoft says that the new Windows 8 tablets will ship around the same time as Windows 8 but the big question in everyone’s mind is how much will this device cost?

Steve Sinofsky made the following remark (around the 43:30 mark) on pricing:

Microsoft Surface with Windows RT will be available in both 32 GB and 64 GB model and will be priced like comparable tablets that are based on ARM.

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Professional will come in 64 GB and 128 GB storage models and will have a retail price comparable with competitive Ultrabook class PCs.

It looks like Microsoft will showcase the Windows RT based Surface tablet as an alternative to the iPad (the “comparable tablet”) while the Surface Pro running Windows 8 could be seen as a replacement for high-end laptops (or the “comparable Ultrabooks”).

Ultrabooks and Tablets – The Current Scene

The iPad costs $500 for the 16 GB version while the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the ASUS Transformer, both 10.1″ Android tablets, are priced at around $400 each. Surface will probably target this segment and could carry a similar price tag.

Speaking of Ultrabook PCs, Dell XPS 13 and HP Envy Spectre XT, both 13″ Ultrabooks, start at $1000 while the Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook is currently available for $800. The 13″ Toshiba Portege Ultrabook is priced at $900.

These prices could obviously change in the coming months but it looks like the Surface Pro tablets could also be in the same $900-$1000 range.

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This story, How much will Microsoft Surface cost?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 19/06/2012 under Microsoft Surface, Gadgets.

Introducing new Fusion Tables API

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Posted by Warren Shen, Fusion Tables team

We are very pleased to announce the public availability of the new Fusion Tables API. The new API includes all of the functionality of the existing SQL API, plus the ability to read and modify table and column metadata as well as the definitions of styles and templates for data visualization. This API is also integrated with the Google APIs console which lets developers manage all their Google APIs in one place and take advantage of built-in reporting and authentication features.

With this launch, we are also announcing a six month deprecation period for the existing SQL API. Since the new API includes all of the functionality of the existing SQL API, developers can easily migrate their applications using our migration guide.

For a detailed description of the features in the new API, please refer to the API documentation.

Our Unique Approach to Research

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Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Google started as a research project—and research has remained a core part of our culture. But we also do research differently than many other places. To shed more light on Google’s unique approach to research, Peter Norvig (Director of Research), Slav Petrov (Senior Research Scientist) and I recently published a paper, “Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research,” in the July issue of Communications of the ACM.     In the paper, we describe our hybrid approach to research, which integrates research and development to maximize our impact on users and the speed at which we make progress. Our model allows us to work at unparalleled scale and conduct research in vivo on real systems with millions of users, rather than on artificial prototypes. This yields not only innovative research results and new technologies, but valuable new capabilities for the company—think of MapReduce, Voice Search or open source projects such as Android and Chrome. 
Breaking up long-term research projects into shorter-term, measurable components is another aspect of our integrated model. This is not to say our model precludes longer-term objectives, but we try to achieve these in stages. For example, Google Translate is a multi-year project characterized by the need for both research and complex systems, but we’ve achieved many small objectives along the way—such as adding languages over time for a current total of 64, developing features like two-step translation functionality, enabling users to make corrections, and consideration of syntactic structure.

Overall, our success in the areas of systems, speech recognition, language translation, machine learning, market algorithms, computer vision and many other areas has stemmed from our hybrid research approach. While there are risks associated with the close integration of research and development activities—namely the concern that research will take a back seat in favor of shorter-term projects—we mitigate those by focusing on the user and empirical data, maintaining a flexible organizational structure, and engaging with the academic community. We have a portfolio of timescales, with some researchers working with engineers to rapidly iterate on existing products, and others working on forward-looking projects that will benefit people in the future.

We hope “Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research” helps explain our method. We feel it will bring some clarification and transparency to our approach, and perhaps merit consideration by other technology companies and academic labs that organize research differently.

To learn more about what we do and see see real-time applications of our hybrid research model, add Research at Google to your circles on Google+.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog) 

Google Research Awards: Summer, 2012

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Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

We’ve just finished the review process for the latest round of the Google Research Awards, which is our bi-annual open call for proposals on research in areas of mutual interest with Google. Our funding provides full-time faculty the opportunity to fund a graduate student and work directly with Google research scientists and engineers.

This round, we are funding 104 awards across 21 different focus areas for a total of nearly $6 million. The subject areas that received the highest level of support this time were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, and mobile. In addition, 28% of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Given that our program is merit-based, we make funding decisions via committees of experts, who assess each proposal by its impact, innovation, relevance to Google, and other factors. Over the past two years, we have seen significant growth in the Research Award program. This round, we had 815 proposals—up 11% from last round, which required 1,946 reviews by 654 reviewers.   

Our award committees represent a microcosm of Research @ Google. Not only do we work with research scientists in making funding decisions, but also engineers—many of whom have advanced degrees in Computer Science. Our research organization has a similar make-up: both research scientists and engineers working together on innovative projects that are product-focused and relevant to our customers.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit our website for more information.

Finding Images on a Specific Site

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One feature of the AJAX Image Search API that you might find useful is the ability to retrieve only the images which are visible on a specific website. For example, you could add a search box that allows people to search through just the images on your own site or you could create a slideshow which shows images from your favorite site.

