Google gets into games and watches you from space

Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.

Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:

  • Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
  • Game types: Web-based Flash only
  • Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK integration
  • Traffic source: Must be 80% US & UK Traffic
  • Content: Family safe and targeted at users age 13 and up
  • Distribution: Must be able to report embed destination and have control over where games are distributed

I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…

The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.

Google launches new browser

Ooooooo, Just found a link to the new Google Chrome browser on my Google home page.

Its pretty cool, very lightweight and very very fast. It even has as “stats for nerds” link on it’s task manager which gives heaps of detail on memory and CPU usage. The internals of the browser are pretty interesting as are the reasons for building a new browser.

Had a couple of issues with some sites and a few pages that seemed to be showing old content! Also gmail doesn’t work it seems to hangup when redirecting to the login page and it doesn’t remember my user name and password for my corporate proxy. Still not bad for a beta.

Check out http://www.google.com/chrome