jugad2 - Vasudev Ram on software innovation: Google+

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Wednesday, April 1, 2015

New Google search site

Google has created a new top level site for their web search:

https://com.google

Posted via mobile.

- Vasudev Ram

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Google Capital coming to invest in India

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Google Capital is coming to India to set up base from which invest in Indian startups, says the Economic Times.

Excerpts:

[ is setting up its growth capital arm in India to double down on startup investing as it turns bullish on fast-growing local emerging companies that have drawn attention from big investors across the world.
...
will hire a team and invest in growth-stage companies in India, a market in which investors ranging from Japanese communications group SoftBank to Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba have recently made big bets. "It made a lot of sense to focus a lot of attention here now," David Lawee, partner at Google Capital
...
A serial entrepreneur, Lawee counts the move to set up office in India as "the most important" decision Google Capital has made in recent months
...
"I want to invest up to the limit of what's reasonable," said Lawee, who was the head of corporate development at Google until 2012.
...
While Google Capital, founded in 2013, has invested nearly $500 million in 11 companies globally, India will be its first destination where it has an office outside the US.
...
The California-based company also invests in early-stage companies through Google Ventures. "The companies that I'm seeing here have much more upside than most companies I'm seeing in the US," said Lawee. ]

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Sunday, January 4, 2015

from pattern.web import Google; google.search()

By Vasudev Ram

$ pip install pattern

# test_pattern_google_search.py
from pattern.web import Google, plaintext

google = Google(language='en') 
for result in google.search('"python"', cached=False):
    try:
        print unicode(plaintext(result.text))
    except UnicodeEncodeError:
        print "UnicodeEncodeError, skipping this tweet"
    except Exception:
        print "Exceptions happen"

$ python test_pattern_google_search.py >t

$ less t # more coffee
The official home of the Python Programming Language.
Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows ...
The original implementation of Python, written in C.
Learn to program in Python, a powerful language used by sites like YouTube and Dropbox.
Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented ...
Welcome to the 3rd Edition of Learn Python the Hard Way. You can visit the companion site to the book at http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ where you can ...
Python 3.4.2 documentation. Welcome! This is the documentation for Python 3.4.2, last updated Jan 01, 2015. Parts of the documentation: ...
Try Python in your browser ... Best way to learn Python for Raspberry Pi? ... Are there any python package that can intelligently parse strings containing numbers
...
Python 2.7.9 documentation. Welcome! This is the documentation for Python 2.7.9, last updated Dec 28, 2014. Parts of the documentation: ...
You can get xkcd shirts, prints, and posters in the store! Python ... Image URL (for

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Monday, December 15, 2014

Indian couple (1 Xoogler) buys small US bank, innovates online payments

Interesting story of innovation in the financial space, involving an Indian couple (of whom one is a Xoogler a.k.a ex-Googler), a small US bank, and cheaper / faster online money transfers / payments:

(Did you know that the English word bank supposedly comes from the old Italian word banca (for bench)?

An Indian couple has bought a small bank in Weir, Kansas, USA, and is using it to innovate in the online financial payments / money transfers space (while preserving and improving the existing brick-and-mortar business of the bank). The site through they allow faster / cheaper payments or money transfers from the US to India (and currently, or soon, other countries), is globalremit.com. Their rate for sending a payment under $1000 USD is $2.50, which works out to 0.25 percent. For above $1000, it is free (disclaimer: all this is according to what I saw on the site recently).

Suresh Ramamurthi earlier worked at Google on the Checkout product, and Suchitra Padmanabhan earlier worked at Lehman Brothers and Bankers Trust.

I saw this news via this tweet by Quentin Hardy (@qhardy), Deputy Tech Editor, The New York Times. (Saw it from a retweet by Bernard Lunn.)

The tweet goes thusly:

"Guy from India learns payments at Google, buys tiny Kansas bank, transforms money. Great, from @nathanielpopper dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/sma…"

And here is the New York Times article referred to in the tweet:

Small Bank in Kansas Is a Financial Testing Ground

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Friday, November 21, 2014

Google Contributor, a new monetization option for online publishers

I saw this via a tweet by GigaOm:

Google launches Contributor, a crowdfunding tool for publishers

Excerpts (shortened and partly re-worded) from the GigaOm article:

[
... Google Contributor, which is designed to allow web users to pay sites that they visit a monthly fee, and in return see no Google ads when they visit those sites.
...
the new feature is launching with 10 publishing partners, including Mashable, Imgur, WikiHow and Science Daily
...
the user who goes to the Contributor web site sees a list of participating web sites, and can decide to give them $1, 2 or 3 per month.
...
The site gets paid when the user actually visits it. The formula for payment is not specified in the GigaOm article.
...
Earlier, Google also launched a contribution system for YouTube video creators called “Fan Funding,” which allows viewers to donate anywhere from $1 to $500 to the channel of their choice.
]

Here is the Google Contributor site.

Based on the article, Google Contributor seems like a potentially good idea for web publishers, such as big sites as well as small sites and blogs. Time will tell, though, how useful it turns out to be. I signed up for an invite, and if I get invited, I'll try it out and may write about my experience with it, here on this blog.

Update: Here is another article about Google Contributor, by NextWeb:

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Thursday, October 23, 2014

Google Inbox launched, successor to Gmail

Google has launched a new email product called Google Inbox.

Saw this via Hacker News:

A post about Google Inbox on the official Google blog:

An inbox that works for you.

Hacker News thread about Google Inbox.

Google is going to roll out Inbox in stages to various sets of people. If you want to get an invitation to it, you can email them at [email protected]. I did it. Once I get invited, if I find Google Inbox useful or interesting, I will write a post about it.

Meanwhile, here are a few features of Google Inbox mentioned in the official Google blog post:

Bundles (of emails) - like categories that they had before in Gmail.

Highlights - key information from important messages.

Reminders, Assists, and Snoozes.

Assist - if you send a reminder to the hardware store, Assist will tell you its number and if it's open.

Snooze lets you snooze away emails and reminders, until a later time or until you reach another place, like your office.

Interestingly, Google seems to have made a somewhat poor choice of name for the product, again (after doing it with "Go" for the Go language), since in both cases, the word is very common and generic ("inbox" and "Go"), so it will be difficult to search for (even using Google, ironically).

Of course, there are workarounds, like using "golang" instead of "Go", and I'm guessing "Google Inbox" instead of just "Inbox", but those won't work as well as having a more unique name. I just did a Google search for the word "inbox", though, and www.google.com/inbox/ was the first hit.

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