The Grill: Google's Alfred Spector on the hot seat

Posted by Ben Bayer, Google Research

Alfred Spector, Google's VP of Research, tells COMPUTERWORLD the ins and outs of Research at Google and where it's headed for the future. Read the complete interview here.

Super Bluetooth hack - Hack others phones with Bluetooth

Wanna hack your friend's phone without even touching it?
Just install "Super Bluetooth Hack"- Bluetooth hacking software.



Install Super Bluetooth hack on your phone and run it. Now the menu will guide you to hack the phones once paired with your phone. Pairing is necessary to hack most of the handsets. You may do this with some trick. Remember, you have a lot to do with if you can pair it. So just try some trick..For eg: tell him to send you a song.
Once your phone is connected(paired) to another phone via bluetooth you are ready to hack that phone with your phone. And ofcourse you can hack the phone only when its bluetooth is on.

Now you can use your phone to do the foll on that phone:
1. Read messages
2. Read contacts
3. Change profile
4. Play ringtone even if phone is on silent
5. play songs
6. Restart the phone
7. Switch off the phone
8. Change ringing volume
9. Restore factory settings
10. CALL FROM THAT PHONE- with all call functions like hold etc.

Download Super Bluetooth Hack 1.8 here.

DOWNLOAD





Enjoy Hacking...

BSNL Free miscall alert

Bsnl provides free miscall alert for its customers allover India. To activate it, dial:

*62*17010#

This is not a trick and is provided by bsnl.

Airtel free miscall alert

Just dial the numbers given below in your phone and press Call button.

Maharastra: *62*+91675#
Rajastan: *62*+91569#
Tamilnadu: *62*9894035100#
Mumbai: *62*+91560#
Kerala: *62*+91567#

This trick is got from another site & i haven't tested it.
Try it and comment here..

Hard format symbian phones

Is your mobile caught by viruses??

Just hard format your phone to remove all viruses.
Nokia's Symbian phones like 6600,6630,etc can be easily hard formatted using a simple trick.
This will remove all data including the contacts from your phone.

First, switch off the phone. Then press and hold down ' Call ' (the green button) , ' * ' , and ' 3 ' buttons and then switch on the phone keeping the buttons pressed.
Then formatting will start.
Now your phone seems like a brand new one and will become much faster.

Predicting the Present with Google Trends

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Hyunyoung Choi, Decision Support Engineering Analyst

Can Google queries help predict economic activity?

The answer depends on what you mean by "predict." Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like "Automotive/Vehicle Shopping" during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.

That famous economist Yogi Berra once said "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This inspired our approach: let us lower the bar and just try to predict the present.

Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior.

Even predicting the present is useful, since it may help identify "turning points" in economic time series. If people start doing significantly more searches for "Real Estate Agents" in a certain location, it is tempting to think that house sales might increase in that area in the near future.

Our paper outlines one approach to short-term economic prediction, but we expect that there are several other interesting ideas out there. So we suggest that forecasting wannabes download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. We'll report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.

It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let's see how well that theory works ...

Secret codes for other phones- Spice, Philips, BenQ..

Secret codes - Spice :
S404 enable COM port: *#42253646633# -> Device -> Set UART -> PS -> UART1/115200
S410 engineer mode: *#3646633#
S900 software version: *#8375#
S900 serial no: *#33778#

Secret codes - Philips :
S200 enable COM port: *#3338913# -> Device -> Set UART -> PS -> UART1/115200

Secret codes - VK-Mobile 3xx, 5xx :
software version: *#79#
software version: *#837#
service menu: *#85*364# (hold #)

Secret codes - VK200, VK2000, VK2010, VK2020, VK4000 :
software version: *#79#
service menu: *#9998*8336# (hold #)
reset defaults (phone/user code reset to default): *#9998*7328# (hold #)

Secret codes - Pantech :
software version: *01763*79837#
service menu: *01763*476#
Reset defaults (phone/user code reset to default): *01763*737381#

Secret codes for China phones

Secret codes - Fly:

M100 software version: ####0000#
2040(i) reset defaults: *#987*99# Send
MX200 reset defaults: *#987*99# Send
MX200 software version: *#900# Send
SL300m reset defaults: *#987*99# Send
SL300m software version: *#900# Send
SL500m reset defaults: *#987*99# Send
SL500m software version: *#900# Send
MP500 reset defaults: *#987*99# Send
MP500 software version: *#900# Send
Set language to English: *#0044#
Set language to Russian: *#0007#

