Twitter paired with Russian search engine Yandex to integrate tweets for real-time search results.
According to Reuters, Yandex has 60 percent of the market share in Russia while Google only holds a quarter. Twitter and Google are no longer partners, and these days the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine prefers its own Google+ social network combined with personalized search results.
The microblogging service announced today it is giving Yandex permission to meld its pipeline of public tweets, and Reuters said the agreement bears likeness to the contract Twitter has with Microsoft’s Bing…
Google acquired the remaining pending patent applications of Cuil, a search engine once extolled as a prospective Google killer.
Two former Google employees and an IBM employee founded the startup that allegedly indexed more websites than Google without retaining information about past search histories or surfing patterns. Many touted it as one of the most successful startups in 2008.
However, things quickly plummeted for Cuil over stirred controversy concerning the abrupt departure of a cofounder. The search engine’s complex two-column format accompanied by thumbnail images did not help the startup’s causes, either. The website eventually went offline in September 2010…
Google Fiber wants to erect a satellite antenna farm near its data center in Iowa to likely receive content from broadcast networks packaged with its high-speed fiber optic network.
Google Fiber’s application in a Federal Communications Commission Public Notice for Satellite Communication Services hopes to “register a C-band receive-only earth station and a Ku-band receive-only earth station in Council Bluffs, Iowa.” According to DataCenterKnowledge, the satellite antennas would deliver analog and digital audio, as well as video and data services.
The FCC application mentioned various 4.5-meter satellite dishes for access to satellite transmissions, including international television programming through Intelsat 9. Google purchased an additional 1,000 acres in 2007 near its Council Bluffs data center, and Google Maps imagining depicts a plot of land to the west of the data center where the satellite farm could potentially rest (as seen in the top image)…
The Federal Trade Commission released a report today (PDF) based on a survey that found apps for children do not fully disclose the types of data collected nor do they adequately educate parents about data harvesting, and the report’s spotlight is set on both Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store.
The consumer protection agency scrutinized privacy policies, recommended each developer give comprehensible disclosures on how data is accrued and shared, including whether children’s data is linked to social network apps, and it even mentioned conducting a six-month review on disclosures and using enforcement if needed. The report focused on the two main app stores themselves and requested more be done to tell children and their parents about privacy concerns…
The Able Remote app converts an Android tablet or smartphone into an interactive remote control for the Google TV through a personalized button layout, voice command options, and gesture controls.
The app’s creator, Leon Nicholls, took to the official Google TV blog today to spotlight his creation that effectively turns an Android device into a customizable remote that also implements one-touch buttons for launching websites, television channels, or Google TV apps:
Boss your TV around. Now you can use voice commands like “channel CNN” or “app Pandora.” Or launch channels and apps with the touch of a button. Yes, it’s that easy. Your new favorite remote may already be in your pocket.
More information and screenshots are available below.
To get the above search results, go to Google’s main page, type in “Mitt Romney,” and take a gander at the hilarious generated autocompletes for the U.S. presidential possibility.
The top suggestions for the former Massachusetts governor are: “Mitt Romney is Mexican,” “Mitt Romney is a tool,” “Mitt Romney is an idiot,” and “Mitt Romney is a serial killer.”
ABC News was the first to notice the search displayed a host of comical suggestions that also included: “Mitt Romney is a robot,” “Mitt Romney is evil,” and “Mitt Romney is satan.”
A quick inspection for Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich revealed similar rib-tickling phrases:
Google improved its search engine once again by aggregating health-related web content to the top of its main page when users search for symptoms.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company took to the Official Inside Search Google Blogtoday to announce how often people search for health information, as well as what the search engine is doing to make the process easier for Googlers.
“Every day, people search on Google for health information. Many of these searches relate to symptoms they or their loved ones may be experiencing,” wrote Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger, MD. “Our data shows that a search for symptoms is often followed by a search for a related condition.”
Consumer Reports is a nifty website that provides product tests and update availability while serving as a general buying guide for consumer electronics and gadgets, and it just announced the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx as its highest-scoring Verizon Wireless smartphone.
