Google

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgJ7yck1qwY&feature=player_embedded]

We already knew Google supported the Raspberry Pi’s goal of bringing inexpensive and programmable hardware to everyone when Eric Schmidt announced some education investments would go toward purchasing the hardware and providing them to educators as teaching aids. However, we get word from the Raspberry Pi foundation today that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has now been ported to the $25 ARM GNU/Linux box. The announcement confirmed “hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly,” but audio is still missing thanks to AudioFlinger support issues. The blog post continued:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra just posted an exclusive link on his Google+ profile for users to Hangout with their fantasy league at NFL.com.

The league is integrating Google+’s popular Hangout video-chat feature on NFL.com to give users a chance to visually interact with other Fantasy Football players from anywhere at any time. This is a huge advancement for the imagination-based sport, which typically eyes participation growth without any changes to technology.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this is the first time Google has implemented Hangouts into a third-party service. The feature is free and available 24/7 by way of a button on fantasy team pages. Google also increased Hangout’s 10-person limit, because leagues usually have about 12 players.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google just sent an email to customers who pre-ordered the Nexus Q to announce it will postpone the consumer launch of its media-streaming device.

The Nexus Q originally received a mid-July shipping time, but Google apparently decided to go back to the drawing board over “initial feedback from users.”

Google is apologizing to those who pre-ordered the $299 Nexus Q by sending them a free one. The U.S.-made device is akin to an Android- and Google services-compatible Apple TV, but it does not run apps.

Google’s email is below.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Microsoft is no stranger to signing up Android vendors to licensing agreements. Most of the major Android device manufactures are already paying the company royalties, and Microsoft is currently involved in various cases with Motorola in the U.S. and elsewhere. The latest from Microsoft’s intellectual property group is a statement posted by the group’s head Horacio Gutierrez and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith (via AllThingsD). In a message titled “A Solid Foundation for Peace”, Microsoft explained its willingness to negotiate a settlement of its current litigation with Motorola:

Microsoft has always been, and remains open to, a settlement of our patent litigation with Motorola. As we have said before, we are seeking solely the same level of reasonable compensation for our patented intellectual property that numerous other Android distributors – both large and small – have already agreed to recognize in our negotiations with them. And we stand ready to pay reasonable compensation for Motorola’s patented intellectual property as well.

However, within the post, Microsoft also noted its requirements for reaching a settlement over its various Android-related patent cases with Motorola—which include a comprehensive agreement covering all patents in question:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google just acquired social media marketing company Wildfire.

AllThingsD reported “people familiar with the transaction” estimate Google bought the social ad business for $250 million, “plus earnouts, employment agreements, etc.”

Wildfire currently serves 16,000 customers, including 30 of the top 50 brands, and it reportedly raised $14 million since founding in 2008. Google will likely merge Wildfire into its ever-expanding social and advertising services to better entice marketers into buying either traditional or display ads for a variety of platforms— even direct rival Facebook.

Both companies took to their respective blogs today to confirm the buyout (below).

Expand
Expanding
Close

As first reported by Chrome Story, owners of newer Chromebooks and Chromeboxes might soon get their hands on more cloud storage…for free. According to references discovered in Chromium OS code, the storage increase will most likely come soon in the way of Google Drive Google currently makes 5 GB available free to users for storing files and documents.

According to the code reference “553 GDATA_WELCOME_TITLE_ALTERNATIVE: ‘Get 100 GB free with Google Drive’,” it sounds very likely that users will be able to receive 100 GB of cloud storage for free. That is definitely useful, especially considering most Chrome OS devices only have 16 GB of local storage. We will let you know when the 100 GB goes official.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[protected-iframe id=”016966f59b9b1a83e76afccc1a4627d7-22427743-18874939″ info=”http://live.wsj.com/public/page/embed-D841AA1C_4DE4_4746_94F0_482A75583F54.html” width=”650″ height=”288″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”]

After announcing it would invest around $100 million in original TV quality content for YouTube last year, Google added almost a 100 new channels offering high-quality content. Today, we get some updates on the progress of the project from a report in The Wall Street Journal. According to WSJ’s sources, advertisers already committed over $150 million in ads on the channels for this year alone. Google also plans to throw another $200 million at the effort going forward. Google will also apparently fund content for international viewers:

YouTube plans to expand its channels initiative to Europe by funding a couple dozen video channels for British and French viewers by next year, according to people familiar with its initiative.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[tweet https://twitter.com/Spotify/status/230264584282447874]

In addition to announcing that the service is now up to 15 million active users and 4 million paying subscribers worldwide, Spotify also announced today that it is rolling out the radio streaming feature (previously only available on iOS) to Android. Same as the iPhone version, the feature provides ad-free radio streams for premium subs and ad-supported streams for free accounts. Unfortunately, the free streams are U.S. only at the moment. You can also save songs from radio streams to a “Liked from Radio” playlist.

