A European Union commissioner chief just gave Google “a matter of weeks” to settle allegations of competition-restricting activity that could help the search engine escape hefty fines and formal charges.

Joaquin Almunia, the European Union’s vice president of the European commission responsible for competition, announced today that he sent a letter to Google’s chairperson Eric Schmidt. The letter detailed the findings of an 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.

The investigation found four areas, or points, where Google’s practices “may be considered as abuses of dominance,” such as: Google exhibits links to its own vertical search services; Google duplicates content from competing vertical search services; competition-restriction agreements between Google and partners on websites where Google provides search ads; and, restrictions that Google sets to the portability of ad campaigns from AdWords to other competitors’ platforms.

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Motorola just tweaked its Android Software Upgrade timetable for Ice Cream Sandwich updates, and it looks like both the United States-based Droid Razr and Razr Maxx are getting Android 4.0 in the second quarter.

The Xoom 3G model is also eyeing an ICS rollout in the same quarter, while the 8.2-inch and 10.1-inch Xyboard, Droid Bionic, and the Droid 4 are upgrading to the latest and current Android OS in Q3 2012. These devices were once listed under “Evaluation & Planning” when Motorola last altered the timetable in February.

It is worth noting the rollout dates could change once Google’s buyout of Motorola completes. Check out the manufacturer’s Motorola Android Software Upgrade News website for a full chart of slated ICS promotions.

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Virgin Mobile, a wholly-own subsidiary of Sprint, announced this morning that it would begin rolling out Google Wallet on its Android phones beginning with the recently announced LG Optimus Elite.

The Elite is a small iPhone-ish sized Android device running Android 2.3. It hit Virgin last week and follows the Optimus V and Slider as popular low-cost Android devices on Virgin Mobile.

Google Wallet has had a rough time with United States carriers. Verizon, with the Galaxy Nexus, blocked it late last year, and AT&T and T-Mobile both have refused to subsidize the Galaxy Nexus GSM version that is available off-plan for $399 through Google’s new Play Store. All three carriers are members of the rival ISIS mobile payments platform, and it is obvious that there is some anti-competitive pressure.

Virgin parent Sprint is a Google Wallet Partner, so it would make sense to see Wallet passed to more Virgin phones and perhaps even Sprint’s other pre-paid subsidiary, Boost Mobile.

The press release follows:

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At this point, at the very least, we already know that Google’s augmented reality glasses are capable of snapping a photo. However, we do not have much of an idea of how the UI might work other than what is in the initial concept video. Our sources previously indicated that Google was using a “head tilting-to scroll and click” for navigation of the user interface. Today, we get a look out how the company is experimenting with alternative methods of input for the glasses from a patent recently granted by the United States Patent & Trademark Office and detailed by PatentBolt.

According to the report, the highlight of the patent is how Google’s glasses could work with hand gestures. The patent described various hand-wearable markers, such as a ring, invisible tattoo, or a woman’s fingernail, which could be detected by the glasses’ IR camera, to “track position and motion of the hand-wearable item within a FOV of the HMD.” In other words, the wearable marker, in whatever form factor, would allow the glasses to pick up hand gestures. The report also noted multiple markers could be used to perform complex gestures involving several fingers or both hands:

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Google launched its Schemer social networking mobile app today as a free iPhone app in the App Store. It originally launched as an invite-only service in December, and then it released on Google Play in April. The service is a social network “all about the schemes” that allows you to post your plans for future activities, meet with friends, and get activities, or “schemes” recommended to you.

The app is completely separate from Google+, but it does utilize your Google+ account to “show you what people in your circles are scheming about.” There is always a possibility we will see more integration between the two services, or Schemer becoming a feature of Google+ after the service picks up steam.

You can download the free Schemer iPhone app from the App Store now.

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Google just announced a small, but welcomed, update to Gmail. Among the new features is the ability to quickly access contact information and Google+ circles from within your inbox.

When searching for an email address in Gmail, in addition to person’s profile image and past conversations, you will now see the person’s contact details like email, phone number, and quick links to start voice and video chats. Google noted the contact data would automatically stay updated for users who have a Google+ profile.

Google has integrated with Gmail through a number of ways in recent months, but today’s update brings further integration with the ability to use Circles in search and filters by typing circle:[circle name] or has:circle. The update also adds profile photos of people in any selected circle in the upper right of the page. The new features will roll out to all Gmail users today.

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Google just made searching the Internet much more tailored—again—by announcing its new Knowledge Graph that identifies the relationship between words in a query.

In a massive blog post on the official Google Blog, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal announced the new feature, while explaining search has historically been about matching keywords to queries, but that is not the ideal approach in the modern era of search.

