Late last night, Google’s Sergey Brin took to his Google+ account to post his thoughts on the eve of the U.S. elections and offer a plea to the winner. Brin explained he is “dreading today’s elections,” while describing government as “a giant bonfire of partisanship”:
I must confess, I am dreading today’s elections…Not because of who might win or lose…Not because as a Californian, my vote for President will count 1/3 as much as an Alaskan (actually it won’t matter at all — I’m not in a swing state)…Not because my vote for Senate will count 1/50 as much as an Alaskan…But because no matter what the outcome, our government will still be a giant bonfire of partisanship
His request for the winner? Withdraw from any political party and govern independently: Expand Expanding Close
The Wall Street Journal just published a lengthy report detailing how Google convinced Nevada state assemblywoman Marilyn Dondero Loop, as well as other states’ transportation committees, to introduce legislation that would help legalize its driverless cars for streets.
“This will save taxpayers countless millions of dollars and revolutionize driving as we know it. No more being distracted, no more accidents, and not another DUI attorney again.”
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company persuaded lawmakers, according to The Wall Street Journal, with “demonstrations and rides in its exotic cars,” and it subsequently earned “legislative wins” in Nevada, California, and Florida. There are even bills pending before legislators in Hawaii, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia:
In the process, the Mountain View, Calif., company is building its credentials as an astute political operator. Google has been “pretty savvy” at navigating state capitols, said Frank Douma, a transportation-policy author and associate director at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. With its self-driving cars, Google “knew what they were doing by moving forward in Nevada” before approaching bigger states, he said. “If you blow it in the first state, you’ve really got problems.”
Success at legalizing self-driving car technology has broader implications for Google. Skills learned from lobbying state lawmakers could aid other endeavors that will require local policy-making, including the potential expansion of its Google Fiber Internet and TV service into markets dominated by cable companies.
Google spent roughly $9 million during the first and second quarters of 2012 lobbying in Washington and coaxing lawmakers and U.S. Department of Transportation officials, but Google did not disclose how much went toward lobbying state officials.
U.S. Judge Lucy Koh granted Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone in June, and the decision resulted in the temporary removal of the device from Google Play pending a software fix with Android 4.1. Today, Reuters reported that Apple’s U.S. injunction on the Galaxy Nexus has been reversed.
TheNextWeb got its hands on the official order. Samsung argued that its product would “sell almost as well without incorporating the patented feature” :
Samsung argued, somewhat humiliatingly, that the sales of the Galaxy Nexus were so poor that they didn’t pose a threat to Apple’s iPhone and that the unified search feature was not essential to the success of its device. The appeals court apparently agrees, as it states in its official order:
…it may very well be that the accused product would sell almost as well without incorporating the patented feature. And in that case, even if the competitive injury that results from selling the accused device is substantial, the harm that flows from the alleged infringement (the only harm that should count) is not.
According to Reuters, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled the court “abused its discretion in entering an injunction” and will send the case back to the California court for consideration. Expand Expanding Close
The concept car, dubbed “NSC-2015, can park or drive up to a passenger when commanded by a smartphone. In the Nissan press video above, a demonstration at CEATEC 2012 shows the modified Nissan Leaf responding to an Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S III.
Nissan specifically said the car could search for an empty space and park itself after a driver has left the vehicle and then the driver could later summon the car with just a simple smartphone tap.
Update: During a Q&A following the signing of Google’s autonomous car bill today, Sergey Brin was asked how long until the public would be using the vehicles. While noting he plans for a broader subset of employees to test the vehicles in the near future, Brin noted he expects the public to begin using the vehicles within 5 years. Sergey also noted the company has had conversations with many car manufacturers but Google doesn’t currently have plans to build cars itself.
“Self driving cars do not run red lights” -Sergey
In a tweet from the Google Public Policy Twitter account, Google noted today that California Gov. Jerry Brown will be signing its autonomous vehicle bill supporting Google’s effort to bring its self-driving cars to public roads. Google will be streaming the signing at 1pm PT on the Google YouTube Channel (embedded above).
