Author: Serkadis

Research at the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine and other prominent medical schools, have demonstrated that mercury vapor continuously escapes from dental amalgams and 80 percent of this vapor is immediately absorbed through the lungs and into the bloodstream…

The dangers of aspartame and the diseases associated with its usage are insignificant to conventional science and government-sponsored health agencies. In fact, I am certain, you would cringe in disbelief if you read the official statements made by some of the most influential…

There are ideas about what constitutes “good nutritional habits” in mainstream America, but a lot of them are simply premised on distortions or outright falsehoods. Here are some of the most common, based on current data and research: Stay away from eggs – they aren’t…

Genetically modified crops were designed to be more resistant to drought and pests, but many scientists say it’s too early to know their side effects. Even as 90 percent of soybeans, corn, and canola in the U.S. are grown with transgenic seeds, 93 percent of consumers…

Collectivists have a favorite target. Big bad corporations. This is a complete scam. Why did Goldman Sachs turn out to be the biggest funder of Obama’s 2008 election bid? Why weren’t the corporate banksters who demanded and received those enormous bailouts, under both…

Beverage giant PepsiCo has once again partnered with Senomyx, the San Diego, Cal.-based chemical company that gained nationwide attention back in 2011 for using aborted human fetal cells to develop flavor chemicals, to create even more flavor chemicals for its products…

Google made plenty of nerds happy earlier today when it began reaching out to the 8,000 people that would have the privilege of spending $1,500 on the company’s head-mounted Glass display, but that thrill wound up being short-lived for some.

About seven hours after announcing that the outreach to would-be Glass Explorers began, the Glass team once again took to the project’s Google Plus page to admit they needed to rescind some of those invitations.

After noting that the #ifihadglass program yielded applicants from all walks of life, a representative noted that “it’s become clear that a few applications that don’t comply with our terms have slipped through the cracks” and that those applications would have to be disqualified.

It’s not clear exactly how many people ultimately got the boot from the Explorer program, but a quick Twitter search yields two viewable tweets breaking the bad news directly from the Glass account. In both of those cases the applicants (hopefully jokingly) said they would engage in some ill-advised behavior while wearing Glass — the more extreme of the two applicants said “#ifihadglass I’d cut a bitch!” which definitely flies in the face of the Explorer program’s terms and conditions. The other was mild in comparison, but still pretty pointless:

#IfIHadGlass, I'd throw it at your face. ._.

—
Le Queen. (@wutabril) February 20, 2013

Of course, there’s still the question of how those people got selected in the first place — it doesn’t seem like whoever was at the helm was being very selective in the first place. According to the terms of the Explorer program, entries were “evaluated and scored by a panel of independent content moderators” who aren’t employed by either Google or its promotional partner, a New York-based marketing firm called Anomaly. Either someone on that jury found those, erm, colorful entries funny and gave them a pass, or the jury just wasn’t paying attention at all. Either way, Google was left to deal with the aftermath publicly.

It’s also unclear how many more applications (if any) will wind up getting the boot as well. Entries like this were earnest and potentially very cool, while others who were chosen seemed to have their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks when tweeting their original applications.

[via The Next Web]

Electric car startup Fisker Automotive has put its U.S. workers on furlough, or temporary unpaid leave, this week according to Reuters. The news follows reports last week in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese auto tech companies that were bidding on an investment or acquisition of Fisker have now stalled.

There’s conflicting reports about why talks with the Chinese auto companies have grown cold. The WSJ says it’s because Fisker wants to try to get the remaining amount of the loan from the Department of Energy that was frozen, and restarting such a loan would mean Fisker’s next car would have to be built in the U.S. The Chinese companies would probably want to build the car in China where it would be lower cost. PluginCars says that the Chinese giants are less interested after looking under the hood of Fisker and realizing the company doesn’t own a lot of the technology in its vehicles.

Fisker hasn’t made one of its hybrid electric sports cars, the Karma, since the Summer of 2012. The company was plagued by problems in 2012, including the bankruptcy of its battery maker A123 Systems, hundreds of cars lost to superstorm Sandy, software glitches and recalls in the Karma cars that were made, and the loss of part of its loan from the Department of Energy for not meeting milestones with its Karma. The broker that was helping raising money for Fisker, Advanced Equities, also shut down after getting in trouble with the SEC.

