As a result of the Google internet bus project, Google has designed a mobile bus which mainly focuses to create awareness of internet among offline population in the local language. The people who are not having knowledge about internet, Google, Gmail, Google map are mainly targeted.

The mobile bus showcases the features of basic internet; initially they have planned to cover four themes namely education, information, communication and entertainment for the first phase. They started this mobile bus from Chennai and it will cover various cities in Tamil Nadu over the next month and a half.

Good news for graduates
Futurist Ray Kurzweil leads a new school called Singularity University that will explore a time when computers are more intelligent than people. The university will be sited at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley, close to Google’s headquarters.

The idea of Singularity University is to assemble graduates from 10 different fields including biotechnology, finance, entrepreneurship, networks, computer system, etc, and offer courses on biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. And to make students look at the same set of problems from different angles.

“The magic of breakthroughs occurs when you have nontraditional thinking around a problem that is stuck,” another founder of University Diamandis said. “It’s when a mathematician works on a biological problem, for example.”The size of future classes will expand to 120 students. Tuition is set at $25,000.
Google has become a sponsor of Singularity University.

In Washington, 17/12/2008, Yahoo announced that it will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from Web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers. Due to the pressure from European and other data protection officials to do more to protect the privacy of users, Google halved the amount of time it stores personal data to nine months. The European Union has recommended that Internet search companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.