The Razr Maxx is $299.99 on Verizon Wireless with a standard two-year contract. Consumer Reports named it the top-rated phone due to its “exceptionally capacious battery” that surpassed 13 hours during talk-test sessions…
Online retailer Amazon is offering the Motorola Droid 4 4G Android smartphone for $100 less than Verizon Wireless’ price during a limited-time only sale.
The discounted $99 smartphone demonstrates top-notch Android power, fast Verizon LTE, and a premium QWERTY keyboard. The device is hefty at 5-by 2.7- by 0.5- inches and 6.3 ounces, coupled with a large battery and slide-out keyboard. However, its rear and front facing HD cameras, 4-inch 960-by-540 LCD panel and Super Amoled Advanced screen make this Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread-powered smartphone worth the buy.
Amazon allows customers to check their upgrade eligibility before getting too excited over the temporary deal.
Social check-in network Foursquare updated its Android app to encompass Android Beam and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich support.
NFC support on Android products, dubbed the “Android Beam” P2P service, allows devices to exchange data through a small tap/wave gesture over short distances. Foursquare’s upgrade subsequently gives users with Android 4 smartphones the ability to share social discovery information by tapping any two NFC-enabled devices together, and the app embraces NFC tag-reading capabilities for check in’s. NFC is available on Foursquare’s Venue, Lists and Me pages.
“The user experience is great. You just hold your phone against the tap [point]. The check-in screen automatically pops up with the right venue. You’re basically shaving very valuable seconds off the check-in process,” said Foursquare’s Vice President of Mobile International Holger Luedorf during a recent Untether.tv audio interview…
Marketing research firm Compete released a study depicting Google+ as half the size of Twitter, and it suggested the +1 button is now available everywhere on the Internet.
Click to enlarge.
Google’s social platform launched June 28, 2011 and quickly sought to combine personal search, custom social networking, and significance to any website with a new +1 feature (similar to Facebook’s “like” button). The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company saw $37.9 billion dollars of revenue last year— an appropriate correlation to its swelling Google+ service.
The social network reached a high of 20 million unique visitors, 50 million visits, and 200 million page views in December 2011, according to Compete. Those statistics corroborate recent estimates that peg Google+ as gaining 750,000 users daily.
“It is now safe to say that Google+ is becoming an enormous success, with nearly half of the unique visitors of Twitter (40,411,065 unique visitors in December),” announced Compete…
The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine took to its social network platform today to celebrate landing the No. 1 spot on Greenpeace’s Cool IT Leaderboard.
As described in the announcing Google+ post, Greenpeace analyst Gary Cook said “Google tops the table because it’s putting it money where its mouth is by pumping investment into renewable energy.”
Google has a stellar record in going green, and it scored 13 points for Climate Solutions, 17 points for Energy Impact, and 23 points for Political Advocacy in Greanpeace’s report. The organization cited Google’s “clean energy investments” as standing out “among the crowd.”
Set-top box manufacturer Boxee published a blog post this morning and lambasted ambiguous cable companies while decrying them of blocking competition and forcing consumers to spend more money.
Boxee Founder and CEO Avner Ronen claimed “cable companies” are lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to make television viewers rent company-issued set-top boxes and cards. The FCC regulates all things communication, and thus prevents the industry from becoming monopolistic by protecting competition and aiding innovation.
Ronen said cable companies want to stop consumers from connecting wall coaxial to a television or set-top box, and start forcing them to rent a set-top box from service providers for an extra monthly fee. The corporations’ set-top boxes will no longer work with the Boxee Box or similar devices. Such regulation could also affect Google TV, Apple TV, and other products that stream Internet video to the television.
Moreover, the purposed measure would also take away from millions of customers who already connect to a television/tuner without a set-top box by subsequently coercing them to purchase a device and pay a monthly fee to cable companies…
Google announced last spring that Kansas City, K.S., landed the search engine’s super-speed Internet project, but disputed details within the original agreement created a troublesome 10-month delay. However, it now seems KCK is finally fiber-ready.
Google claimed it would begin KCK customer signups for the service in the fourth quarter of 2011, and the company planned to power-up the fiber optic network in the first quarter of 2012. For a while, it seemed those plans would not come to fruition, but Google announced in an official blog post today that it is ready to lay fiber now.