Fisker founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker resigned earlier this month. The company has a loan repayment of part of the $192 million that it was able to secure from the DOE next month. Fisker raised over a billion dollars from private investors. It’s Karma car is owned by some well known customers including actor Leonardo DiCaprio, hip hop artist The Game, pop artist Justin Bieber, former Vice President Al Gore, and actor Matt Damon.

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A little over a year and a half ago, Mascoma, which is a startup with aims to make next-generation cellulosic ethanol, filed to go public in a potentially $100 million IPO. In an article entitled “Some red flags and numbers in Mascoma’s IPO filing,” back then I detailed why that seemed like a strange choice given its weak financials, such as the fact that at the time government grants made up 86 percent of Mascoma’s total revenue.

So whatever happened to that IPO? Last week, Mascoma quietly withdrew its IPO plans. The company cited “market conditions,” for the move, though the macro IPO market conditions seem a little better in 2013 than 2012. Already this year smart grid company Silver Spring Networks went public, and late last year solar installer SolarCity made it out.

Mascoma currently makes a next-generation yeast that it sells to corn ethanol makers to help them cut the costs of making corn ethanol. That’s what made up the other 14 percent of its revenues (the part that wasn’t grants) at the time of its IPO-filing. But Mascoma’s real aim is to use its technology to make cellulosic ethanol — a next-gen type of ethanol that uses plant waste (not corn) — and the company wanted to do that using wood waste in a factory in Michigan. Many companies have tried to make cellulosic ethanol at scale in recent years and failed.

Before pulling its IPO, Mascoma raised two rounds of a few millions of dollars in debt over the past six months. That’s not the typical behavior of a company on the upswing getting ready to go public.

And over the past year and a half, as Mascoma amended its S-1 every once in awhile, its finances didn’t improve. The latest revenue numbers from March 2012 — a year ago — said that government grants and awards then constituted 93 percent of its revenue while sales of its equipment and services made up 6 percent of revenue. So the percentage of grants disturbingly actually rose over the 6 months from its first filing, rather than dropped, and its percentage of sales from real products fell.

Mascoma over the years has raised a lot of money from both venture capitalists, strategic corporations and public funds. At least over $100 million in private capital from companies like Khosla Ventures, SunOpta, GM, Marathon Oil, Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Venture, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vantage Point Venture Partners, and Pinnacle Ventures. The company was founded in 2005 from research from a Dartmouth Professor, Lee Rybeck Lynd.

Public funds have also been awarded and sometimes allocated for its projects. The Department of Energy awarded it $80 million to help it build Kinross, though its unclear if Mascoma actually drew down on those funds. The state of Michigan also offered Mascoma a $20 million grant to build the factory in Michigan.

At some point in 2012, Mascoma had been hoping to start construction on its factory in Kinross, Michigan that could eventually produce 20 million gallons per year of cellulosic ethanol. The company had wanted that to happen before the end of 2012, with operations starting in 2014.

An article in Michigan Capital Confidential from the summer of 2012 quotes a financing partner of Mascoma’s, Frontier’s VP of Operations, Ken Nielsen, who said that the company expects to ”start construction by the end of the year [2012].” Mascoma managed to secure (in December 2011) an agreement with Valero to help it build that factory, but it’s unclear how much Valero was willing to put up to finance this project.

According to the Michigan Capital Confidential the Kinross project had as of the summer of 2012 only created three jobs (it was originally supposed to create 70) and “received strong criticism from environmental and fiscal groups across the political spectrum.”

As of March 2013, it’s unclear if Mascoma ever broke ground on that facility, or if it hasn’t when it will. I’ve reached out to the company and am waiting to hear back. You can bet if they did start construction, they’d have sent out a press release on it across the internets. Instead, vaguely, Mascoma’s website still says the Kinross facility is “planned” and anticipated to go under construction in 3 to 6 months (the same time line it used a year ago).

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In an age of Hadoop and a general analytics revolution, it’s easy to poke fun at legacy data warehouse vendors such as Teradata. Some people might even call it fun. After all, they sell expensive appliances and weren’t built from the ground up to handle the unstructured data that most people think of when they think of “big data.”

