Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks alerted his readers about a tip he received from an anonymous source regarding a supposed "Real Working Demo of Android." We actually received the same news tip late last night here at Mashable, as well.
"..Wanted to send you a link to a real prototype or a version of a system that actually works. You're the first person I'm sending this email! Google contextual search on a live phone call. You can make real telephone calls with google search on http://69.57.168.29/asr/ and blog.heycosmo.com - enter your phone number and a second number. It connects the two phone... while talking it will pick up words like "I'm very hungry" and plays a burger king advertisement.."
The technology sounds plausible from a technological perspective. We know that the GOOG-411 service is simply a loss leader designed to refine their voice recognition technology for use in other products, like YouTube's contextual ads. Still, the "working demo" sounded a bit too good to be true, and having an image of YouTube viral video guru Nalts embedded on the page sure didn't lend further credibility to the tip. I decided to do a bit of investigation.
Starting with the obvious, I did a look-up on the owner of the IP address. ARIN says the owner of the IP address in question is a company called FortressITX and the DNS is administered by a company called Pegasus Web Technologies. Fortress sells hosted domain solutions, and Pegasus seems to resell those services for as low as $8.95 a month. In other words, it seems fairly unlikely that Google ran out of storage space and suddenly needed to go open up a ten dollar web hosting account.Then there's the fact that the web form runs on ASP. Very few services at Google run on ASP (in fact, other than some acquired technologies, I can't think of a single native ASP app in the entire Google suite of services).
Then there's the fact that we actually tried the form, and the closest thing a phone call that occurred was the results page that popped up that said "Calling...".