Google’s Knol a threat to Wikipedia?

Last Month Google announced the launch of the new project ‘Knol’. A free tool by Google to encourage people who know a particular subject to write authoritative article about it. Eventhough the idea is not so different from that of wikipedia or mahalo, one key aspect of Knol is the authors of the article will be displayed. Also Knol seems to offer incentives for authors in terms of recognition and money the two aspects that were lacking in Wikipedia.

Moving on to see how it might affect the growth of wikipedia, the web search to almost any particular topic in Google contains wikipedia pages in the first ten hits. Estimates suggests that almost 50% of the Wikipedia traffic comes through the Google search. Considering if the Knol is up and running in a few months time and if the Knol pages starts coming in the Google search results before the Wikipedia pages then the traffic of Wikipedia might go down drastically.

Google’s Android

Have you ever wondered how it would be if we can write mobile applications like any other applications that we develop for the personal computer? The link that was missing so far was filled up once again by the search giant Google. There is always a buzz whenever Google releases a product. This time they have stepped into the Mobile phone Market. Though Google has not released a Google Phone as yet, they announced the launch of an open platform for a mobile phone applications.

So what is Android? It is a Linux based mobile software platform, a free software available under the Apache-Open Source license. So for those of you who are wondering whats special in this mobile platform Google says Android will have a browser capable of handling whatever a pc’s web browser can handle. According to the Android Open source license agreement, anyone can modify the OS to suit their needs. The platform allows for customization down to the screen. Think of iGoogle page in your mobile where you can customize almost anything.

Google has released the SDK for developers to develop applications for the Android Platform and this time Google is planning to reward and recognize the developers. So they have set a side 10 million dollars for the best applications developed for android. So probably in a few months time we will be seeing innovative applications being developed for the mobile phones.