Ben Lovejoy

If you have a Chromecast stick and have purchased movies or music from Google Play, you no longer need to cast them to your TV from your smartphone or tablet – you can now do it directly from the Chrome browser on your PC.

Make sure you have the Google Cast extension installed on your Chrome web browser (http://goo.gl/nzbB6t), and then look for the Cast icon in the Google Play web player. Click it and your movie or song will instantly start playing on your TV through Chromecast … 
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Google’s former head of patents Michelle Lee has been named as the interim head of the USPTO, starting work there on 13th January, reports Yahoo! Finance.

Although technically Lee is deputy director, the agency hasn’t had a director since David Kappos left back in February, meaning that Lee will be running the show for the immediate future at least.

The appointment is an interesting choice given Google’s vocal criticism of patent trolls … 
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Microsoft’s renewed nervousness about Chromebooks was likely influenced by advance knowledge of Dell’s announcement that it would be joining Acer, HP and Samsung in manufacturing the ultraportable laptops in January.

The machine will have a Celeron 2955U processor, a choice of 2GB or 4GB RAM and 16GB of flash storage. The screen will be an 11-inch 1366×768 display with 720p front-facing webcam. You’ll get two USB 3 sockets plus HDMI in a case less than an inch thick and weighing under three pounds. Battery-life is said to be around 10 hours … 
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Korean site ET News reports that Samsung has cut its smartphone sales target for 2014 from 360M handsets to 330M. The company’s original goal would have represented 25 percent year-on-year growth, now reduced to just 14 percent.

The company is blaming saturation at the top end of the market, with many existing owners of flagship handsets having reduced their upgrade cycle from annual to bi-annual.

Samsung as a whole isn’t hurting – it recently announced record revenues and profits – but the bulk of those earnings came from lower-end handsets and its chip manufacturing business. The ET News piece says that Samsung also plans to move into a whole bunch of new areas, including cloud computing and hi-tech materials … 
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Google Street View has taken us to some pretty funky places, including the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Eiffel Tower, a Bond villain’s lair, a trek up to the top of Mount Fuji , animal park tours, a Venice Gondola ride and visits inside Dr Who’s TARDIS, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and a submarine.

But there are still some places Street View doesn’t yet reach, so if you have a favourite hike, cycle ride or rock climb you want to share with others, you can now create your own Street View style tours through Google’s Views community.

Have you ever tried to convey the feeling of walking through your favorite park? Or have you wanted to create a virtual tour of your business to attract customers? Well, starting today, it’s now possible for you to build your own Street View experiences to do just that. Using a new feature in our Views community, you can easily connect your photo spheres to create 360º virtual tours of the places you love, then share them with the world on Google Maps …

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A couple of days after Google started inviting Glass Explorers to upgrade to the second generation model, Google employee Brian Matiash posted photos showing Glass mounted on a pair of prescription glasses – then later removed them. You’d have thought Google of all companies would know you can’t erase things from the Internet …

It appears that the modified Glass unit has a slot in the top into which the glasses are fitted. It looks from the photos like quite a few designs of prescription glasses and sunglasses would be compatible with the unit.

Roll-out of Glass Explorer program is very gradually expanding, with existing Explorers recently invited to buy Glass for a friend after previously being given three invitations to pass on back in September.

Second photo of the prescription glass model below … 
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Google has now added the Play Music app to the MyGlass page, allowing Glass users to use voice controls to play music through the device. The announcement was made by Google engineer Stephen Lau on Google+.

The Play Music APK was first spotted in the Glass XE11 update last month, and users were able to side load the app, but it was not officially listed by Google at the time. Now it is. As we explained then:

Once the app is loaded, simply say “OK Glass, listen to,” then the name of a song, artist, album, or playlist. A card will then pop up with results and allow you to specify what to play. A new card also stays pinned for further music control, including Play, Stop, Skip, Rewind, and volume control … 
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Reuters reports that Samsung is expected to spend a massive $14B on advertising & marketing this year, accelerating a trend seen earlier in the U.S., but questions both the value and the strategy.

Samsung spends a bigger chunk of its annual revenue on advertising and promotion than any other of the world’s top-20 companies by sales – 5.4 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Apple spends just 0.6 percent, and General Motors 3.5 percent […]

But, while Samsung has become the world’s biggest advertiser, spending $4.3 billion on ads alone last year, its global brand value of $39.6 billion is less than half that of Apple, which spent only $1 billion on advertising, according to Interbrand and ad researcher Ad Age.

Brand experts say the spend is probably driven by Samsung’s desire to change its image from a fast-follower – a company that spots new ideas from competitors and quickly launches its own version – to an innovator … 
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The one-step installer for CyanogenMod – an open-source, modified form of Android that adds functionality to an Android handset – has been pulled from the Play Store by Google, on the ground that it does not offer a simple ‘revert’ option as required by the store’s terms & conditions. Google argues this means it violates the warranty terms of handsets.

