9to5 Staff

Google Offers, the search giant’s deal-of-the-day website that launched six months ago, is now expanding to five new cities in the United States. Beginning today, people in Charlotte, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio and Tampa can take advantage of the Offers website to subscribe to great deals in the aforementioned cities. According to a post over at the official Google Commerce blog, these deals include $11 for a beer tasting, growler bottle, souvenir glass and soft pretzel at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery in Charlotte ($22 value), $5 for $10 of food and drink at Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque Restaurant in Kansas City, $5 for $12 toward burgers, brews and more at Sobelman’s Pub & Grill in Milwaukee, $10 for $20 of fine sandwiches, pasta, steaks and more at Liberty Bar in San Antonio, and $5 for $10 of Greek cuisine at Louis Pappas Market Cafe in Tampa. You can subscribe to these and other deals via email at google.com/offers or through the Wallet app on the Galaxy Nexus smartphone on the Sprint network.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tmEegvUpGA]

Samsung kick started its anti-Apple Galaxy S II campaign with a November 2011 advert that enraged people who would wait in line for a new iPhone. A follow-up commercial downplayed Apple’s iCloud and iTunes Match services as the campaign continued on Facebook. Earlier this week, Samsung shifted gear with an advert that lambasted Apple’s iPhone over its lack of stock turn-by-turn navigation software akin to Google Maps with Navigation for Android.

Today, the South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate aired another commercial following the “Samsunged” theme and focusing on the barista character featured in the November 2011 commercial. More precisely, it mocks the barista’s latte-making art. Samsung reserved an ad slot during Super Bowl XLVI, therefore, things should get interesting come Feb. 5. Let us know in the comments how you liked the new commercial.

Another advert pitting Android’s speech-to-text capabilities against Apple’s is right after the break.

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Google is adamant on accelerating work on its Google+ social network. By doing so, the company has already stepped on people’s toes. An upcoming Q&A feature from Google does not seem to be aimed squarely at Quora, a popular question-and-answer website, but the Quora people understandably cann0t be too happy about this development. See, according to VentureBeat, the search company is trying out a new capability called “Ask on Google+” allowing you to ask friends about the topics you are searching for. It is akin to Facebook Questions, with one huge advantage: One accesses it easily at the bottom of one’s search results:

Click the link to ask your friends any question related to restaurants, movies, how to make friends on Google+, or other topics. Your question will automatically be posted to your Google+ stream for your friends to answer.

Granted, it is nowhere near as complete as Quora and it lacks the basic component, a Q&A engine. In its current implementation, asking stuff on Google+ from your search results simply puts up an overlay window with a pre-populated Google+ post related to your search query. For example, if I were searching for “2012 Android smartphones,” clicking the “Ask on Google+” link would create the “Hi there! I have a question about 2012 Android smartphones…” message. You can edit the message, select your audience, or add a location, photo, video or URL. The folks with whom you shared the message will not be able to select from custom choices like with Facebook Answers. Still, it certainly does not mean crowd-sourcing answers from your Google+ friends will not take some allure off Quora and similar services— quite the contrary.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sHPfc6whaSk]

Each day, Google’s YouTube video sharing service clocks in more than 4 billion views, a blog post over at the official YouTube blog revealed Monday. The figure represents a 25 percent increase in the past eight months as the number of people who visit YouTube soared to 800 million a month. People are now uploading about 60 hours worth of video to the service every minute, a 25 percent increase over the 48 hours of video uploads a minute in May 2011. The video above is a sample of a new interactive collection of “what happens in a YouTube second” available at onehourpersecond.com.

Yet, only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are monetized with various adverts that appear when users click on clips. Google acquired then-young startup YouTube in 2006 for an astounding $1.65 billion. The Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered Internet giant committed considerable resources to making professional content available through the video sharing service to better pursue its broader entertainment strategy centered around Google TV, a software-based project that drives set-top boxes and networked HD TVs from participating partners.

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A tipster over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out a small —but welcomed— tweak in Google Maps that lets you highlight areas of interest based on upon search queries:

When you search for a city or a county or a ZIP Code, Google Maps now highlights the boundaries of what you searched for. If you are zoomed out, the whole area is shaded pink. If you zoom in a bit, it has just a big pink border with grey shading. Zoom in even more and it’s a dashed boundary with grey shading.

In the above screenshot, I searched for Cupertino, Calif., and Google Maps automatically highlighted the city’s area inside the map view, allowing me to visually grasp the size of Cupertino. Note that the highlighting feature does not work in other Maps views, such as satellite.