The Bay Citizenreports Google is now only awaiting approval from Gov. Jerry Brown as its driverless car bill passed 37-0 in the Senate and 74-2 in the Assembly. The bill, which was put together by legislative staffer Howard Posner and sponsored by state Sen. Alex Padilla, would allow Google and other companies to test their driverless cars on public roads and require new laws governing the operation of the vehicles in public:
Padilla’s bill, SB 1298, would allow companies to test self-driven cars on public roads and require the DMV to draft rules governing use of the vehicles by the public. The measure also would define a car’s “operator” as the person sitting in the driver’s seat, or if there’s no one in the driver’s seat, the person who “causes the autonomous technology to engage.”… In its final form, the bill would give the DMV authority to reject the use of driverless cars that did not meet its standards. The measure also would require that owners be notified about what data their car is collecting, but it did not resolve questions of liability.
Google provided a statement to The Bay Citizen in an email: Expand Expanding Close
With Apple and Samsung’s jury trial slated to kick off in a federal district court in San Jose, Calif., this Monday, AllThingsD points us to trial briefs where Samsung’s lawyers argued Apple’s inspiration for the original iPhone CAD drawings and designs were inspired by a Sony product:
Right after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a “Sony-like” design for an Apple phone and then had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared. Confirming the origin of the design, these internal Apple CAD drawings prepared at Mr. Nishibori‘s direction even had the “Sony” name prominently emblazoned on the phone design, as the below images from Apple‘s internal documents show..
Soon afterward, on March 8, 2006, Apple designer Richard Howarth reported that, in contrast to another internal design that was then under consideration, Mr. Nishibori‘s “Sony-style” design enabled “a much smaller-looking product with a much nicer shape to have next to your ear and in your pocket” and had greater “size and shape/comfort benefits.” As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed in deposition testimony, this “Sony-style” design he prepared changed the course of the project that yielded the final iPhone design.
The article referenced above is from a 2006 interview with Sony designers that appeared in Businessweek.
CamUp filed a lawsuit late last week that claimed Google ripped its video-chat feature for Google+ and YouTube.
The lawsuit filing revealed Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president, along with a few Mountain View engineers, approached the New York-based startup at the South by Southwest Festival in March 2011. They later met in London to negotiate adding a Hangout-like button, called “Watch with your friends on CamUp,” to Google’s popular video-sharing platform, YouTube. Despite receiving accolades on its product, CamUp did not hear from the Googlers after the meeting.
By May 2011, CamUp detected an alarming amount of visits from Google’s headquarters in California. The startup suggested that the traffic is evidence of Google beginning to examine its product for copying purposes. Google launched Hangouts with a “Watch your friends” button just one month later, which were allegedly indistinguishable from CamUp’s offerings.
CamUp is seeking damages, an injunction to remove Hangouts on YouTube and Google+, and it is suing Google UK’s Director of Business and Markets Richard Robinson.
Google is marking any LGBT-related query this month with a rainbow-colored banner under the search box.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company is once-again celebrating LGBT Pride Month, as it has down for the last five years in a row, by adding a bit of color to its search.
U.S. President Barack Obama declared June as LGBT Pride Month for 2012. The month-long stance is against discrimination and violence toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, with promotion for equal and civil rights.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted Project Glass a patent that protects the trackpad feature of Google Glasses.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin appeared with his wife, Anne Wojcicki, on California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s Current TV show last month to briefly let the politician demo a pair of Google Glasses. During “The Gavin Newsom Show” interview (above), Brin gave the world a glimpse as to how the space-age spectacles work.
Viewers immediately noticed a trackpad-like control on the right side of the augmented-reality glasses, but the USPTO just protected the feature by granting Project Glass a patent for the trackpad. The patent covers a sensor device, for either side, that tracks gestures and finely controls the heads-up display. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company also detailed several gestures that work with the trackpad—such as scrolling, tapping, or flipping—to provide visible, semi-transparent options.
Last time we checked in on the ongoing U.S. patent-related court cases between Apple and Samsung, Apple’s lawyers were requesting to add the Galaxy S III to its previous motion for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus line of products from February.
Apple was hoping the courts would agree to withhold sales of the S III until a ruling on the preliminary injunction was made. Samsung recommended the judge dismiss Apple’s request and file a new motion, but Apple attorney Josh Krevitt threatened Samsung at a hearing on Thursday that Apple could file a temporary restraining order as early as today to stop sales of the S III before it launches June 21. Bloomberg reported:
Josh Krevitt, a lawyer for Cupertino, California-based Apple, told Koh he was considering filing a request for a temporary restraining order in the interest of blocking sales of the Galaxy S III before its scheduled release in the U.S. this month… Krevitt said a court order temporarily barring Galaxy S III sales in the U.S. will create “a mechanism to allow the court to decide this issue before the launch.”
