Google

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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

While conducting a search on Google+, a user can only comment on an existing post or share a found item, however, the Google+ team announced a new feature today that lets users start a conversation directly from search results.

Until now, options for interacting with a certain phrase or interest was limited to commenting and posting. The newly announced component suddenly turns a search into a conversation and relieves the pressure from users needing original content to partake in discussions…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google announced two new features for Google+, including a “What’s Hot” stream that allows users to see the most interesting content shared throughout Google+, and users can now view who has “+1′d” posts —not just the count.

These minor tweaks display Google’s attempts to make Google+ more interactive and attractive. The “What’s Hot” stream on mobile devices could be a response to Twitter’s “Discover” feature that surfaced last month. It is accessible in the Web app by swiping to the right of the Circles stream, and a constant view of trending posts for Google+ will immediately appear. This ensures a flurry of content, even when people within a user’s Circles are silent for the day…

Expand
Expanding
Close

If you are after an Ice Cream Sandwich tablet you now have exactly two options: the ASUS Transformer Prime which got the update last week, or the Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi that just got ICS, according to Motorola.

Note that only the Wi-Fi version gets ICS.  The 3G/LTE versions are coming shortly —we are assuming— due to radio issues.

It is still impressive of ASUS/embarrassing for Google/MOT that ASUS beat the Android tablet reference design to ICS.  The press release is available below…

Expand
Expanding
Close

[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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google and many other websites went black today to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, but now the globally popular search engine has taken the protest one step further.

Pierre Far, a Webmaster trends analyst at Google, announced on Google+ today that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company slowed its web crawlers to continue support against U.S. anti-piracy bills.

More information is available below.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[ted id=1329 lang=en]

Everyone has their SOPA/PIPA things today (and that is good!).  Here is ours.

My former professor, Clay Shirky, explains what SOPA and PIPA are, what will happen if these are passed and why it is bad.  He’s good at this stuff.

Yes it’s Flash (original version here).
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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]

Expand
Expanding
Close

Interbrand assesses brand value across the world, and the consultancy recently released its “2011 Ranking of the Top 100 Brands” with Google sitting tight at the No. 4 spot.

“With a 27 percent increase in brand value in the past year, Google’s position as one of the world’s preeminent brands is growing and nothing seems capable of stopping it,” announced the annual report.

There are three main aspects to the methodology of assessing a brand, according to Interbrand, and those include financial performance, role of brand, and brand strength. Internal factors vary between authenticity and consistency to responsiveness and commitment of the brand regarding strength…

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVum3HsmZ6M&feature=player_embedded”]

Launching on the Google+ Games platform, Google is showing off a new game involving its Google Maps product. The game, as you can see demonstrated in the video above, involves rolling a blue ball around a map. The game is set to launch sometime in February.

Expand
Expanding
Close

It seems with any smartphone announced these days, users are yearning for a white version of the device, and two prime examples are the iPhone and Galaxy S II. Of course, it is not any different when it comes to the newest flagship Ice Cream Sandwich handset out of Google and Samsung, the Galaxy Nexus. Italian publication HD Blog had the chance to photograph the white version of the Galaxy Nexus. As you can see in the gallery below, the back and sides are completely white, while the front keeps the black look. The previous flagship, the Nexus S, follows the same formula.

Specifications for the white version of the Galaxy Nexus will remain the same and still ship in both a 16GB and 32GB version, HD Blog said. The white version will land in Europe (GSM) sometime in the coming weeks. It is not clear if there will also be a white version on Verizon Wireless, but there is always a way to get it in the United States through other channels. Looks good, eh?

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google to include the inspection of social network service Google+, according to Bloomberg.

The publication sourced two people “familiar with the situation,” and cited “competition issues raised by Google+” as the primary aspect of the FTC’s investigation into whether the globally popular search engine gives preference to its own services. The FTC is also inquiring whether such practices violate antitrust laws, according to Bloomberg, who could not identify its sources due to the investigation’s nonpublic status.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company rolled out “Search, Plus Your World” to its search engine Jan. 10 and dubbed the revision a “personal results” feature that displays Google+ photographs, news and comments when user’s conduct Web searches. The Electronic Privacy Information Center promptly called upon the FTC on Jan. 12 to investigate the recent search changes in a letter posted on its website…

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

After being introduced in August, Google just announced improvements to its Gmail offline Chrome app. The first improvement, which the Chrome team called their favorite, is the ability to choose whether you want to synchronize 7, 14 or 31 days worth of mail. The second improvement includes attachment support, keyboard shortcuts, and enhancements when it comes to performance. You can download the Gmail offline Chrome application in the Chrome Web Store.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

[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]

Expand
Expanding
Close