Google.org has announced awards for innovative panchayats and encourage more innovation in local governance throughout the country. Initially the top five innovative panchayats in each state , Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, will be awarded a cash prize of Rs. 5 lakhs for each panchayat.

Link: http://www.google.org/ggpp.html

All legally recognized gram panchayats in the states of Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh can apply before January 25, 2009.

The prize will be awarded in one of six areas: education, health and nutrition, water supply, rural infrastructure, rural electrification, and resource mobilization.

This for me is really an innovative idea from Google.org. Gram panchayats play a vital role when the change has to happen at the grassroots level. Rewarding the work done by the panchayats is a sure way to encourage them to do more for the community they are serving. The awarded panchayats will inspire others panchayats to do their best.

Voila! Google again switches gears ahead of its competitors( did I hear you saying MicroSoft ). Google has released a new browser plug-in “Google Gears” on May 30, 2007, which will enable offline access to web applications.

This will address the main problem faced by web applications which can not be used when you are not connected to the Internet.

To put it in simpler terms, let us take an example.

Almost everyone of us use one or another email like Yahoo, Google etc. You can use any of these applications only when you are connected to the Internet. By using Google Gears now developers can develop these applications in such a way that you can read your emails even when you are offline. The messages are downloaded to your local computer and stored in a database. You can read and search these emails without an internet connection.

This new technology will change the way the web is used. First Google product to use this technology is Google’s RSS reader. If you have installed Google Gears, you can download latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an internet connection.

From Google Gear Blog:

“Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone. We also want to get early feedback, community involvement, and rapid iterations.”

So, Google Gears is going to change the way we use the web today. It will take some time to move out of Beta and open for developers to start using it in production environments.

I am going to experiment with it some time soon and publish an example article here.