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Google opens applications for its $1,000,000 ‘Little Box Challenge’

The Little Box Challenge, an open competition to build a smaller power inverter 2014-07-22 10-27-42 2014-07-22 10-27-51

Google announced the Little Box Challenge earlier this year, and in the name of progress, the company plans to give away $1,000,000 to a team of people capable of shrinking the power inverter to the size of a tablet. Today, Google officially launched the contest and detailed what it’s going to take to grab that million dollars — and is now taking applications for teams to get on board.
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Google’s Nexus 4 reaches 1M shipments

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After a month of delay, website crashes, and an all-too familiar “Sold Out” sign, the Nexus 4 is back in stock. Oh, and Google has just shipped its millionth unit. Nearly three months after its initial launch on Google Play, a “Senior Member” of the Android hacking community XDA claimed that the millionth unit of the LG/Google phone has just been shipped in Turkey. While this of course isn’t official word from Google or LG, the serial number the poster provided (“ATURBK 302KPSL999998 20130205 TURKEY”) seems to be enough evidence.

About a month ago, the same user, who goes by the name “draugaz”, claimed that he figured out the serial number of what each Nexus 4 meant. His breakdown of what he believes each number to mean is below.

“LGE960 ACAGBK 212KPHG188745 20121206 GLOBAL/GLOBAL N N”

If you break this string apart, you get:
LGE960 = phone model
A = ?
CA = Country where the device was sold. (Others include ‘US’ for the U.S., ‘HK’ for Hong Kong, ‘AU’ for Australia and so on.)
G = Storage (G = 16GB, 8 = 8GB)
BK = Color
2 = ?
12 = Production Month (November)
K = Production Country (Korea)
PHG = ?
188745 = The line or production number, showing that phone was the 188,745th device made.
2012121206 = The production date in YYYYMMDD format”

If his breakdown of the serial number is to be believed, then the Nexus 4 sold in Turkey is the 999,998 Nexus 4 made and not the millionth. While TechCrunch claimed that Google has yet to respond to the report, it’s expected for Google to announce the exact amount sold at I/O in May.

Google+ becomes fastest growing website in history with 25 million unique users

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI&]
Today ComScore confirmed Google+ has officially hit 25 million unique users less than a month after its public launch. We told you not to worry when Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic for the new social network and today’s report from ComScore confirms our hunch that Google might actually be on the right track.

To put this in perspective, rival Facebook took approximately three years to reach the same milestone, while Twitter took two and a half.  Twenty-five million may be a long way from the more than 750 million current Facebook users, but it is certainly a step in the right direction after similar services such as Buzz have been long abandoned.

Its quite obvious Google is pretty serious about this whole Google+ Facebook/Twitter-killer thing and the incredible rate of growth should be more than enough encouragement to make it a big focus over at the GooglePlex. They have already done so by integrating the service into almost every aspect of their other services from Gmail, which SearchEngineLand notes seems to be tied to Google+ adoption, to YouTube Live integration, and rolling out updates for the Android app to both fix issues and add functionality.

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