To specify a site, use the setSiteRestriction method on an ImageSearch object. Here is a simple example:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#site_restrict

We can do more than just provide a site-specific image search box, we could also use the search results in a unique way. For example, we could create a slideshow which shows images which match our desired keyword and appear on a specific site. For this example, let's create a simple slideshow that displays images from nasa.gov.

var imageIndex = 0;
var images;

function nextImage() {
 imageIndex++;
 if (imageIndex >= images.length) {
   imageIndex = 0;
 }

 var imageContainer = document.getElementById(
     'image-container');
 imageContainer.src = images[imageIndex].tbUrl;
}

function searchComplete(searcher) {
 if (searcher.results && searcher.results.length > 0) {
   var contentDiv = document.getElementById(
       'content-slideshow');
   contentDiv.innerHTML = '';

   var imageTag = document.createElement('img');
   imageTag['id'] = 'image-container';
   imageTag['src'] = searcher.results[imageIndex].tbUrl;
   images = searcher.results;

   contentDiv.appendChild(imageTag);

   // Switch to the next image every 5 seconds.
   setInterval("nextImage();", 5000);
 }
}

function slideshowOnLoad() {
 var imageSearch = new google.search.ImageSearch();
 imageSearch.setSiteRestriction('nasa.gov');
 imageSearch.setSearchCompleteCallback(
     this, searchComplete, [imageSearch]);
 imageSearch.execute('supernova');
}

google.setOnLoadCallback(slideshowOnLoad);

In the above samples, there are three lines I'd like to call your attention to. The first line to note is the imageSearch.execute at the bottom, here we've entered the keywords that our slideshow images should be related to. Next we restrict the site to nasa.gov using imageSearch.setSiteRestriction. Lastly, we call setInterval once we receive the results of our search for images. The setInterval call tells the browser to run our nextImage function every five seconds.

Here are the two samples we've talked about in action:

The site restriction can also include a path within a website. For example you could do setSiteRestriction(
'http://www.flickr.com/photos/<username>') to search the photos that have been posted by a particular user on flickr.

To learn more about some other neat features of the AJAX Image Search API take a look at our code playground samples and documentation. For questions on this and other topics, drop us a line in the discussion group.

Search Form and Results on Two Different Pages

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One of the major advantages of an Ajax style search box is that users can perform their queries and get their results without leaving the page. However, some webmasters prefer that their users go to a separate results page after they enter a search. The Ajax search library supports this "two-page" use case as well, and since this is a question that we see from time to time we've set up a simple demo site.

To create this page we wrote a simple form in HTML and added JavaScript to add the "Google Custom Search" branding in the search box. View source to see all the details.

When the user submits the form, they are taken to a results page which has the following HTML structure:

    <div id="results">Loading...</div>

We then tell the search library to draw its search box and results in the div we just created:

        // Draw the control in content div
        customSearchControl.draw('results');

Since the user came to this page from our search form, their query terms are now part of the page URL, so all we need to do now is extract them and execute their query:

      function getQuery() {
        var url = '' + window.location;
        var queryStart = url.indexOf('?') + 1;
        if (queryStart > 0) {
          var parts = url.substr(queryStart).split('&');
          for (var i = 0; i < parts.length; i++) {
            if (parts[i].substr(0, 1) == 'q') {
              return unescape(parts[i].split('=')[1].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
            }
          }
        }
        return '';
      }

      // See the source code of the results page for full details.

      ...
  

        // Run a query
        customSearchControl.execute(getQuery());

There is one more optional setting that you might be interested in. The second page which we've just created contains a search box that will allow the user to perform searches on this same page. If you would prefer for the search box not to appear on this results page we can add the following HTML to the page:

    <input style="display:none" id="hidden-input" />

We hide the input box because we don't want the Ajax search library to render the usual query input box, just to show the results. We then tell the search library to draw its search box in the hidden input, making it invisible:

        // Set drawing options to use our hidden input box.
        var drawOptions = new google.search.DrawOptions();
        drawOptions.setInput(document.getElementById('hidden-input'));

        // Change the draw call to include our new options.
        customSearchControl.draw('results', drawOptions);

To see an example of a two-page search setup with a hidden query input, visit this page.

To learn more about the Google Custom Search API, read our documentation. If you run into any problems while setting this up, post your question in our discussion group or hop on our IRC channel.

Restricting by licenses now available in the Image Search API

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I'm always amazed at the creative ways developers use Google's APIs. I'm always pleased when we are able to add a new feature to the API, as I know that someone, somewhere will do something cool and unexpected with it. The latest addition is to the Image Search API. You can now restrict results by various licenses applied to each image.

There are two different ways to use this feature. In the JavaScript API, you can restrict your results to one of four common licenses (just like on Google Image Search). This is done using the setRestriction method, after creating your Image Search searcher. Here's how to restrict to images which have been labeled for reuse with modification:

var searcher = new google.search.ImageSearch();searcher.setRestriction(google.search.ImageSearch.RESTRICT_RIGHTS,                        google.search.ImageSearch.RIGHTS_MODIFICATION);

You can experiment with a live example of this in our Code Playground.

If you're using the JSON API, you can use the as_rights optional parameter to tell the API to include or exclude certain attributions. To perform the same restriction as above, try adding this to your requests:

&as_rights=
 (cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike|cc_noncommercial).-(cc_nonderived)

For a full list of the attribute combinations for each type of license, perform an appropriately restricted search on Google Image Search's advanced search and take a look at the as_rights parameter in the URL on the results page.

Note: Images returned with this filter may still have conditions on the license for use. Please remember that violating copyright is strictly prohibited by the API Terms of Use. For more details, see this article.
Please come visit our IRC channel and support forum and let us know how you've used this feature in your site or app!