But whatever you think about Teradata’s approach to handling big data workloads, make no mistake about the company’s clout: It has been around for decades, and it’s still analyzing boatloads of data for some of the biggest names in business. I spent a day in February touring the Teradata Labs facility in San Diego, and although I heard all about the technology and the company’s vision for a Teradata-Hadoop-Aster analytics super-environment, the thing that stuck out most were the users. Walmart, eBay, Continental … Apple.

Here’s how they’re all using Teradata and at what scale (try not to faint when you think of the bill):

• Apple: Apple is operating a multiple-petabyte Teradata system (that became apparent during its iCloud launch in 2011) and, I learned, was Teradata’s “fastest ever customer to a petabyte.” Apple uses the data warehouse to get a better understanding of its customers across product groups. Now every piece of identifiable information — and those iTunes interactiona generate a lot of data — goes into the system so the company knows who’s who and what they’re up to.

• Walmart: The retail giant deployed Teradata’s first-ever terabyte-scale database in 1992, and it has grown, uh, a bit since then. Its operational system was at 2.5 petabytes as of 2008, and is certainly leaps and bounds bigger by now — likely well into the double digits when you consider it operates separate ones for Walmart and Sam’s Club as well as a backup system. The analytics efforts have essentially helped Walmart become a massive consignment shop. It tells suppliers, “You have three feet of shelf space. Optimize it.” And then it gives them any data they could possibly need to determine what’s selling, how fast and even whether they should redesign their packaging to fit more on the shelves.
• eBay: eBay (e ebay) has two systems in place, and they’re both big. Its primary data warehouse is 9.2 petabyes; its “singularity system” that stores web clicks and other “big” data is more than 40 petabytes. It has a single table that’s 1 trillion rows. Yes, this is smaller than the 50 petabytes worth of Hadoop capacity eBay added last year, but Teradata is quick to point out that all of its systems support data into and out of Hadoop, so it’s not as if eBay is operating two entirely distinct data environments.

Of course, Teradata has lots of other petabyte-scale customers, with Verizon, AT&T and Bank of America among them. Here are a few more interesting use cases:

• Harrah’s (now part of the Caesar’s Entertainment casino empire) understands how much money particular gamblers can afford to lose in a day before they won’t come back the next day.
• Disney is rolling out new bracelet tickets equipped with GPS and NFC that track everything visitors do while inside Disney’s amusement parks. The New York Times detailed the privacy implications of this move in a January article.
• A manufacturing customer generates 20 terabytes of data per hour while testing products, although that volume is ultimately reduced to about 1 terabyte after the valuable data is filtered out.
• At some point, Continental Airlines decided it wanted to keep its customers happy and began assessing them by lifetime value (which, it turns out, is often inversely related to frequent-flyer status) and began making alternative arrangements for them as soon as the airline realized flights would be delayed.
• A luxury car company used Aster Data to analyze the pattern of failures for various components inside its cars. It found out that lighting, seats and infotainment often failed together (they’re on the same circuit) and began inspecting all three when a customer comes in for service on any of them.

None of this means Teradata is destined to continue being a huge name in analytics (Scott Yara, co-founder of rival EMC Greenplum, recently called data warehouses this generation’s mainframe), but it’s still interesting to learn how big companies are analyzing their data, regardless what they’re running on. And with exabytes worth of data no doubt residing in customer systems across the world, Teradata isn’t going anywhere soon.

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Amazon Studios announced that it has greenlit a new original comedy series called Betas for Amazon Prime Instant Video. The company describes the show:

Set in the land of Silicon Valley start-ups where the right algorithm can make you king, Betas, written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, follows four computer geeks and their quest for nerd fame as they attempt to crack the ultimate code. Ed Begley Jr., Jon Daly, Joe Dinicol, Margo Harshman, Charlie Saxton and Karan Soni star in the pilot.

The pilot is being directed and produced by Michael Lehmann (Heathers, True Blood, Dexter, American Horror Story) along with Alan Freedland and Alan Cohen (King of the Hill, Due Date, American Dad), and Michael London (Sideways, The Visitor, The Informant).