“We’ve measured utility poles; we’ve studied maps and surveyed neighborhoods; we’ve come up with a comprehensive set of detailed engineering plans; and we’ve eaten way too much barbecue. Now, starting today, we’re ready to lay fiber,” wrote Google Access General Manager Kevin Lo.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company said it plans to stretch thousands of miles of cables across Kansas City, K.S., and Kansas City, M.O…
Americans were busy consuming record amounts of chicken wings and dip during yesterday’s big game, but they were also mobile web browsing more than ever before.
According to an official Google blog post, United States viewers used their tablets and smartphones to Google the Giants and Patriots, halftime acts and the best Super Bowl advertisements.
“In fact, around 41 percent of searches related to [Super Bowl ads] that were made during the game came from mobile devices, up from 25 percent for the same time the day prior,” wrote software engineer Jeffrey Oldham.
The Super Bowl XLVI streamed live for the first time this year, and a soaring spike in related searches came with the flagship circumstance. Predominate searches initially came from desktop devices, but mobile devices leaped forward as the four-hour game launched into full swing.
Read below for more details on Google and the Super Bowl.
The world’s largest democracy is asking Google and 20 other companies to respect a law passed last year and bar offensive material online after a private petitioner decided to sue them over potentially insulting images to Hindus, Christians and Muslims.
Google, YouTube and Blogspot removed some content from India-based websites Monday to adhere to a court directive that cautioned a China-like crackdown, according to Reuters (via The Globe and Mail). Google has not name the blocked websites.
“(Our) review team has looked at the content and disabled this content from the local domains of search, YouTube and Blogger,” said Google spokesperson Paroma Roy Chowdhury to Reuters.
The Indian law passed last year makes Internet companies responsible for user content posted online and allots 36 hours to remove any offensive content…
The technology world is abuzz with great minds, great innovators, and great…men?
According to an official Google blog post from this morning, women hold less than one third of the world’s engineering gigs, despite the female sex making up more than half of the global population. Moreover, fewer than 15 percent of United States female students take Advanced Placement computer science tests. The same rule goes for high-tech regions of the world, such as Israel.
The breach between males and females in the technology industry leaves room for controversy, and such dissension reared its head at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The annual event featured scantily clad “booth babes” hired by some companies to promote their —well— booths. The practice led many to wonder if it is an effective marketing strategy or a reflection on gender gaps in technology.
The hot issue further propelled when ZDNet posted a picture of a female developer at CES 2012, but the publication referred to her as “The Saddest Booth Babe In The World” due to her somewhat emotionless face during the moment the photograph was snapped. Critics lambasted the photo caption because the woman looked nothing like a typical show booth babe, but rather a bored developer with no one around for presenting.
A female group of engineers at Google in Israel is determined to resolve this widespread setback in the industry by encouraging women to enter the technology realm. Google initiated the “Mind the Gap!” program in 2008 with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers to embolden girls with technology, science, and math-centric education. The program establishes monthly school visits to the Google’s Israel office and tech conferences at various universities to help the girls learn technology, computer science, and its applications…
Well, it is finally here: Facebook’s IPO filing was just made public, and the monster document details information about the social network’s value, revenue, and its No. 1 competition—Google.
The filing brims with particulars that private companies do not need to share, but public companies do, and there are even scattered bits of related data points (like market position risks, financial conditions required for success, and threatening rivals). In this case, Facebook made it well-known that Google is its main foe.
Let’s get a few of the nitty gritty details out of the way before mentioning the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Company’s opponent woes. Facebook filed S-1 papers this afternoon to raise at least $5 billion with plans to start selling stock this spring…
Analytics firm Localytics released a study today depicting Android fragmentation as a not-so serious issue in recent times.
Fragmentation is the inability to develop an application against a singular reference and achieve its intended behavior throughout all devices or operating systems suitable for the application. Localytics pinpointed Android’s succession to a couple operating systems, screen sizes, and display resolutions as the primary factors contributing to the removal of fragmentation among handheld devices and tablets…
While the world is busy touting Amazon’s mediocre quarterly financial results announced earlier today, 9to5Google is only interested in the Android side of the online retailer’s wide spectrum.
