In the experiment, the boys packed a foam cooler with a few gel handwarmers, a couple of cameras and a cell phone with built in GPS. Matt and Asad filled their weather balloon with 165 dollars worth of helium to nearly its bursting point; Ho explained his reasoning behind this to the Toronto Star:

“If you fill your balloon, say, halfway, it will reach a higher max altitude, but then obviously it’s got a lot more time in the air so it has a lot more time that it could be affected by wind, A perfect flight plan would be just up and down, on the same spot. The less we had to drive to retrieve Lego Man that was our goal, especially since we’re surrounded by so many lakes. There were so many problems that could go wrong.”

Once the balloon reached its bursting point, the parachute they fabricated would bring the experiment back to the surface of the Earth. A little over an hour and a half after launch, the boys used the GPS to track down the experiment to a wooded area near Rice Lake in Canada.

According to the Google blog, winners from three age groups have been named, and judging by the description of the winners, they clearly showed off the scientific talent in impressive ways. The winners, by age group, are as follows:

Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age group. Lauren studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.

Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age group. Naomi endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people’s reliance on asthma medications.

Shree Bose in the 17-18 age group. Shree discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs.

There was also an overall winner announced, and that designation went to Shree Bose, with her impressive cancer treatment study. Not only were the winners rewarded for their scientific talents, their findings can also be implemented by the general public. This is especially important when dealing with such subjects as cancer and asthma. Any progress on these fronts, even it is from a younger group than one might expect, is welcome. The blog entry goes on to say:

[The winners] examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.

Can you imagine the implications if it was a non-adult who uncovered important information that affected the way cancer is treated, making these treatments more effective? A Lego trophy would only be the beginning of the accolades such a person would receive. As for the prizes the winners received, contributing to the awards were Google, CERN, LEGO and National Geographic:

Shree received a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer and an internship at CERN. Naomi and Lauren each received $25,000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO. All three were awarded lifetime digital subscriptions to Scientific American.

The LEGO internship sounds about as awesome as being an intern can be; although, there’s no word if the winners will be able to contribute to the life-sized Lego creations that pop up on a consistent basis. I mean, what good is a LEGO internship if you can’t build awesome models? On a more serious side, Google created a YouTube page for their science fair, and while there’s not any video of the winners’ announcement — yet — there’s still some good content to be found there, especially for those who didn’t take part in this year’s contest, but are looking forward to participating in next year’s.

It turns out not to be the Wii 2, or “Project Cafe” or even simply “Nintendo” as some speculated. The Wii U looks to bring HD gaming to Nintendo staples while sticking true to its motion play roots.

The huge innovation that comes with the Wii U is the touchscreen controller. It pretty much looks like we speculated, with a large screen and built in front-facing camera.

Here are some specs of the console and controller, from the Nintendo E3 site:

• Console is 1.8 inches tall, 6.8 inches wide and 10.5 inches long
• Console supports 1080p quality with HDMI and Component outputs
• Internal flash memory, with external USB hard drive or SD card memory expansion options
• IBM power-based multi-core microprocessor
• The controller has a 6.2 inch 16:9 widescreen touch screen, built in accelerometer and gyroscope, microphone, sensor strip, stylus, and front facing camera

The controller can be used as a standalone gaming device or in congruence with a larger TV, though the latter is the preferred method of play. For instance, a game being broadcast on the TV screen can be fully transferred to the handheld screen mid-play.

Nintendo announced some titles that will be coming out for the Wii U, including Batman Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed, Tekken, Ninja Gaiden 3, and Ghost Recon Online. One that has been rumored for some time that was also announced is Lego City Stories.

Also available on the 3DS, Lego City Stories is a continuation of the very popular Lego games featuring plots from Batman, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is described as an “open world game packed with action, humor, and a city full of LEGO vehicles coming exclusively to Wii U and 3DS.” Sounds like Grand Theft Auto: Lego to me. Maybe with less prostitute killing, however. (Maybe not?) Image courtesy of the Lego wiki:

The Wii U will be released sometime in 2012.

Google’s described the event as "the world’s first online global science competition," and some interesting partners are also involved: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American. 

As for who’s eligible and what’s at stake, a paragraph on the specially created Google Science Fair Channel on YouTube stated, "Students aged 13 – 18 from around the world are invited to enter and compete for awesome once-a-lifetime experiences, scholarships and real-life work opportunities."