First Samsung will have to prove in court today that the Galaxy S III includes a “different combination of features” from the Nexus in order to prevent Apple from adding the device to the previously requested preliminary injunction. According to Bloomberg, Samsung lawyer Bill Price claimed: “Apple’s urgency stems from its inability to “compete against the new features” of the Galaxy S III, and the company is trying to “prevent a phone from getting to the public that is better than Apple’s in many, many respects.”
Reuters noted that several Google attorneys attended Thursday’s hearing. If Apple files for a temporary restraining order, the scheduled July 30 trial date would likely be delayed. Apple is also trying its best to kill HTC.
Apple put forward a second California litigation against South Korea-based Samsung earlier this week when it sought the court’s consent to add the Android-powered Galaxy S III smartphone to its motion for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus.
Apple made this move approximately 20 hours after I wrote about the Galaxy S III being “the obvious next target”. In my blog post I speculated that Apple might bring a preliminary injunction motion against it, possibly after awaiting tomorrow’s preliminary injunction hearing. Apple decided to forge ahead now. Apple is on the offensive against Android. Earlier this week it filed an ITC complaint requesting an immediate import ban of 29 allegedly-infringing HTC devices. There’s an important overlap: the “data tapping” patent that Apple is seeking to enforce against HTC’s current generation of products is one of two patents Apple is using against the S III.
Apple purchased the S III in the United Kingdom, where Samsung launched it on May 29. The U.S. launch date is June 21 — precisely two weeks after the preliminary injunction hearing.
Apple’s motion notes that “[a]ccording to press reports, Samsung has already sold over nine million preorders of the Galaxy S III; indeed, the Galaxy S III has been reported to be the most extensively preordered piece of consumer electronics in history.”
Apple filed the first preliminary injunction motion against the Galaxy Nexus in February over four disputed patents. The Cupertino, Calif.-based Company’s requested in its latest motion that Samsung withhold the launch of the device’s successor in the United States until the court rules on the preliminary injunction request.
Samsung replied to the motion this afternoon, contending Apple cannot continue to add to its record for the Galaxy Nexus:
“If Apple wishes to seek an injunction against the Galaxy S III, the Court should require Apple to file a new motion and allow the parties to develop a full factual record on all four factors. Accordingly, the Court should reject Apple’s motion to amend its current notice of motion for a preliminary injunction.”
Sony and Google introduced a new Google TV product at an event today in Palo Alto, Calif. Phandroid was on-hand for the event and noted the box also comes with a completely redesigned double-sided remote that integrates a multi-touch trackpad on one side and a full keyboard on the other. There is not much word on pricing or specs, but Sony is expecting to launch the Google TV 2.0 device sometime this summer with more information likely coming out of Google I/O. Go past the break for videos of the device and remote from the event:
Reuters reported that a judge rejected Google and Apple’s bid last night to have an antitrust lawsuit dismissed. The lawsuit claimed the companies illegally entered “no-poach” agreements in an effort to stop competitors from stealing talent:
District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, rejected the companies’ bid to dismiss claims brought under the Sherman Act and California state law, in a decision released Wednesday night. […] The proposed class action lawsuit was brought by five software engineers, who accused the companies of conspiring to depress employee pay by eliminating competition for skilled labor.
Other defendants in the case included Intel, Adobe Systems, Intuit Walt Disney Co’s Pixar, and Lucasfilm.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/rgZuUTRvzso]
YouTube announced it is live-streaming “Coachella 2012” all weekend long on its video-sharing platform.
“Since 2001, the the Coachella Music and Arts festival has brought thousands of fans to southern California to kick off the music festival season in style. For the second year, YouTube will be live streaming the action, with a three day broadcast of the festival, presented by State Farm,” explained Google’s Music Marketing Manager Tim Partridge on the Official YouTube Blog.
Google expanded its GoMo initiative to offer small businesses an opportunity to mobilize their websites for free.
According to Fortune, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine teamed with startup Duda Mobile to offer the $9 per month service at no cost for an entire year starting today. Users will save $108 a year, and then they can purchase the premium service after the complimentary period ends—if desired.
In a blog post, Duda Mobile’s Dennis Mink explained the collaboration:
Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well as us consumers who no longer want to pinch and zoom our way through their regular websites on our phones.