“Amazon is giving us a chance to work outside the TV bureaucracies and connect directly with audiences hungry for original content, and Betas is the perfect match for that model,” said producer Michael London. “Betas is a half hour comedy about a group of tech-savvy millennials trying to connect with the world both personally and professionally. Speaking for the whole creative team on Betas, we couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of the first launch of Amazon Studios pilots and working with such an inspiring group of people.”

“We can’t wait to hear what fans think of this and the seven other comedy pilots we’re producing — we have unbelievable casts and crews working on these projects,” said Roy Price Director of Amazon Studios.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced the upcoming Zombieland TV series. Other comedies in the works at Amazon include: Alpha House, Browsers, Dark Minions, Onion News Empire, Supanatural, and Those Who Can’t.

Image: Ed Begley Jr. in Arrested Development

Google put out a new Webmaster Help video today, though this one doesn’t really do much to help webmasters. It’s simply Matt Cutt responding to the question: Where do you see Google search 10 years down the road?

An interesting topic, for sure.

As Cutts notes, that’s a long time. In Internet years that’s a really, really long time. I can’t imagine how even Cutts could possibly know what Google will be like that far into the future. It sounds, however, like a lot of current Google projects like Google Glass and Google Now are involved.

One interesting (if not scary) concept Cutts mentions is a brain interface.

“In theory there could be a brain interface so you could be having a dialogue where some of it is audible and some of it is not,” he contemplates.

I think that hovers somewhere around that “creepy line” that Microsoft likes to keep talking about (and even illustrating). Former Google CEO (and current Executive Chairman) Eric Schmidt said a few years ago that brain implants would cross the creepy line. The part about the creepy line was used as a sound byte in Microsoft’s “Scroogled” campaign about Gmail, even though Schmidt was talking about brain implants.

I smell a Scroogled resurrection.

It is like Groundhog Day! Once again an undersea cable has been cut — the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (aka SEA-ME-WE 4) cable and that is causing an internet (and communications) slowdown in and around Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The cut was said to be near Alexandria in Egypt. Tata Communications – previously Videsh Sanchar Nigam LimitedIndia – administers the network.

While the cut was on a single cable, it came at an unfortunate time as a few other major cables were in “maintenance mode” and that has resulted in problems for service providers across the region. Our sources in the telecom community confirmed that two other cables — Europe India Gateway (EIG) and India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) — were in ‘maintenance’ mode when the SWM4 got cut. The result is downstream congestion on networks that are going to India and around the Indian Ocean. UAE’s Etisalat reported that the internet speeds were down by as much as 60 percent in some locations.

Sunil Tagare, who runs the BuySellBandwidth.com, on his blog wrote

It’s not good enough to say since you have 10 cables even if going through Egypt, you have route diversity. And as today’s 4 cable cuts have demonstrated, any time the cables are along similar paths, there is a high likelihood that all of them might be cut at the same time.

He was arguing that four major cable — I-Me-We, Sea-Me-We-4, EIG and TE North – were impacted at the same time and thus causing problems in the Middle East and Asia. It is not a smart way to think about the networks, especially since we depend so heavily on many of these optical cables. Tagare’s argument makes sense to me, for we have seen this pattern repeat itself a few times. As I wrote earlier, there are three major cables that connect Europe and Middle East – SeaMeWe-3, SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Euro-Asia — and they follow the same path underneath the Mediterranean Sea, making them vulnerable to cuts.

In 2010, the SEA-ME-WE-4 experienced a cut causing large scale disruptions, two years after the cable experienced an outage. Things have become more acute now considering that SEA-ME-WE4 is a lifeline for the African internet.

SEACOM, an African consortium which owns the big African Internet cable, later confirmed the outage on its website and said that it was working towards restoration. SEACOM had already been experiencing problems since March 24 and was in the middle of fixing those before it was hit by the cable cut.

Mark Simpson, CEO of SEACOM, said in a press note:

The cause of the outage is a physical cable cut some kilometres north of the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea. This is not likely to be known until the cable is repaired in the coming week or two and the damaged section is recovered from the seabed and inspected. However we suspect, based on our experience with sub-sea systems and the nature of the sea area where the cut has occurred, that the most likely cause is external aggression to the cable most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed. Unfortunately this remains a common cause of damage to cable systems globally, despite our continued efforts to protect the cable with armour, burying, notifications to ships of cable location and exclusion zones.

