Google Finance Real-time Quote from NYSE

After Google got real-time quote from NASDAQ earlier this month, less than a month, it gets real-time quote from New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) too.

Google Docs Supports PDF upload

Photo from Google Docs Blog

Now you can upload pdf file to Google Docs. I think it's good that you don't even need to install pdf reader to read a pdf file/attachment. (BTW, I recommend Foxit PDF reader, which is small and fast compare to the one from Adobe) However, there are two drawbacks that I know of:

1. Although you can search the content of the pdf in the pdf view, you can't do the search in the Google Docs panel(Here) .
2. In order to display the pdf without a pdf reader, Google convert the pdf file to an image file(PNG format). For most documents, that's sufficient. However, in my 3-column-all-font-10.5-Chinese test pdf file. All Chinese characters too blurry, not even one character could be read. Interestingly, I could still highlight the file and copy the text out of it.

Get Firefox 3 And Set A Guinness World Record

Firefox 3 is out. Download it here. You could help to set a Guinness World Record if you download it within 24 hours from June 17, 2008 10am PDT. That means it will end @ June 18, 2008 10am PDT. Or you could use this to check the end time at your location.

Update 1:24pm: Mozilla.org (which develops Firefox) releases some statistics about the download rate FF3. link1 and link2

Mozilla.com web traffic is pushing well over 2 Gigabits a second of just pure HTTP traffic. That is in addition to the 13 Gigabits a second or so of download traffic. We are still at around 14,000 download/minute and mozilla.com is responding well! Go Mozilla community and IT team! (emphasis mine)

Update 12:17am: Just found out a site that report the number of downloads for Firefox 3 here. As of now, there are total of 4,802,223 copies downloaded.

What You Can Do With Google Maps

Brian Ussery wrote a blog in Google Blogoscoped to list some recent released features in Google Maps.

Here is the list of features mentioned from the blog:

“Get directions” with Google Maps Street View
“Get directions" for Public Transportation in Google Maps
Find Future Traffic Conditions with Google Maps
More “Photos” in Google Maps
More “Wikipedia” Map Results
Google Maps Video
Google Maps Edits

Among those features, I like and use the traffic information from Google Maps the most. There are two parts of it.

1. Live Traffic
   
   It has both traffic speed on freeway, road construction and accident around the area.
   The data is updated more frequently than the data in my in-car GPS unit.
2. Traffic condition at "any time of a week"
   It shows you the normal traffic condition any time of a week. It handy for traveler to check out the traffic condition of a place to avoid being stuck in traffic. (You might want to check out how bad it is to drive in LA Thursday 5:00pm. Click on "change" next to "live traffic" and change the day and time to see the traffic.)

If Google Maps keeps improving, I think all we need is an IPhone or an Google Android phone (Demo: video1 video2). (An of course a 3G connection)

Google Get Real-time Stock Quotes from Nasdaq

Starting from June 2nd (yesterday), Google Finance announces it will have real-time Nasdaq stock quotes and update it's website every second. Before this announcement, it used to have a 15-20 minutes delay for stock quotes to be published on free online site like Google Finance or Yahoo Finance.
This pilot program from Nasdaq is not exclusive for Google, other companies like CNBC, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, Xignite (Nasdaq Press Release) are involved too. I don't hold any stock but I think it's always good that there is more data available to the public.

A related news, Google Finance got Hong Kong Stock Exchange pricing data.