Android becomes even more real: new toys for mobile apps developers

Now we can touch and feel Android in Oxagile office not only on screens of our mobile phones. We have got quite a full-fledged idol and can address it in terms of worship.

Artist Andrew Bell talked with guys from Google and together with Dyzplastic he created something what can be called as “designer toy”. This creature in the flesh represents a popular logo that has become favorite one for those who work at application development for Android OS.

Android is available in variety of skins from the 10th of February (with international delivery services!). Its head rotates, as well as hands, its price is about seven dollars, and the height is three inches.

Mobile software developers working for Oxagile think that Android toy can become the same legendary hero as Be@rbrick and Memobot.

Motorola makes friends with Android

As we know, the Motorola Corporation refused to sell its mobile unit. Now the management of this American electronic giant is betting on Android, an operating system developed by Google. Motorola plans to release from 20 to 30 new models of smartphones during the year 2010. And all these devices will use the Android OS. This information was reported to Electronista.com by some unnamed top-manager of the company. So Electronista, a popular online source of news about such mobile application platforms as Android, iPhone, BlackBerry etc., published this informal announcement without delay.

As for other “simple” Motorola cell phones, new models will use either the Qualcomm Brew platform or a special mobile platform that was developed by Motorola.

Now the company has three working groups of mobile developers and all their activities are somehow connected with the Android platform. First group works in the U.S., the second one works in China and the third one applies its ideas in industry in Korea. Their results can be seen in practice. Motorola has already announced four devices based on Android: Cliq, Droid, Backflip and Motoroi. But soon companies that work at application development for Android will offer their mobile soft not only for these four models.

Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, was impressed by Google Nexus One phone

Steve Wozniak admitted in his last interview for NBC Bay Area, that he is a happy owner of the Google Nexus One smartphone. He so wanted to test this new gadget that bought it on the first day of Nexus One sales. Moreover, according to Mr. Wozniak’s words, now Google phone is one of his most favorite gadgets. Although he is still using iPhone as the main phone for communication.

Wozniak said that he regularly buys new models of mobile phones from different popular manufacturers. Besides Google Nexus One he used phones based on such mobile application platforms as iPhone and BlackBerry, also he tested the Motorola Droid Phone.

RIM products caused the most serious complaints from Apple founder. Mr. Wozniak has been using BlackBerry phone for a few months and as a result he has remained dissatisfied with it. And as for Droid and Nexus (which mobile apps were developed on Android OS), he considers them as excellent phones, stressing, however, that not every phone with the Android platform on board will be as good as Nexus One.

Web development: web sites that changed into web services

As we wrote in the previous post, structured information is the main Web Trend in 2009. Today we call your attention to the real examples, illustrating this tendency.

OpenCalais

OpenCalais is probably the best representative of Linked Data (type of structured information maintained by W3C). Thomson Reuters, international business and financial news giant, launched API called OpenCalais in February, 2008. OpenCalais transforms unstructured HTML document in semantically labeled, organizing the information into groups: “people”, “places”, “companies” and others. Thus third-party applications and websites can use this processed information, creating new and interesting projects.

OpenCalais

Google Rich Snippets

This year Google added a special function to its search engine, so called Rich Snippets. This function retrieves and displays useful information from Web sites using open standards for structured information, such as: microformats and RDFa. Launching this feature Google asked web application developers to mark their HTML code. Implementation of this technology will take a lot of time, but the fact that such large companies like Google are developing these services shows the growing importance of structuring information on the Internet. Meanwhile, other large companies are also moving in this direction, especially Yahoo.

‘MapReduce’ Data Processing

In 2004 Google reported about the data processing model which they used. This model is based on the idea that the data is handled by a pair of simple functions - Map and Reduce. The first function – Map – selects a set of pairs ‘key/values’ from the input data (which are also the pairs ‘key/value’), and the second one combines / groups these pairs, and, besides, produces pairs, more often less pairs than have come for inputting.

An additional element is the distributed file system GoogleFS thanks to which a processed file and all the intermediate information become easily accessible from any computer in the cluster. Since all processing architecture consists of small functions, processing can be easily vectorized in the cluster. Splitting into separate pieces and restoring after failure becomes easier. Using the distributed file system we divide the data into small pieces, a separate cluster element works with each of them.

The same idea can be also met under the name ‘Split/Aggregate’ i.e. the essence is in the idea that the input data (irrespective of the size) is divided into separate units (the stage ‘split’), for example line by line, each line as a separate value for processing. These line blocks are arranged in the cluster for processing where for the function ‘map’ is called for each line. The result of the performance is again combined (reduce/aggregate) into an output file. If necessary, the data is stored in a certain order, for example by a ‘foreign key’.

The method itself suits well for long-term processing of great volumes of data and when the certain sequence of process or getting results as new data becomes available is not required i.e. if several gigabytes of data are available for processing and we need the final result of processing, it is an excellent variant. But if the same gigabyte arrives in parts constantly and we have to send it immediately for processing, expecting a result as soon as possible, it’s more convenient to use another method rather than MapReduce and Hadoop.