Flat World Strategies: Where's Your Office in a Flat World? - The Webware Wars Gordon And Mike's ICT Podcast

Intro


In our previous discussion regarding gaming we learned about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. Among the most popular was World of Warcraft. This week we consider The Webware Wars.
Among the factors that have led to the proliferation of webware are:
increased adoption of high-speed internet, greater bandwidth, cheap
storage and a new dynamic and interactive web architecture enable by a
collection of technologies referred to as Web 2.0 and AJAX. Everybody's
getting into the act, including big players like Microsoft and Google,
and little fish like Zoho and Thinkfree.


Mike,
let's start out with what we have been using the longest - What are
some of the New Features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets?

As with any Google product, new features are quietly added with little
notice or fanfare. Since we last talked about Google docs and
Spreadsheets (GDS), there have been a number of additions and
improvements - mostly on the spreadsheets side of the house. The first
addition is actually within Gmail - Google's popular web-based email.
In the past, when a Gmail user received an email attachment (either
word or excel) the only option was to open the attachment as an an html
document-viewing only, or download and open the attachment. Now when a
users receives an excel document, the have the option of opening that
spreadsheet directly in GDS - presumably, a similar functionality will
eventually be available for word documents.


Can you describe GoogleLookup?

This a new feature in the spreadsheets portion of the GDS that takes
advantage of the online nature of GDS. In fact, it's a formula in the
spreadsheet that attempts to answer a question by using information
from the web. The syntax is fairly straightforward:

=GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") [the double quotes are required!]


Some examples include:







looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or



when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]

=GoogleLookup("Springfield, MA", "population") gives us 152,082 

=GoogleLookup("NJ", "population") gives us 8,414,350




If you mouse over
the cell, you'll see links to the source pages. Don't expect to change
the world with this function, but have fun with it.



What are some of the entity types you can look up?

Here
are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup,
and a few popular attribute names (some entities won't have all these
attributes, and some will have more, so experiment):




Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp

U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower

Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length

Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation

Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality

Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality

Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality

U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party

Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position

Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight

Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density

Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperature

Planets (like "Saturn"): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere

Dinosaurs (like "Velociraptor"): height, weight, when it lived

Ships (like "USS Chesapeake"): length, displacement, complement, commissioned

Companies (like "Hewlett-Packard"): employees, ceo, ticker


What about GoogleFinance?

While GoogleLookup provides access to a wide variety of data, another
new feat