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Google just revamped the look of Latitude, its location-aware service akin to Foursquare. According to a post by Google’s community manager for Google Maps, Danial Mabasa, the new Google Latitude interface can be now accessed on desktop browsers at www.google.com/latitude. As you can see from the above screenshot, it is not much different from Google+. However, upon remembering how the old website looked, it is definitely a major makeover that helps achieve consistent user experience across Google’s key properties.

You can now easily access your friends’ list in the left-hand column or click the wrench icon to customize your personal location history and location settings. Whenever you want to manually update your location, just hit the Update button next to your name and approve your browser’s location sharing prompt. Another cool feature lets you playback your location history (should you choose to preserve it) from a select range of dates by pressing the Play button on the bottom left-hand corner of the map.

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One in 10 South Koreans now own a Galaxy S II smartphone made by Samsung as the company announced that sales of the handset in the 48 million-people country surpassed 5 million units, or more than 10 percent of the country’s population. It took Samsung nine months to hit the milestone since the phone’s release at the end of April 2011.

Strong domestic sales helped Samsung achieve a 53 percent market share for smartphones in South Korean throughout 2011. Japanese business daily The Nikkei said the Galaxy S II is the first handset to sell that many units in the country. In September of last year, Samsung sold 3.5 million Galaxy S II smartphones in South Korea. The 1.2GHz dual-core device comes with a 4.27-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 1GB RAM, Android 2.3 and is upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Google CEO Larry Page is on a mission to remodel his company’s organizational structure and preserve startup mentality that helped create the Internet’s most important asset. He has been on it ever since he took over the reigns from Eric Schmidt in April of last year, and just like Steve Jobs did upon his return from exile —Page mercilessly axed many internal projects while doubling down on a few that do matter. He namely focused on Google’s social thing marketed under the Google+ moniker.

We were promised “moonshots” as Page set out to Jobs-ify the company he cofounded with Sergey Brin. Heck, Page’s already been named ‘CEO of the Year’ by Investors Business Daily. Fortune’s Senior Editor-at-Large Adam Lashinsky sat down with Page to discuss life at Google. His exclusive interview with Page revealed that Google is “more realistic about recruiting” and “kinder about tolerating underperformers.”

As of last year, the company began recruiting at such nonpedigreed institutions as Texas A&M and the State University of New York at Buffalo; interview sessions that often involved as many as 12 screenings now average between four and five.

This is in stark contrast to Apple, a company built on secrets and famous for its relentless pursuit of A-players. Lashinsky profiled Apple extensively in his upcoming book called “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works,” due for release Jan. 25.

Page said Google’s famous perks, such as free food and gym, are remaining (“I don’t worry about the cost”). He also noted Google is going the extra mile to help employees live a healthy lifestyle, which includes helping them quit smoking…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8rSlvS-ZfQ]

Google is renowned for its practice of recognizing important anniversaries and famous people from human history prominently on the main Google homepage. The company calls it Google Doodle —an 11-year-old tradition to educate visitors on historic events and people through the power of search. Clicking a Doodle logo for, say, Nikola Tesla, will simply take one to the search result’s page populated with links to popular articles about the famous inventor.

The first Google Doodle was in recognition of the Burning Man Festival of 1998 and was designed by cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Subsequent Doodles were designed by outside designers, often by Dennis Hwang who created most Doodles to date. Today, the search company’s Vice President of Product Management Marissa Mayer issued an invitation to all K through 12 students to apply for the fifth annual United States Doodle 4 Google contest…

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European regulators are moving early on Google antitrust probe, telling Reuters that a decision on a formal complaint against Google for misuse of its market position will be reached in late March, much sooner than expected. EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told the news gathering organization late on Tuesday:

I will receive comments from the case team towards the end of the first quarter. I do not expect anything sooner. Let us see.

Since November of last year, 10 complainants such as Microsoft, VfT, Foundem, Deal du Jour, 1plusV and the Spanish Association of Daily Newspaper Publishers have filed complaints with the Commission, accusing the search giant of misusing its dominance in search. Google’s problem with EU courts could result in a multi-billion dollar fine, as had been the case with EU antitrust probes into Microsoft and Intel in the past.

