SXSW 2011: Google's Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products at Google, spoke at SXSW 2011 about new products Google is developing. She focused on location-based services. She started her speech with a demonstration of some kind of Google service that shows skiers on mountain slopes. Coming in late, I wasn't sure if this was a new Google Earth feature, or a new product. Superimposed on the live video of skiers was an augmented reality view that provided the information about the ski routes and the weather. Seeing tiny, ant-like skiers zipping around on the slopes, Marissa Mayer emitted a low, warm chuckle, so infectious that the audience giggled with her. Or maybe they laughed at the contrast of a Google VP being amused by the little silly things in life, such as ant-like humans bustling around like particles in Brownian motion.

Augmented reality -- applications that overlay information about objects around you over their images -- can give you a richer, more detailed experience of those objects than real life itself can. Google Art project is an example of that. Google Art images of famous paintings, such as Van Gogh's "Starry Night" were made with a giga-pixel camera, said Marissa Mayer. This lets you zoom into any part of it, and examine every square inch, every brushstroke as close as you would never be able in a museum.

Augmented reality is no doubt a hot trend in location-based services, but Mayer spent more time on context-based discovery. That's a new direction of Google's location-based services. If you are standing in front of the Capitol (to non-Austinites, that's where Texas Legislature meets), and whip out your phone, that doesn't always mean you want information about the Capitol. If you are a first-time visitor to Austin, you may indeed be interested in its history, the date it was built, its architectural style, etc. But if you are an Austinite, you probably just want to check your email. So context is the key.

Then there was time for questions and answers. A guy in the audience asked Marissa Mayer if Google Maps will ever have customer service. Currently it takes up to a year to remove "deadly routes" from Google Maps, he said. Given that it has 8 or 9 million users, Google Maps ought to really do a better job of that. Marissa replied that customer support would be a good idea, as she herself has ended up in wrong places following Google Maps routes. From that I inferred that "deadly routes" meant "dead" routes, or ones that no longer exist -- as opposed to routes with high lethal accident counts. :-)

More pictures from SXSW 2011 are in my photo gallery.

A bug in Google Spreadsheets?

A couple of days ago I tweeted my exasperation with Google Spreadsheets. @ronaldho kindly replied to my tweet, asking for clarification. Here is what's happening.

At first Firefox, and then Chrome have been resizing my Google Spreadsheets fonts. Suppose the text in my spreadsheets was originally 10 points. That's a nice size font I can easily read. Then one day, all of a sudden, the browser shrinks the font. It still shows it as 10 pt, but realistically it now looks like 8 pt. That's a bit too small for me. I didn't do anything to cause this. The browser did it not in response to any of my action (intentional or not), but out of the blue. That's right, the browser window with the spreadsheet was just sitting there, untouched, and suddenly the text shrank.

So I select all the text in the spreadsheet and increase it to 12 points. For a while, all is well. Then, a few days later, the browser shrinks the text again! So now 12 points look like 8!

I increase to 14 points. The story continues. It got to where 18-point font started looking like 8.

I was hoping that this was just a Firefox misfeature, so I switched to Google Chrome. At first, the fonts in Google Chrome appeared their correct sizes. Then, after just 2 days of usage, 12-point font shrank a couple of sizes. So, unfortunately, Chrome does it too. This must be a bug in Google Spreadsheets, not in any browser.

(All the fonts in my other Google docs appear correctly, by the way. This bug affects just spreadsheets.)

If this keeps happening, I won't be able to work with Google Spreadsheets anymore. The font sizes don't go higher than 24. When 24-point font starts looking like 6 points, then what? I'll have to drop Google Spreadsheets. That's a shame, because I have lots of useful data there. I gather data for my own life-logging experiments, which I plan to use to test applications I'm writing. (Hence the data mining I was referring to in my tweet, @ronaldho. It has nothing to do with Google Spreadsheets themselves.)

If there is a way to stop Google Spreadsheets from doing this, I would appreciate the tips.