By the way, SEAMEWE-3 experienced a cut about two months ago (between Singapore and Perth, Australia) and it hasn’t been fixed just yet mostly because the network operator was waiting for Indonesian government permission to fix the cable which is in Indonesian waters.

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SAP announced the launch of some new ERP rapid-deployment apps this week. These would be the SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, SAP ERP for Manufacturing and SAP ERP for Trading solutions.

The company says they will deliver speed and simplicity to enterprises considering the adoption of adoption of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.

The solutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, best-practices content and “end-user enablement.” Each comes with a fixed price.

“The promise of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP 360 Customer is to enable businesses to run faster, simpler and smarter,” said Steven Birdsall, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions. “Now, through rapid-deployment, we have wrapped this innovation into an easily accessible package as well. We have helped reduce implementation barriers for a non-disruptive and practical transformation into real-time business. Rapid-deployment solutions are offering customers game-changing innovation with controlled risk.”

“These new rapid-deployment solutions support IDC’s findings that emerging technology implementations are becoming shorter, and require fewer consulting and integration services,” said Gard Little, research director, at IDC for IT consulting and systems integration research. “Delivered as a complete package with a modular approach, SAP Rapid Deployment solutions allow customers to incrementally address business needs at their own pace in a simple and pre-integrated framework that can help them unlock value quickly.”

More on SAP Rapid Deployment solutions here.

A lot of people are complaining about issues with Facebook notifications. Specifically, some users of Facebook’s Messenger app are having problems. We’re seeing complaints that people using the app are getting notifications for old messages.

One user of the iOS app tells WebProNews the app keeps alerting them to previously sent, old messages. This person says that from about ten messages a friend sent today, they’ve gotten about 40 alerts.

The problems may not be exclusive to the Messenger app or the iOS version. People are also complaining a lot about notification issues on Twitter:

I hate when Facebook tells me I have notifications but when I go look I have nothing.

— rebecca∞lynn (@rebeccalynn_xo) March 27, 2013

My Facebook messenger is mega fucked ok I keep getting messages from previous conversations as notifications like WTF I don’t want 2009 msgs

— Kirstyyyyyyyy (@heyitsk_stew) March 27, 2013

My Facebook notifications are fucking up

— Josh Pringle (@pringle96) March 27, 2013

Yes Facebook, I checked that notification, so you can get rid of that little red number now.

— Miquel Foley (@MiquelFoley) March 27, 2013

I don’t like it when I get on facebook & my notifications are all blown up…makes me nervous .

—~ * Harlem (@princess_oloy) March 27, 2013

“@itwitrandomly: All of a sudden, nothing becomes as annoying as a Facebook notification”like seriously it culd b ova annoyin

— Mis khadijat (@bustybea1) March 27, 2013

hate when my Facebook notifications don’t show up and I never know when someone has messages me! crey

— brandon. (@Brandon_Pagee) March 27, 2013

Why is my mac sending my Facebook notifications like an hour after they were sent? Stop sending me shit I already know about dammit D:

— Rob Horrocks (@RobHorrocks432) March 27, 2013

my iphone is giving me facebook notifications i got 30mins ago staaaahp

— Julia Fe ☯ (@dis4st3rpiece) March 27, 2013

A+ Facebook messenger sending me notifications of conversations that happened an hour ago

— Charlotte Scott (@char_manderr) March 27, 2013

Come Facebook sort your notifications out. #stupid

— The Big Cheese (@BIG_JOHN_69_) March 27, 2013

After the whole Interflora paid links fiasco, Google took to its Webmaster Central blog to remind webmasters about the no-nos of paid links and advertorials.

Today, Google took to the Google News blog to remind bloggers and publishers that the rules apply in Google News too.

“Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site,” writes Google Sr. Director of News and Social Products, Richard Gingras. “It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.”

“Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines,” he adds. “Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.”