Today, we were contacted by the Google Play Support team to say that our CyanogenMod Installer application is in violation of Google Play’s developer terms.

They advised us to voluntarily remove the application, or they would be forced to remove it administratively. We have complied with their wishes while we wait for a more favorable resolution.

CynanogenMod allows you to replace the manufacturer or carrier firmware with a custom version that allows you to over-clock the CPU and do a whole bunch of things you might not be able to do otherwise, like wifi & Bluetooth tethering, and playing music in the FLAC lossless format … 
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DisplayMate, a company specializing in scientific display testing and calibration, gave top marks to the Kindle Fire HDX 7, saying its advanced display technology was “almost magical.” The Nexus 7 took 2nd place, with the Retina iPad Mini “a distant third.”

The Kindle Fire HDX 7 is Amazon’s 3rd generation LCD Tablet, and their displays have been improving by leaps and bounds since we first tested them back in 2011. Their Full Size Flagship Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 is the best performing Tablet display that we have ever tested, due in part to using the highest performance LCDs with Low Temperature Poly Silicon LTPS. But the Mini Kindle Fire HDX 7 that we test here is also incredibly innovative because it is the first Tablet display to use super high technology Quantum Dots, which produce highly saturated primary colors for LCDs that are similar to those produced by OLED displays. They not only significantly increase the Color Gamut to 100 percent but also improve the power efficiency at the same time. It’s a very impressive display with very impressive technology.

Quantum Dots are almost magical because they use Quantum Physics to produce highly saturated primary colors for LCDs that are similar to those produced by OLED displays […] Quantum Dots are going to revolutionize LCDs for the next 5+ years … 
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Shortly after a Street View tour of London’s Gatwick Airport, Google has expanded its transit program to encompass 15 other airports, more than 50 train & metro stations – and even allows your virtual trips to take you right onto an airliner at Dubhai.

Google’s blog shows off a small selection of the new locations, including check-in at Madrid airport, arrivals at Tokyo airport, a walk though London’s Waterloo train station and locating your seat on board an Emirates A380 airliner.

The split view, showing both terminal map and Street View walk-thru, is particularly helpful for familiarising yourself with a transit airport in advance of a tight connection … 
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Engadget reports that some developers who had registered their interest in the Glass Explorers program are now receiving emailed invitations from Google.

Although third-party developers have been able to develop Glass apps using a cloud-based API, this approached imposed limitations on what those apps could do. Google recently removed these limitations by offering developers an SDK, or in this case a GDK (Glass Development Kit), previewed here … 
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Affordable home automation has been a long time coming. Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed that it’s the 21st Century and homes still don’t have Star Trek style swishy doors as standard.

But smartphone-controlled heating and lighting is here today. Nest hasn’t yet made it to the UK, so I decided to try out competitor system Tado, which is available in Europe now and expected to launch in the US at CES in Las Vegas in January. I tested it with both an iPhone and Nexus 4.

In the UK, it costs £249 ($400) outright, or you can rent it for £7 ($11.35) a month. Tado claims you will save more on your heating costs than it costs to rent.

The concept

The idea behind Tado is three-fold. First, automation. As well as the programmable timer you have in any heating system, it also monitors the locations of everyone in the household via their smartphones. If everyone is out, it turns down the heating even if the timer says it should be on.

How much it turns it down depends on how far away you are, because it aims to have it back up to temperature by the time you return. Nip out to the local grocery store, and it won’t adjust it much, drive an hour to work and it’ll turn it down a lot … 
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We first showed you leaked photos of a gold-colored HTC One in September, and HTC finally confirmed today that the gold version will be joining the black, silver, blue and red casings.

Apple made gold a fashionable color for smartphones with the champagne option for its flagship iPhone 5s model, and the shade HTC has chosen looks remarkably similar. Both Samsung and HTC have made small volumes of actual gold-plated handsets, but those are not quite the sort of thing you’ll find in your local shopping mall … 
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Zee Aero, a low-profile company based in Mountain View very close to Google X, the company’s research lab, has registered a patent for what appears to be a flying car, reports SFGate (via Gizmodo). And from two photos uncovered by the paper, it looks like the company has already got as far as either a prototype or large mockup.

The patent illustrations look all but identical to an aircraft spotted from a helicopter at an abandoned Naval base on Alameda just under a year ago. If the photo looks a little odd it’s because Greg Espiritu used a camcorder to zoom in and then took this photo of the LCD display.

Here’s one of the patent illustrations:

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Just a day after Google launched a physical card to allow you to more easily withdraw cash and spend your Google Wallet balance, the company has released an update to the Android app allowing you to add additional cards just by photographing them.

Add a credit/debit card just by taking a picture. Both the number and expiration date will be captured automatically …

In one of the coolest doodles yet, Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the British TV series Doctor Who? with a multi-level game in which you can play any of the eleven doctors.

This particular doodle delivers rather more than Google’s description of them as “10 seconds of homepage happiness.”

Clearly Google’s staff are fans of the series, as Street View includes the ability to enter the Doctor’s TARDIS.