BillDay.com

Baseline Magazine provides an interesting glimpse into what makes Google tick in “How Google Works“.

The teasers on some of the technical stuff (BigFiles, Google File System, and BigTable) are good, but so are some of the “fly your own airplane” stuff. Example: Google uses software smarts to crunch on emailed weekly contributor updates rather than requiring more heavy handy methods that, frankly, many employees in many enterprises simply ignore.

Worth a read.

An update to my “US passports go wireless” post from last month:

Wired has reported that a hacker has successfully cloned an RFID passport. Read the Wired article here and see what Bruce and his readers think about the whole thing here.

Zillow has enabled mobile home searches via SMS.

Or more correctly, they’ve enabled email based searches, which happen to work from most mobile phones using SMS. If you email an address+ZIP or address+city+state to z@labs.zillow.com, you’ll receive a summary of any available information on the given property including its “zestimate” (estimated value based upon comparable sales, assessed value, etc.), number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square footage, and year built.

Very handy if you’re home shopping, or if you’re a real estate agent, or if you ever wonder “How much is that house worth?” while you’re out about town.

Another cool mobile service brought to you by texting.