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Software maker Oracle estimated that each day’s worth of Android activations makes Google approximately $10 million in annual revenue while also strengthening its Google+ service, German patent blogger Florian Mueller wrote on his FOSS Patents blog today. Oracle made this claim at a German court in regards to its patent infringement claims against the search giant:

While this case awaits trial, more than 700,000 Android-based devices are activated every day, all fundamentally built around the copyrighted Java APIs and the enhanced performance enabled by Oracle’s patents. Each day’s worth of activations likely generates approximately $10 million in annual mobile advertising revenue for Google.

Oracle did not explain its math, however, leading Mueller to suspect that the figure is based “on the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user.” Interestingly, Oracle wrote in court documents “Analysts have predicted that the number of new Android devices will reach 2.5 million per day within twelve months.” However, it is not just about mobile advertising, the success of Android is benefiting Google’s other properties, namely its Google+ social network…

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Google recently enhanced the Gmail offline Chrome app and integrated the webmail service with Google+ filters for circles, auto-sync for contacts and sharing features. Today, new capabilities rolled out to Google Apps for Business, Google Apps for Government and Google Apps for Education editions, managed via the Google Apps control panel. Administrators can now take advantage of improved email compliance footers, approved/blocked sender lists and file attachment policies, the search firm wrote in a blog post.

Previously, users had to resort to Google Message Security to use these capabilities. Google said it improved upon these features and “designed them specifically to meet the needs of our Apps customers.” Last September, Google brought out contacts manager from consumer Gmail to Google Apps.

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Soon, you will no longer have to resort to image editing apps such as Adobe Photoshop or Skitch for Android just to adorn your Google+ images with some funny captions. According to Google engineer Colin McMilen, adding text on top of your photographs is easy:

To try it out, drop a photo into the sharebox on Google+, then click the “Add text” button underneath the photo. Type in something funny, then share and enjoy.

Some funny examples are available here. The other improvement involves hashtags that let you tag posts with words or phrases prefixed with the symbol #, like on Twitter. Conveniently enough, Google designer Chris Messina who invented hashtags during his Twitter tenure announced the new feature in a Google+ post:

We want to make it even easier to use and discover hashtags, so today we’re rolling out a new auto-complete feature. Now when you start typing a hashtag in a post or comment, Google+ will present a list of hashtags you might be looking for.

Here is a cool example of dozens of hashtags created for photographers and artists to tag photographs. Just click any hashtag to easily browse through collections of great snaps.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVd9Ogcu_Ps]

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UPDATE [Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 7:35am ET]: Steve Wozniak commented on the original article on Facebook, saying he’s been misinterpreted (again). His full comment can be found at the bottom of this article.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak never shied away from admitting that he uses Android phones on a daily basis —in addition to his iPhone. The famous geek even received the Galaxy Nexus before the rest of the United States (although he likes the Motorola Droid Razr better). Given that Wozniak, a vocal critic of today’s smartphone design, has been misquoted in the past, you may want to take this one with a few pinches of salt. According to reporter Dan Lyons’s story published by The Daily Beast, Woz said Android beats Apple’s iPhone:

My primary phone is the iPhone. I love the beauty of it. But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do. […] If you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little bit, well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways.

The Woz is a long-time friend of Andy Rubin, the head of the Android project and former board member of Danger, Rubin’s previous startup behind the Sidekick smartphone…

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Google’s AdSense team is tweaking the AdSense adverts’ rendering process on desktop and mobile devices, according to a blog post by the AdSense team. As part of the change, the company noted AdSense would automatically optimize how ad units are displayed on computers, tablets and smartphones. The AdSense backend will sense the type of device a website is being viewed from and it will optimize for the given platform. This includes reducing the number of ads per ad slot and increasing the size of the text to make them more legible and noticeable. In addition, an AdSense advert now features a big button that helps a user select it on tiny screens.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsMeo_7wBSs]

When Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he finally “cracked the code” to building an integrated television set that is user-friendly and seamlessly syncs with all of your devices, Samsung Australia’s Director of Audiovisual Philip Newton told the Sydney Morning Herald that Jobs’ was talking about connectivity.

He laughed off the mythical iTV and dissed Jobs’ TV brain wave as “nothing new,” saying the future is now and it is his company’s Smart TVs:

When Steve Jobs talked about he’s ‘cracked it’, he’s talking about connectivity – so we’ve had that in the market already for 12 months, it’s nothing new, it was new for them because they didn’t play in the space. It’s old news as far as the traditional players are concerned and we have broadened that with things like voice control and touch control; the remote control for these TVs has a touch pad.