World—meet Google Consumer Surveys: Just when it looks like Google has extended its reach into every dark corner of the Internet, the search engine launches a new service to reap more cash online.
Google just launched a new feature called “Account Activity” that sends account-holders monthly encrypted reports about their signed-in frittering across the Web and Google services.
Once a user opts-in to the feature, Google will confirm and then send the first monthly report (see image below). The full-report gives Account information, such as locations, browsers, and platforms employed while Internet surfing.
The report also gives Gmail specifics, like most contacted addresses and to-and-fro message counts, and it breaks-down other Google services’ particulars, including Web history with users’ top searches, types, and queries, and a personal YouTube report on uploaded video activity and viewers’ location data. Users can also delete old reports or browse previous months as they begin to pile up.
The “Googleplex” has been Google’s hallmark offices for years and rates as one of the top places to work by many magazines. According to a new report from the Mercury Times, Google is expanding on its already large Googleplex. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company reportedly plans to spend $120 million to add new advancements to its sprawling headquarters, from a new museum to new testing labs for the secret Google X projects.
Google plans to open a new Experience Center as a museum not open to the public. The Experience Center would show Google’s history to special invited groups. Some of the products shown off could potentially be confidential. The focus here would be selling products to groups, such as school districts.
There has been much in the news lately regarding Google’s “Project X.” In Project X, the team is reportedly working on new HUD glasses, which we exclusively told you last month. As part of its new $120 million addition, Google is attaching new additions to that sector. Google is also adding to its “Google/@home” initiative. As part of @home, Google is reportedly developing a new streaming home-entertainment device. This break through into consumer electronics could be announced tomorrow, according to a teaser from the Google TV team.
Late last week we told you that the U.S. Justice Department apparently had evidence that Google, along with Apple, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, Intel, Walt Disney and Lucasfilms, entered “no-poach” agreements as part of an antitrust investigation from 2010. U.S. District Judge Lucy H Koh made a statement yesterday at the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., confirming the companies must face a lawsuit. According to the report fromBloomberg, Koh said she would allow plaintiffs to re-file their complaint even if an initial request by the defendants to dismiss the claims is granted.
Judge Koh’s decision yesterday will result in Google and the other companies having to provide a detailed account of the agreements made with other companies. They must also allow lawyers to take depositions. One lawyer representing the plaintiffs, Joseph Saveri, said, “We get to see what really happened,” claiming the case could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Google provided statements to Bloomberg claiming they have “always actively and aggressively recruited top talent,” while the others have declined to comment.
AT&T started rolling out LTE in California’s San Francisco market earlier this month, and now the company is moving south to Los Angeles. The Samsung Skyrocket with LTE capabilities that I am testing (great phone, by the way) started detecting LTE connection around the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) area. The speeds in this instance are not as fast as they are (yet) in other markets, but they are in line with the LTE speeds seen in San Francisco last week. In addition, they certainly beat HSPA+.
The speeds I am seeing in L.A. are around what is shown in the image above: 18mb/s up, 5mb/s down.
An AT&T spokesperson told 9to5Mac:
We’re continuing to expand our 4G LTE coverage nationwide. As part of our rollout, we’re regularly testing and turning up parts of our network, including in additional markets, so some customers with LTE devices may already see faster speeds.
Therefore, LTE in L.A. has not officially been announced, but now we know it is definitely in testing around the areas of L.A. This testing likely means an official rollout soon. As testing progresses, we should see LTE in more areas of L.A.
Let us know if you spot any LTE connection in unannounced regions.
Amazon Affiliate members in California got a rude awakening this morning when they received and email from Amazon telling them that all Affiliate programs would be terminated by September 30th. This is in reaction to a proposed CA law that would tax Amazon purchases because Affiliate Account holders (workers) live and work in the State.
The whole thing is up for debate but we found the last sentence in the letter (whole thing pasted below the fold):
We are also working on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available.
A microkitchen inside Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google, which employs 26,000 people, will hire more new employees this year than ever before. It doesn’t come as a surprise then that the company is about to build its own office space, something they have never done before. According toMercuryNews.com, the company will spare no expenses to build a 600,000 square feet of office space for its rookie employees affectionately called Nooglers. This compares to the 4.3 million square feet in total for their Mountain View headquarters, with 65 buildings stretching along more than a mile of Charleston Road. It’ll be custom build from the ground up and Google will employ some cutting-edge green designs, too….
