Getting your voice mail as text is awesome. I started using a service that did this when I worked for Spinvox, in London, many years ago. But the service was sort of expensive, a Mechanical Turk, since there were a few offices spread about where transcribers would listen to your messages and type them out. Google Voice (aka Grand Central) did it better, and I’ve been using it for a while now. Today, they moved it into public availability, free for all, do go give it a whirl. Note: Lifehacker has a great write-up on making the service play nice with sipgate, so you can call out to regular old telephones.

Recorded Future, it seems, has succeeded in making the difficult seem easy… generalizable predictive algorithms that can be used for forecasting purposes. The vid demonstrates how cool it *could* be, assuming it is somewhat accurate. This kind of information *could* be so valuable for traders, or any business that’s engaged in commodities. Caveat: I didn’t sign up for the $149 subscription, but am very much looking forward to seeing it in my Google results page.

Google Docs added some cool new features today, including some general interface tweaks and a nifty new collaborative image editor. Looks pretty basic, if you’re comparing to CS5 (which is completely unfair!), but it has some definite utility… consider those times when you could just get the message across more clearly in visual form.

This is just a little marketing bit on how Google Apps is getting used in a lot of large companies, these days. Konica Minolta, National Geographic, Jaguar Land Rover and plenty of others. “Enjoy”…

Chen, from Google, just finished up a cool presentation about some new hacks he’s been working on, that provide a gestural interface overlay to Android. This is a very cool step toward natural human interaction with the wealth of data we’ve got access to, now. Check out the stroke gestures library.

Yesterday, Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace, which is a storefront for web applications that integrate with Google Apps, combined with some new integration tools.  Think iTunes, but for Google.  This is great for developers, it would seem, as a means to give potential customers visibility into new products.  More broadly, though, it will be interesting to see how this impacts Google’s presence in the enterprise application space.  See the video for details:

Yesterday, Google acquired DocVerse, a document sharing tool designed to add live document collaboration to Microsoft Office apps.  What’s Google up to?  I imagine it’s a means to migrate more Office users to Google Docs, bit by bit, but maybe there’s something else going on… like Google Docs on a desktop platform (think Picasa).