It seems the Seattle-based Company’s net income plummeted in the fourth quarter of 2011, but Android productivity was on the upswing, with Android app sales in the Amazon Appstore and Kindle Fire sales skyrocketing to new heights
Amazon reported net sales increased to $17.43 billion, which is a 35 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2010; however, the net income decreased 58 percent to $177 million versus $416 million from the quarter a year prior.
According to Amazon, sales for the Kindle e-reader and tablet line increased by 177 percent from 2010’s third quarter during the nine-week holiday sales period. The Android-based Kindle Fire tablet was subsequently the top-selling product on Amazon for 17 weeks preceding Dec. 31.
“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” said Founder and CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65 percent unit growth and now represent 36 percent of total units sold.”
Meanwhile, Android customers for the Amazon Appstore nearly tripled in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter of 2011, and customers downloaded more apps from the Amazon Appstore than every previous quarters combined.
A conference call containing forward-looking statements regarding the Company’s earnings results will be webcast live today at 5 p.m. ET, and it will be available for three months at www.amazon.com/ir.
Amazon’e entire Q4 2011 financial press release is available below.
Google dismissed its Kenya Country Lead Olga Arara-Kimani, along with a “technical guy in Zurich,” over the recent Google-Mocality scandal.
The information is not officially confirmed by Google. However, Kenyan blog NairobiTech reported Olga was “picked for the fall,” because a “sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the storm.”
The firings coincide with a Jan. 27 Google+ post by Europe and Emerging Markets Product and Engineering Vice President Nelson Matto:
We’ve concluded our investigation into the serious allegations about our use of data from Mocality’s website in Kenya. We’re very sorry this happened. We’ve taken appropriate action with the people involved and made changes in our operations to ensure this doesn’t occur again.
Rep. Edward Markey, a prominent U.S. lawmaker on privacy issues, announced earlier this week he was concerned with Google’s new privacy policy, and he further addressed his worries on Thursday by calling for a probe into Google’s handling of consumer data.
Google’s offerings include its globally popular search engine, Gmail, YouTube, Search plus Your World, Google+, and more, which are streamlined under the merging of 60 privacy policies intended to “mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” The unified policy’s primary objective is to assemble and integrate information from across Google’s products and services as a single throng of data that the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company can use to target advertising dollars.
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Markey released a Jan. 26 statement contending that the new policy changes should allot premium consumer control, and in the meantime, he plans to ask the Federal Communications Commission to investigate if such options exists for Google users:
“All consumers should have the right to say no to sharing of their personal information, particularly when young people are involved. Google’s new privacy policy should enable consumers to opt-out if they don’t want their use of YouTube to morph into YouTrack. Consumers – not corporations – should have control over their own personal information, especially for children and teens. I plan to ask the Federal Trade Commission whether Google’s planned changes to its privacy policy violate Google’s recent settlement with the agency.”
Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. —while awaiting Google consumption— announced its Q4 2011 financial figures today, and the results are paltry.
The Illinois-headquartered communications corporation reported an $80 million loss on revenue of $3.4 billion. In Q4 2010, Motorola Mobility published a $100 million profit.
The red ink terrain expands to the company’s trend of dwindling phone shipments, as it sent out a mere 10.5 million devices in Q4 2011 versus 11.3 million from the same quarter a year earlier. The company shipped 42.4 million devices total in 2011 that includes 18.7 million smartphones and an additional million in tablets. However, Q4 2011 is only accountable for 200,000 units, despite the Xoom 2 launch and Xyboard series.
Sprint issued over-the-air updates last week that removed Carrier IQ and provided various bug fixes and enhancements to a few devices, and now the Samsung Epic 4G Touch is receiving a similar software update.
The OTA update starts today and will completely rollout within 10 days. According to Android Police and Sprint’s Community website, the Samsung smartphone update includes Carrier IQ removal, multiple calendar alerts dismissal, and Commercial Alert System activation. Users should visit the Samsung Epic 4G Touch Software Update blog for complete install instructions.