Samsung is promoting Smart TVs left and right at the CES show that is underway this week in Las Vegas. The company is showing off apps and games such as Angry Birds running smoothly on Smart TVs. Feature-wise, Samsung Smart TVs is also beating Google TVs to the punch with capabilities such as voice interaction, facial recognition, integrated camera controls for multi-video conferencing and multitasking. Samsung covered all aspects of the Smart TV market at its latest CES press conference held Jan. 9, and it seems Google TV —at this point— is certainly lagging in terms of adequate competition.

Sony, Panasonic and LG are also pushing integrated television sets built around the Smart TV platform. While not officially an exhibitor, Apple reportedly dispatched 250 employees to attend the show and monitor what competition is doing; among them is the head of iOS product marketing Greg Joswiak. Apple has been rumored for months to launch 32- and 37-inch television sets in the summer of 2012. Does Samsung see Apple as a threat?

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If you are a blogger and you are using Google’s blogging service called “Blogger,” you are probably aware of its many limitations compared to WordPress— the de facto blogging standard. Google has been slow to address the many concerns Bloggers users have and has been neglecting the service lately. One of the glaring issues has always been Blogger’s commenting system that leaves a lot to be desired.

Today, the Blogger team announced that threaded commenting is now live in Blogger. Previously, there was no way of telling whether posters put up a new comment or responded to another comment on the thread. Threaded commenting, which is a norm on the vast majority of other blogging platforms, solves this problem elegantly with indentation. A small, but welcome fix. Here is to hoping the team is working on bigger issues as Blogger is definitely crying for some love.

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The search giant today introduced a couple enhancements to Hangouts, the group video chat feature of the Google+ social service. The new look of the Hangouts interface follows the design language used across Google’s many properties on the web. Thanks to the optimized layout, there is now more real estate for the actual live video feed, leading to a better and more immersive user experience.

Besides the revamped look, Hangouts now support screen sharing, which Google said, “Has graduated from Hangouts with Extras.” Hangouts screen sharing is designed to enable anyone to easily share what is on his or her computer screen with everyone in the hangout. Google noted that many other extras would soon graduate to Hangouts.

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A smartphone reference design by Intel.

Handset maker Motorola Mobility, which was acquired by Google, and is subject to approval from regulators in the United States and Europe, said at CES 2012 yesterday that it would release fewer phones in 2012. The company also announced a multi-year strategic mobile partnership with Intel to make Android smartphones powered by the chipmaker’s struggling Atom platform.

According to Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha’s roundtable meeting with reporters at CES yesterday, Motorola no longer sees value in dispersing its efforts by flooding the market with countless devices:

A lot of products that are roughly the same doesn’t drive the market to a new place. […] I made this decision independent of what the others will. We’re doing what we think is the right thing.

Motorola issued a warning last week on fourth-quarter results, and the company said numbers would come in below the $3.9 billion that most analysts expected. As for the Motorola-Intel partnership…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbtxoCCFbfo]

Nik Software, the company behind Snapseed, the popular image editing app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, announced yesterday that it will “soon” port the program to Tegra-powered Android tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich for $5 a pop.

Nik Software President and CEO Michael J. Slater said:

We’re thrilled with the success and worldwide recognition of our popular mobile app and are excited to bring the Snapseed experience to Mac users for the first time. By bringing Snapseed to the Mac App Store, we’re able to quickly extend our reach to a worldwide audience of creative amateur photographers while offering our existing mobile users the fully-featured Mac experience they’ve been asking for.

Nik collaborated with Nvidia on the project so expect some snazzy visuals and smooth performance, which is the hallmark of the iOS version. Snapseed sports cool filters and tools like grunge, vintage and drama to make the best out of your photographs. The full list of features follows…

[slideshow]

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Carrier AT&T announced today at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show six new Android devices, including Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Ion, and more. In all, five Android smartphones and one 4G LTE tablet were announced for early 2012.

The new Sony Ericsson Xperia ion —the handset maker’s first 4G LTE smartphone seen above— is an AT&T network-exclusive boasting a 12-megapixel camera and a large 4.6-inch display. The 5.3-inch Galaxy Note largely resembles its European counterpart, sans the added support for 4G LTE radio technology.

Per The Verge’s hands-on, the United States version has “a more traditional four-button capacitive arrangement below the display instead of the single button found on the European model.”  Samsung is advertising this device like crazy in Europe, so it should gain traction in the U.S. if AT&T follows suit.

More information on other devices in AT&T’s lineup are available below the fold.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY-XvDgpv_c]

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