Android App Inventor

 

App Inventor for Android provides an easy, gentle way for programming students and other curious folks to create apps for Android devices. Incubated and launched by Google, App Inventor will now be shepherded by the new MIT Center for Mobile Learning. App Inventor godfather Hal Abelson will oversee the new center along with two distinguished MIT colleagues.

While App Inventor is just starting out, the recently discovered Protoanguilla palau eel is an amazing 200 million years old. This eel has never been seen in the fossil record; in fact, it’s being called a “living fossil”. It is so unique that it occupies its own species, genus, and family.

Finally, as you ponder the implications of developing mobile apps and living prehistoric eels, you can enjoy a nice paper banana.

SketchUp World in 3D

 

A new website called Your World in 3D to help introduce users to the concept of geo-modeling – the term given to creating 3D buildings for Google Earth and Google Maps. Today, they’re releasing the Your World in 3D website in 15 additional languages: Czech, German, English (UK), Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Porteguese, Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

 

 

User generated models from around the worldBesides being fun, building your town in 3D is a great way to show civic pride, encourage tourism for your town, and promote your business. 3D modeling has also been used in crisis response situations as we saw in the grassroots modeling effort that happened after the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy.

 

To see the site in another language, use the drop-down menu in the bottom of any pageYour World in 3D has all the tools you’ll need to start geo-modeling and features several examples of what fellow modeling. By releasing Your World in 3D in more languages, we hope that you and your friends from around the globe will join us to help build the most comprehensive 3D virtual mirror of planet Earth.

GoogleSketchUpBlog

Google Translate API for business

Back in May, Google announced the deprecation of the free Translate API v1. They’re introducing a paid version of the Google Translate API for businesses and commercial software developers. The Google Translate API provides a programmatic interface to access Google’s latest machine translation technology. This API supports translations between 50+ languages (more than 2500 language pairs) and is made possible by Google’s cloud infrastructure and large scale machine learning algorithms.

The paid version of Translate API removes many of the usage restrictions of previous versions and can now be used in commercial products. Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up online via the APIs console for usage up to 50 M chars/month.

Developers who created projects in the API Console and started using the Translate API V2 prior to today will continue to receive a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day until December 1, 2011 or until they enable billing for their projects.

For academic users, they will continue to offer free access to the Google Translate Research API through their University Research Program for Google Translate. For website translations, they encourage you to use the Google Website Translator gadget which will continue to be free for use on all web sites. In addition, Google Translate, Translator Toolkit, the mobile translate apps for iPhone and Android, and translation features within Chrome, Gmail, etc. will continue to be available to all users at no charge.