Additional information is supposed to be shared during a live event on the YouTube channel tomorrow morning.  There’s also a more traditional Google Science Fair site that should be updated at some point.

We’ll go ahead and wish good luck to all potential Google Science Fair participants.  It sounds like the search company and its partners intend to make this a very rewarding experience.

UPDATE: Courtesy of the Official Google Blog, here are all the details.

Switzerland, Taiwan, and Portual are the three main attractions (as you probably gathered from this piece’s title).  Interesting and even stunning views are available of each, with the image below showing off Grindelwald, Switzerland.

As for the odds and ends, Stephen Chau, a product manager, explained in a post on the LatLong Blog, "We took our Street View cars for spins around two race tracks in California: Thunderhill Raceway Park and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca."

Chau then continued, "We’ve also used our Street View Trike, the new bicycle-based system, to gather imagery at San Diego State University and LEGOLAND California.  We’ve included a little surprise at LEGOLAND, which we hope you will enjoy!"  (That surprise – possible spoiler alert! – may or may not be the Lego Pegman.)

So there’s plenty of stuff to keep Street View fans busy.  And since it had been a while since the last time Google released any fresh Street View imagery, this morning’s update should prove especially welcome.

A post on the LatLong Blog explains, "This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. . . .  The gadget allows you to pre-fill the ‘To’ field with one or multiple addresses.  Customers are then able to print their directions with a single click."

This should increase the convenience factor of businesses’ sites, even as it allows firms to make sure potential shoppers don’t wander away.  A nice touch is that companies can keep messy street addresses out of the "To" fields, as well – it’s possible to use more recognizable names and aliases. 

As you can see, Legoland California‘s already taken advantage of the Google Maps offering.  More serious entities like Emeril Lagasse restaurants and Harvard have put it to use, too.

The gadget’s available in 23 languages, so it’s probably just a matter of time until businesses all over the world are on much better terms with Google Maps.

Has Google Created A Monster?

And then something more interesting happens (or, more accurately, is happening). Everybody’s favorite mountain to blast, Microsoft, has been blasted so low that they’re an unexpected underdog.

Or, to mix my metaphors further in honor of the upcoming Kentucky Derby, Microsoft is (it’s so strange to say I doubt it each time) the dark horse.

Now I’ve never been one to hype the power and potential of Google – oh wait, yeah, I have, lots of times. But it’s especially eerie to watch those prognostications come alive, especially as we all championed it all along. Everyone has sensed it for some time, that Google could and probably will, permeate all aspects of our lives.

Google Search, Google Ads, Google TV, Google Movies, Google Newspapers, Google park benches, Google satellites, Google ISP. Expect to see that brand on the side of a lot more property to come.

After acquiring DoubleClick, which already has Microsoft and AT&T ironically crying antitrust, there is talk Google is trying to cut News Corp. out of a deal for Dow Jones. And that makes Google followers pause to reassess.

They learned their lesson after not buying MySpace when they had the chance. All this wasn’t too long after Schmidt shrewdly buddied up with Apple – the lowest, hardest punch the company could have thrown at the Beast of Redmond.

Has all that Google hysteria, the IPO, the cheering on, the multi-nationalization, the creeping into every facet of media, the first real challenge Microsoft has faced in a while, combined to create a monster we’re all not certain we can control? Were the French right? Sacre bleu!

I’m not the only one that thinks Microsoft is becoming more endearing to the public than before. Microsoft is a giant we’ve already gotten comfortable dealing with.

Times Online Writer Jonathan Weber calls Microsoft "the great underdog," and expounds on why we need Microsoft in the age of Google.

Google has changed the way of the web in less than ten years. Without a strong Microsoft, its dominance will only increase.

Not that Microsoft doesn’t deserve it. They’ve been the shrewdest competitors the world has seen till now. But Google’s rise to challenge, though we all hoped for it, is getting a bit frightening. Who knew the lighthearted Lego Googtopia would become the fortress that it is?

Weber concludes:

And strange as this would have sounded ten years ago, the industry needs Microsoft to be a viable player in the Web 2.0 world, lest we all be bit players in the universe according to Google.

My only real conclusion:

It’s a strange, strange world when you can think of a company like Microsoft as the underdog. 