You can get a look at the Google News quality guidelines here. Similar language in those says:

Google News is not a marketing service. We don’t want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

“If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only,” says Gingras. “Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Now we’re wondering what exactly prompted this post. Did Google just bust someone? That appeared to be the motivation for Cutts’ earlier post.

We’re also wondering whatever came of that recent incident where Google itself was busted with paid links again.

Last year was a pretty quiet year for solar thermal startup eSolar, which makes solar plant gear that converts the sun’s heat into electricity (solar panels convert sun light into electricity). But perhaps the company is about to try to kick it up a notch. According to a filing, the company is raising a $30 million round, and has closed on close to $13 million of that round.

Founded in 2007 and incubated in Bill Gross’ Idealabs, eSolar has already raised a lot of money over its lifetime. It’s raised at least $170 million from a combination of Indian telecom and solar company ACME group, power company NRG Energy, Oak Investment Partners, Quercus Trust, Google.org, and GE.

To its credit, the company built one of the first solar thermal power plants in the U.S. in Lancaster, Calif. We covered the launch of the Sierra SunTower back in the Summer of 2009. That project was small, at 5 MW, and a pilot, but is still in operation. However, commercial scale versions of these projects are on the hundreds of megawatts level like the one BrightSource is building near Las Vegas called Ivanpah.

eSolar also told Greentech Media last Summer that it has a live solar power tower project in Bikaner in India, which it says has been in operation since April 2011. I’m not sure the size of that project, but will update this when I hear more. ACME has an exclusive license to build power plants with eSolar’s technology in India.

After its Sierra SunTower was built, eSolar appears to have spent some time regrouping and focusing on using molten salt storage technology to make its gear more cost competitive with solar panels. The price of solar panels have plummeted over the past two years, making solar thermal less competitive. According to this article, eSolar has been hoping to deploy its first commercial solar power tower with molten salt storage in the 2014 and 2015 timeframe.

It’s hard to track if eSolar still has claim on some of the deals it announced over the years. The company announced a 245 MW project with Southern California Edison back in 2008, but I think that project was sold to NRG Energy in this deal in 2009. Back then, eSolar decided to become an equipment supplier and not a project developer, and now works with big companies to manage project development. It’s not clear, but NRG might have sold that one off or switched the technology it will use to solar panels. I’ll update this when I hear more.

eSolar also had announced a whopping deal with Chinese power equipment maker Penglai Electric to build 2 GW of solar thermal projects in China over the next decade. eSolar still lists Pengali Electric as a partner on its site, but also writes that the first solar plant out of that deal in China would be a 92 MW project that would break ground in 2010. I haven’t heard that that was under construction.

Over the past year, it’s been hard for solar thermal technology to compete with solar panels because solar panels have gotten so incredibly cheap. Solar thermal can be more cost competitive if it’s built on a massive scale like BrightSource’s Ivanpah, but many power developers are opting to use solar panels instead of solar thermal tech these days.

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Google just announced the launch of offline language packages for Google Translate for Android. With the feature, you don’t need an Internet connection to translate your way out of a jam.

If you open the app, and select “offline languages” from the menu, you will be able to choose a package for download. You should probably do this while you do have a connection, so you have it ready.

“To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu,” says associate product manager Minqi Jiang. “Once the packages are downloaded, you’re good to go.”

“While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access,” adds Jiang.

The packages are only available for Android 2.3 and up. 50 languages are supported.

Using Google Translate just became much easier for travelers having a hard time finding internet access while abroad: Google announced the addition of offline language support for the Android application. Fifty languages gain the offline support, which does need to be first enabled while online. After that, however, no web connection is needed to use the translation program.

Google says the offline translation dictionaries found in the new version “are less comprehensive than their online equivalents” but that’s a small price to pay. And in the future, I could see the offline language data grow in scope as flash storage decreases in cost while expanding in capacity.

While the new feature is handy in areas with limited data coverage, I see the biggest use case for travelers. Often finding, paying for and configuring connectivity on a smartphone can be challenging in another country; particularly for users based in the U.S.

By pre-installing the proper offline language packs, you can be chatting and translating right away upon arriving in a new land. The limited translations should get you communicating until you can find a persistent connection and then you can use the app’s full online capabilities.

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