Secret codes - Konka :
C926 software version: *320# Send
C926 set default language: *#0000# Send
C926 set English language: *#0044# Send
Service codes GStar:
GM208 (Chinese Nokea 6230+) engineering menu: *#66*#
Set language to English: *#0044#
Set language to Russian: *#0007#

Secret codes - GStar:
GM208 (Chinese Nokea 6230+) engineering menu: *#66*#
Set language to English: *#0044#
Set language to Russian: *#0007#

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Posted by Fernando Pereira, Google Research

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and I argue that we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data. See the full article here (IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2009).

Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards: Improving industry understanding and practices in online marketing

Posted by Jeff Walz, University Relations and Anne Bray, Head of Agency, WPP

Google and the WPP Group have teamed up to create a new research program with the goal of improving industry understanding of digital marketing. Eleven research awards have been given to universities through the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program, announced by both companies in the fall of 2008. The academic studies will harness WPP client data to explore how online media influences consumer behavior, attitudes, and decision making. The research provides an opportunity for very innovative thinking in an area that is at the crossroads of marketing, computer science, economics, and various mathematical disciplines.

More than 120 entries were received by the deadline for proposals. The awards represent the first round of grants in the three-year program towards which WPP and Google will commit up to $4.6 million in an effort to support research around digital marketing. Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, participated on the decision committee.

The winning projects offer convincing designs for exploring how online and offline marketing influence consumer attitudes, decisions, and purchase behavior. As marketing continues to become more digital and more measurable, the results of these studies will also advance our understanding of how advertising investment should be allocated among media channels.

The researchers and affiliated academic institutions participating in this first round of awarded projects are:

• “Effect of Online Exposure on Offline Buying: How Online Exposure
Aids or Hurts Offline Buying by Increasing the Impact of Offline
Attributes”; Amitav Chakravarti, New York University, Stern School of
Business, Department of Marketing

• “The Interaction Between Digital Marketing Tactics and Sales
Performance Online and Offline”; Elie Ofek, Associate Professor
Marketing, Harvard Business School and Zsolt Katona, Associate
Professor of Marketing, UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business

• ”Are Brand Attitudes Contagious? Consumer Response to Organic
Search Trends”; Donna L. Hoffman, Professor, A. Gary Anderson
Graduate School of Management, University of California Riverside and
Thomas P. Novak, A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management,
University of California Riverside

• “Does internet advertising help established brands or niche ("long
tail") brands more? Catherine Tucker, Assistant Professor of
Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Marketing and Avi Goldfarb, Associate
Professor of Marketing, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

• “Marketing on the Map: Visual Search and Consumer Decision Making”;
Nicolas Lurie, Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of
Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Management and
Sam Ransbotham, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Carroll
School of Management, Boston College

• “Methods for multivariate metric analysis; identifying change
drivers”; Trevor J. Hastie, Professor, Department of Statistics,
Stanford University

• “Unpuzzling the Synergy of Display and Search Advertising: Insights
from Data Mining of Chinese Internet Users”; Hairong Li, Department of
Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing, Michigan State
University and Shuguang Zhao, Media Survey Lab, Tsinghua University

• “Optimal Allocation of Offline and Online Media Budget”; Sunil
Gupta, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School;
Anita Elberse, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School; and
Kenneth C. Wilbur, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Marshall School
of Business, University of Southern California

• “Targeting Ads to Match Individual Cognitive Styles: A Market
Test”; Glen Urban, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

• “How do consumers determine what is relevant? A psychometric and
neuroscientific study of online search and advertising effectiveness”;
Antoine Bechara, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Department
of Psychology/Brain & Creativity Institute, University of Southern
California and Martin Reimann, Fellow, Department of Psychology/Brain
& Creativity, University of Southern California

• “A Comprehensive Model of the Effects of Brand-Generated and
Consumer-Generated Communications on Brand Perceptions, Sales and
Share”; Douglas Bowman and Manish Tripathi, Professors of Marketing,
Goizueta Business School, Emory University.

You can find more information about the Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program on the website.