GOOGLE GOGGLES

Matt and I each spend about 12 hours a day on Gmail. Sometimes more.

Our work accounts are filled, so we both pay for an extra 75GB of storage. I also have a personal Gmail account and then there's a 3rd account, the 'junk' email account, that I use when I have to give an email address to companies, or sign up forms or Federal authorities or whoever.

Anyway, the point is, since Matt and I are such frequent users of Gmail, we have ideas all the time on ways to make it better. And usually, somehow, Google manages to also think of these ideas on their own and a lot of times they launch them a few months after we come up with them. I always tell Matt that I think Google is secretly spying on us and taping our conversations through the microphones built into our laptops, but he says that I'm a moron and that I sound like those losers in the Windows 7 commercials.

The point is, about 6 months ago, my brother had this idea for an iPhone app which could take pictures of business cards and import the information into your phone's contacts using optical character recognition. We initially thought of developing it, but at the time, the iPhone camera was so crappy, it couldn't take a clear enough photo in order for the app to work.

Anyway, Google and their magic Android phones have now made that idea possible and put it inside something called Google Goggles. To be fair to Google, Goggles also does about 90 other really cool things, none of which I, or Matt, or my brother thought of - those Google came up with on their own. Check it out...



The other waking hours of the day, in which I'm not checking one of my 16 Gmail accounts or busy inventing new ways for Google to make money, I'm usually on Yahoo Fantasy Basketball. There are about a billion ways I could make that thing work better, but, unfortunately, Yahoo never really makes improvements to it. So I, and everyone else in my league, complain about the same poor features year after year. And then it dawned on me the other day, 'What if Google made a Fantasy Basketball system?' The very thought almost made my mind explode just imagining the possibilities.

I writing a letter with this request now and sending it out tomorrow. If Santa doesn't respond to me in a timely manner then I will write to Google Headquarters myself.