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b'Intro
\\n\\nIn our previous discussion regarding gaming we learned about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. Among the most popular was World of Warcraft. This week we consider The Webware Wars.\\nAmong the factors that have led to the proliferation of webware are:\\nincreased adoption of high-speed internet, greater bandwidth, cheap\\nstorage and a new dynamic and interactive web architecture enable by a\\ncollection of technologies referred to as Web 2.0 and AJAX. Everybody\'s\\ngetting into the act, including big players like Microsoft and Google,\\nand little fish like Zoho and Thinkfree.
\\n
Mike,\\nlet\'s start out with what we have been using the longest - What are\\nsome of the New Features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets?
\\nAs with any Google product, new features are quietly added with little\\nnotice or fanfare. Since we last talked about Google docs and\\nSpreadsheets (GDS), there have been a number of additions and\\nimprovements - mostly on the spreadsheets side of the house. The first\\naddition is actually within Gmail - Google\'s popular web-based email.\\nIn the past, when a Gmail user received an email attachment (either\\nword or excel) the only option was to open the attachment as an an html\\ndocument-viewing only, or download and open the attachment. Now when a\\nusers receives an excel document, the have the option of opening that\\nspreadsheet directly in GDS - presumably, a similar functionality will\\neventually be available for word documents.
\\n
Can you describe GoogleLookup?
\\nThis a new feature in the spreadsheets portion of the GDS that takes\\nadvantage of the online nature of GDS. In fact, it\'s a formula in the\\nspreadsheet that attempts to answer a question by using information\\nfrom the web. The syntax is fairly straightforward:
\\n=GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") [the double quotes are required!]
\\n\\nSome examples include:
\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n

• \\n looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or
  \\n \\n
• \\n when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]\\n
• \\n =GoogleLookup("Springfield, MA", "population") gives us 152,082\\xa0\\n
• \\n =GoogleLookup("NJ", "population") gives us 8,414,350
  \\n \\n

\\n What are some of the entity types you can look up?

Here\\nare some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup,\\nand a few popular attribute names (some entities won\'t have all these\\nattributes, and some will have more, so experiment):\\n

• \\n Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp\\n
• \\n U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower\\n
• \\n Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length\\n
• \\n Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation\\n
• \\n Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality\\n
• \\n Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality\\n
• \\n Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality\\n
• \\n U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party\\n
• \\n Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position\\n
• \\n Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight\\n
• \\n Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density\\n
• \\n Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperature\\n
• \\n Planets (like "Saturn"): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere\\n
• \\n Dinosaurs (like "Velociraptor"): height, weight, when it lived\\n
• \\n Ships (like "USS Chesapeake"): length, displacement, complement, commissioned\\n
• \\n Companies (like "Hewlett-Packard"): employees, ceo, ticker