What’s in this version:

There’s a great new radio experience in Spotify. Now you can discover and save music on the go! If your station plays a song you really like, save it with a single tap.
New: Start a radio station based on your favorite playlist, genre, album, artist or song.
New: Personalize your radio stations by voting songs up or down.

An interesting post appeared on Reddit today about an upcoming movie on two 40-something interns trying to become successful at an Internet company, but, more intriguingly, the film’s plot supposedly has Google ties.

The Reddit poster claimed his college transformed into a “Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson movie called ‘The Internship’ where they play Google interns.” A quick glimpse at the comments revealed the picture is shooting at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Ga.

According to the college’s website, set preparations for the movie will begin this week, “with production scheduled to wrap up on Aug. 24.” Adam Carlson of Creative Loafing, an Atlanta-based entertainment blog, reported earlier this month that he also spotted the film crew in town with Google:

• As it turns out, I showed up as the crew was beginning prep on an outdoor sequence across the street from the Studios, which would include both a fire hydrant specially painted red and a Google bus.
• The scenes indoors probably had a Google connection, too, […] a Coke machine had been installed on a top floor with a Google banner across it, covering the logo.
• Maybe Owen and Vince — who play out-of-work salesmen reinventing themselves with a tech firm internship — were meant to be at Google? No one would confirm, but the very humid, very Atlanta weather didn’t feel much like California.

A gallery is below.

Expand
Expanding
Close

SageTV’s founder just revealed in a Google+ comment that Fiber TV is powered by his former company’s technology.

SageTV essentially provided a television interface for DVR, music, and photographs, with the ability for users to create and control the media center from multiple devices. In June 2011, SageTV CTO and founder Jeffrey Kardatzke announced that Google acquired his company, and SageTV products have no longer been available for purchase since.

Google launched its Gigabit Google Fiber Internet and TV service in Kansas City this afternoon. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company spent a lot of time demoing its “100 times faster” Internet service, but the majority of the demo was for Fiber TV. The service will give access to YouTube, DVR, on-demand libraries, and Netflix.

While Fiber TV is only available to “Fiberhoods” in Kansas City at the moment, Kardatzke told Google+ folks to “stay tuned” (below).

Expand
Expanding
Close

The blogosphere recently swelled with speculation as to why Samsung removed Google’s universal search function from its premiere Galaxy SIII smartphone, but a new report today revealed the ousting was simply “inadvertent.”

AndroidCentral first revealed the problem: 

• There’s a new over-the-air update rolling out for the international Samsung Galaxy S III (aka Galaxy S3 GT-i9300) this evening. The OTA message identifies it as a “stability update,” but what it also does is remove local (on-device) search functionality in the phone’s built-in Google Search app. The new version — XXBLG6 — is a relatively recent build, having been cooked just a few days ago on Jul. 20. A new baseband version, XXLG6, is also included, but we haven’t noticed any other changes thus far.
• Following legal action by Apple, which temporarily resulted in the Galaxy Nexus being banned in the U.S., Samsung has taken to pre-emptively disabling the ability to search within on-device data (like contacts and applications) on some U.S. Galaxy S3’s. However, the decision to kill local search on the unlocked international model — which isn’t sold in the U.S. — is a little perplexing, not least because Apple has yet to challenge Sammy over local search in the EU or UK, where the GT-i9300 is sold.

Samsung just confirmed to TechRadar, however, that the removal of search functionality on the U.K. version of the Galaxy S III had nothing to do with a legal action by Apple. The mysterious occurrence, which stopped the ability to search for files, contacts, and apps through the built-in Google Search widget, was apparently unintentional.

According to Samsung:

“The most recent software upgrade for the Galaxy S III in the UK included the inadvertent removal of the universal search function. Samsung will provide the correct software upgrade within the next few days.”