According to the Singal:

• “Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.
• But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The SVP further described how the Knowledge Graph helps Google decipher ambiguous language. The feature’s methodology determines whether a user meant Taj Mahal the monument or Taj Mahal the musician when searching “Taj Mahal,” and then it displays a more narrowed list of search results.

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Google’s product leader for display ads business, Jason Bigler, took to Twitter yesterday to announce his not-so shocked reaction over General Motors, ya know—the nation’s third-biggest advertiser, slashing its $10 million Facebook campaign budget to zilch.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis K. Berman told the world via the micro-blogging service that GM pulled its $10 million advertising campaign from Facebook because “the ads didn’t work.” Bigler obviously agreed with the reporter’s sentiments.

Google’s ad boss has a reason to jump on the Facebook-bashing bandwagon, though. After all, his company operates its own social network that directly competes with Mark Zuckerberg’s widely-popular website. However, amid the Twitter trash-talk, there just might be some actual truths to Facebook’s potentially flawed campaign techniques when compared to Google’s advertising methods.

According to Business Insider:

Google’s perfect online ad product is the search ad. Search ads are perfect because the people paying for the ads know that the people looking at the ads want to see them. Consumers go on to Google and search for products or information about products, and Google shows them ads from the company that makes that product (and ads from its competitors).  There is no guesswork in the targeting of Google ads. The same cannot be said for Facebook ads. Facebook ads are targeted the old-fashioned way.

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According to a post on XDA-Developers, some Android users discovered Google Play Music is limiting the number of device deauthorizations per account. The new 10-device limit apparently rolled out sometime over the last 60 days and users are now beginning to receive a message informing them they have hit the limit. AndroidandMe pointed out the number of deauthorizations is actually limited to four per year, despite the 10-device limit.

As noted in the post, the issue is specifically problematic for users who often flash new ROMs to their device, because each ROM is recognized as a new device. Fortunately, Google agreed to remove older devices for some users who contacted Google Support via email, but the only solution otherwise is to create a new account and re-upload your music. The post on XDA explained another option is to “restore a Nandroid backup from a ROM that was working before.” This is clearly an issue Google will have to address in the near future…

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This morning’s Stable release of Chrome will soon allow access to open tabs across multiple devices in different locations.

The feature has been available in Chrome Beta since early April. It enabled users logged into Chrome to open browser tabs on one device while permitting access to them on separate devices from within the “Other devices” menu on the New Tab page.

“Say you’ve found an awesome recipe on your work computer while… ahem… working hard at the office. But when you get back home, you can’t quite remember if it was two teaspoons of baking soda or two teaspoons of baking powder,” wrote Software Engineers Raz Mathias on the official Google Chrome Blog while detailing the latest feature. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could pull up the same recipe on your home computer with one click?”

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Patents recently published by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (via Engadget) show Google successfully patented at least the ornamental design of its “Project Glass” augmented reality glasses unveiled last month. It does not look exactly like the prototypes shown off in the concept videos, nor the pair worn by Sergey Brin, but we expect the design will be altered somewhat before it eventually hits the market.

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Google released an animated video today that explores what happens to an email once the “send” button is clicked in Gmail.

The cartoon visually depicts a digital message’s journey as it travels past servers, cables, hard drives, even underground pathways equipped with vampires, from a user’s inbox to another’s mobile device.

The interactive timeline, dubbed “The Story of Send,” is meant to detail Google’s safety, security, and low energy footprint within its data centers as they handle billions of emails each day. While the HTML 5-based documentary provides an illustrated, advertised view of the process, visitors can get a more in-depth look by clicking on the informational tidbits, promotional videos, and photos embedded within the animation.

Check out the feature’s advertisement reel above, or just visit the website. You can even take a peak at 9to5Google’s video screen capture below.

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Google is reportedly close to buying social startup Meebo at roughly $100 million, AllThingsD reported this evening. Citing “two sources familiar with the matter,” the publication said the deal is close to going down.

Meebo launched in 2005 and has had many products over the years like a web-based and smartphone-based IM client and a tool bar that can be loaded on websites to provide readers with social links. These types of toolbars can be found on TMZ, TV Guide, and more. Most recently, the startup launched a new homepage that lets you “create an interest profile to get new and timely information about the things that matter to you.”

Over the years, the Mountain View, Calif.-based (how fitting) startup raised $60 million in funding to date. It most recently raised a monster round of $25 million from Khosla Ventures in 2010.

If the acquisition goes through, Google will most likely use the team and technology to boost its social network/heavy Facebook competitor Google+. More recently, Google bought out Digg-founder Kevin Rose and his team of employees from their endeavor called “Milk.” Rose and his former team are currently assigned to work on Google+, which we expect to be the same fate for the Meebo team.

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