This may address several of the comments in the last post concerning what types of products and services could benefit from co-creation. As the following post was written over a year ago, now’s the time to update it and perhaps give more examples within each category. Ideas and comments welcome! A lot has been written in the past year on the topic, but I find it more fun to co-create the idea of co-creation.

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(2.12.05) Thanks to everyone’s contributions on defining the concept of co-creation (here and here), I think we’re arriving at a pretty good place. Here’s where my head’s at now:

“An open, ongoing collaboration between employees and customers to define and create products, services, experiences, ideas and information.”

Open brings in the idea of transparency, so that non-participants can easily see the collaborative process. This, in my mind, eliminates traditional customer research from the definition.

Ongoing implies that it’s not a one-time shot at obtaining customer input and then taking the rest of it in-house. Anyone can participate at any time.

Collaboration brings in the spirit of teamwork. Employees and customers are peers in the process. In many cases, the company simply serves as a facilitator of the process.

Products are probably the most clear-cut application for co-creation: open-source software, Lego Factory, Google’s API. We could add Wikipedia to this list as a co-created encyclopedia (although it would also apply to information and ideas).

Information is probably the next obvious application: epinions.com, Amazon.com, MarketingProf’s Idea Exchange.

Experiences: This gets a bit more fuzzy. A good example is probably Apple iTunes/iPod customized playlists… the company provided the tools to allow customers to create their own music experience. We could get really fuzzy here and say that because a brand is an idea in the minds of customers, then all brands are co-created. But I won’t say it, because I think it’s confusing the issue. Any more tangible examples of co-created experiences?

Services: This is another tough one. Typically a service company exists to do something that a customer doesn’t want to do. Again, would love some ideas on how service companies could work with customers to co-create.

Ideas: What we’re doing now, co-creating this definition of co-creation.

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Jennifer Rice is the founder of Mantra Brand Communication. She has extensive experience in brand/marketing strategy, market/customer research, integrated marketing communications and channel support.

Jennifer also writes theWhat’s Your Brand Mantra? blog which offers musings on branding, marketing and the ecology of business.

Upon hearing the news that a Microsoft team had pulled a drive-by, one could imagine the scene:

A rival search engine CEO, looking over fruit at an open market, hears the squeal of tires.

Three minutes later, the deed is done; the Butterfly has destroyed the barrel and hammer from his weapon. Soon they will rest at the bottom of the Bay.

Alas, the reality does not match the potential of what would have been the search story of the year. But that’s ok. The Street-side Drive-by preview arranged by MSN and the Virtual Earth team is pretty cool in its own right.

Sean Rowe, Program Manager, Virtual Earth, described the technology preview that his team made available today:

The team plans to add more cities before formally launching Street-side Drive-by this summer, when it will be integrated into Windows Live Local.

Inspiration for this came from A9′s street photography project, according to Robert Scoble; Microsoft wanted to take this idea “to the next level.” He commented on his blog that photography for each city took about a month to complete for the project.

Street-side is very much a prototype (as in “it doesn’t work perfectly right now and we know this”) at this point, and the Virtual Earth folks are soliciting feedback from those who test it. As for future cities, WebProNews would like to nominate its home of Lexington, Kentucky. After all, we were part of the Birds’ Eye debut in Local Live, so why not Street-side too?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Businesses must protect their trademarks, and spend a lot of money to build brand awareness. Part of that strategy leads businesses with an online presence to purchase URLs containing different spellings. The Lego toy company has done so by purchasing legos.com.

Many people tend to call Lego toys Legos’. Evidently, someone in the corporate offices at Lego has taken the term Legos’ as a deeply personal, slandering insult. Visiting Legos.com brings up a redirect page along with an admonishment to the visitor:

Wow. Making the argument that calling the bricks Legos instead of Lego bricks’ violates the brand comes across as unusually pedantic. Probably a legal necessity, but still not a very consumer-friendly approach.

Lego isn’t exactly innocent when it comes to using terms without permission. The company’s Bionicle line of toys featured names derived from Maori tribes, a practice that earned the company a rebuke over its unauthorized and inappropriate use of “traditional names and language” from a New Zealand Maori lawyer. Lego generously met with Maori representatives and agreed to stop the usage of those terms.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.