A new update will roll out over the next few days to fix the problem.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c]

Google plans to make a “special announcement about Google Fiber and the next chapter of the Internet” at 12 p.m. EST.

The company revealed earlier this week that it would launch the “100 times faster than broadband” Internet service today in Kansas City.

Expand
Expanding
Close

The world must be ending—because Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay just united for a cause.

The Web’s leading giants apparently formed an “Internet Association” to lobby on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post first detailed the alliance, which former Congressional guru Michael Beckerman leads, while it further noted a full list of parties is not yet known. An anonymous source told the publication, however, that the above four companies are the most notable members.

Beckerman most recently served as deputy staff director to the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, and he boasts more than 12 years in Washington under his belt.

“The Internet must have a voice in Washington,” explained Beckerman in a press release (PDF). The Internet Association, which officially launches in September, aims to act as the Web’s executive voice.

Google is already copiously betted in various lobbying issues. 9to5Google even reported earlier this week that the folks in Mountain View spent over $5 million lobbying in Q2 2012.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEMqxcfIqp4&feature=player_embedded]

Google just unveiled its “YouTube Creator Space” in London.

The high-tech studio will essentially allow YouTubers to create premium content for Google’s video-sharing platform. They will have access to technical equipment, and other YouTube content producers, which will undoubtedly encourage quality videos based on fresh, collaborative ideas.

“We’re delighted to announce that in the next few weeks we’ll be opening the doors to our new creator space, housed in the offices of Google London’s Soho office,” announced the company on its YouTube Creator Hub channel.

According to the above video’s description:

Our partners from all over Europe, Middle East and Africa will be able to book time in the space to create and collaborate with other creators, learn new techniques, as well as gaining access to state-of-the-art audio visual equipment, to help them generate great new content for their channels. The creator space is complete with the latest equipment such as DSLRs and cinema cameras, two studios including a green screen and fully staffed editing suites.

The YouTube Next Lab, which is a team “focused on accelerating the growth and development of channels and creators on YouTube,” will oversee the London studio.

Expand
Expanding
Close

A new report from The Wall Street Journal today, citing an SEC filing, noted Google has put an exact value on the patents acquired in its purchase of Motorola Mobility. In the filing, Google claimed “patents and developed technology” acquired in the deal were valued at $5.5 billion—less than half of the $12.4 billion Google paid for the company.

Google also broke down the rest of the purchase price in the SEC filing:

Expand
Expanding
Close

You may already be aware that Google search provides a calculator that offers answers to queries, such as 2+2 directly, from the main search results page. As pointed out by a reader, Google recently updated the calculator search functionality, and it now provides a full HTML5 scientific calculator for these types of search queries. The features work with voice—except for on mobile devices, as they do not have access to the full scientific calculator presented on desktops.

Earlier this month, Google started to roll out a similar widget on its search page for unit conversions, like inches to centimeters. Now, unit conversion queries are presented with the live unit conversion tool (pictured below) that allows you to switch between units of measurements for temperature, length, mass, speed, digital storage, and much more.

Expand
Expanding
Close

We knew the U.S.-made streaming device would ship sometime in July to those who preordered, but today Nexus Q is officially in stock on the Google Play store. It is shipping in “3-5 business days” to U.S. customers. Nexus 7 certainly had a good start. It sold out at several retailers, but many are skeptical the $299 media streamer will do as well.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google and the European Commission consented to the “outlines of a settlement” today, according to The Financial Times (via SearchEngineLand), which, if inked, would spare the search engine from official antitrust charges.

Europe’s premier competition watchdog has long accused the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company of abusing its dominance to suppress opponents in the market. Google previously said it would make company-wide changes to avoid a legal battle and expensive fines, and it seems the most recent outcome of those discussions is a new settlement draft of which the details are currently unknown. The rough deal reportedly also extends to a contentious matter that surfaced late in the talks—mobile search.

Joaquin Almunia, the European Union’s vice president of the European commission responsible for competition, sent a letter to Google Executive Chairperson Eric Schmidt in May. The letter detailed the antitrust investigation into Google’s search practices, and it offered the search engine a chance to remedy its “abuses” by settling.

“I have just sent a letter to Eric Schmidt setting out these four points. In this letter, I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with first proposals of remedies to address each of these points,” said Alumnia.

Expand
Expanding
Close