Over the weekend, press renders of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge leaked via Evan Blass, leaving not much to the imagination for the Korean company’s upcoming Mobile World Congress press conference. Now, the S7 Edge has been outed even more, with references to the unannounced device appearing on one page of Samsung’s own website…
Google is rolling out a redesigned Google+ today hat it says focuses on two features, Communicates and Collections, that people said kept them coming back to the service.
Expand
Expanding
Close
By now it’ll come as absolutely no surprise that Google has gone all in on Google+, it’s clearly a major part of the company’s future roadmap. We know that with the evolution of every new feature on Google+, it’s one more step in the search engine giants plans to allow the don’t-call-it-a-social-service to dominate the social world.
Google is reinventing its Web-search technique with direct information for queries to better maintain the majority market share.
The Wall Street Journal said Google aims to replace some Web links with summarized answers and facts. The search formula transition will roll out over the next few months as the search engine begins to merge relevant results with semantic search, which attempts to understand the meaning of words versus keyword identification. One source said the change could influence 10 percent to 20 percent of all search queries.
Under the new strategy, a search for “Mount Everest” will display key attributes, such as the mountain’s location, altitude, or geographical history, aggregated from Google-indexed websites. Longer queries might uncover a real answer instead of links to websites. For example, the question “What are the 10 largest mountains in the United States?” would subsequently reveal a list of mountains and not ambiguous links to various state parks or hikers’ fan pages.
Google’s top executive Amit Singhal told WSJ that the new search results are the product of hundreds of millions of “entities” stored in a database. The company’s Metaweb team of 50 engineers painstakingly gathered particulars on people, places, and things over the last two years to build an immense collection for associating different words through semantic search.
More information is available below.
Photos by Veronica Oggy
When the original Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 was introduced, it was hardly proof the iPad had much to worry about from the 7-inch Android market. Not because of the its 7-inch display, however, which actually turned out to be a much nicer experience than cheerleaders of Apple’s view would have you believe. If the new Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus accomplishes one task successfully, it’s proving once again a 7-inch slate is an undeniably ideal size for the majority of everyday, on-the-go tasks, and with Honeycomb 3.2 and beefed up insides, Samsung’s new 7-inch experience could be your next tablet.
Right out the gate it’s clear this is the best Android tablet I’ve used– While pretty much the same experience on the slightly scaled up Galaxy Tab 10.1 feels inferior to the iPad, the 7.0 Plus seems to stand on its own. It’s also never been more clear how much Apple needs a product in the 7-inch category, and that’s saying a lot for the short amount of time I’ve spent with the device.
Design:
Expand
Expanding
Close
Last we heard Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus was set to ship in the US on November 13th. Ahead of schedule, Amazon is now shipping the the 7-inch, Android Honeycomb-powered device for $399. If you’re unfamiliar, the Tab Plus ships with a 1024×600 Super LCD display, 1GB of RAM, microSD slot, 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 3-megapixel main cam, and 2-megapixel front cam. You can grab it now in 16 and 32 GB variants. It also packs in the Peel Smart Remote application and built-in IR sensor for controlling your A/V setup. Head over to Amazon to get it now.
Amazon also recently started shipping their Android-based Galaxy Player 4 and Galaxy Player 5, iPod touch-like media players. You can grab the 4-inch model for $229, and the 5-inch model for $269 now.
What once used to send you to Picasa Web Albums, the “photos” link on Google’s navigation bar now sends you to Google+’s Photo service — Google Operating System discovered. Google+’s Photo service displays photos from your circles, from your Android phone, photo’s you’ve been tagged in, and your list of Picasa Web albums. Google+ Photos is still missing some editing features, album descriptions, and the ability to edit prints.
Don’t get this confused however, as Picasa is still available by manually typing in the URL. But, this seems for the best, right?
Analyst Experian Hitwise has published numbers saying Google Plus’s traffic has spiked 1269% this past week, since the service opened to everyone. Last week, Plus recieved 15 million visits rather than the on average 1 million.
The traffic spike was most likely helped out by Google’s blunt advertising for Plus. Experian Hitwise’s numbers don’t include mobile users (which probably isn’t much) or users from Google’s black bar. To compliment the amount of visitors Paul Allen has also been throwing out their that the social network is now up to 43 million users. (via ReadWriteWeb)
No, we did not photoshop that arrow in. In an effort to push Google Plus, which just went into public beta today, Google is now literally pointing to the Plus link with an arrow. Also, below the search box you will find a link to signup. With Google’s 1,100,000,000 pageviews a day (according to Website Outlook, so we’re not sure how accurate that really is) they’re bound to bring in some traffic. What are you waiting for; sign up!
When Google+ was launched, users were pretty receptive, to say the least. After Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic, the site went on to become the fastest growing in history. Today, a new report from Hitwise (via Bloomberg) shows the social network may struggle to catch up to 750 million+ strong Facebook.
While users spent an average of 5 minutes and 47 seconds on the service the week ending on August 27 (a 4% increase from the week before), U.S. visits to the site fell 5.5 percent to 1.6 million. The real story here is the fact that use of Google+ seems to have peaked backed in July.
July 16th seen the average time spent on the service peak at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, while U.S. visits to the site were up 283 percent that week. It’s necessary to note that these numbers can’t be taken as a truly accurate reflection of the service’s growth.
Expand
Expanding
Close
We’ve showed how Google+ Hangouts has been used for politicians to connect with citizens and to host live concerts, but Lee Allison has another cool take. Lee Allison, a technology consultant in New York, hosts a hour long cooking show on Google+, called Google+ Cooking School, three times a week. He uses multiple camera angles to show his viewers exactly what he is cooking up. Allison posts the ingredients for the food he is making on the show, and invites his viewers to cook with him — or he says you can just sit back and relax with a glass of wine.
Since Google+ Hangouts does have limits to only 10 people and people constantly popping in and out, Allison is moving part of his show to WebEx. Though he will continue his show on Hangouts, he will charge $20 for his show on WebEx dubbed The Social Skillet.
It’s cool to see all of these different takes on what’s arguably Google+’s best feature. (via The New York Times)
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google has just pushed an update for the official Google+ app for iOS, bringing with it support for iPad and iPod touch, two devices the app was previously unavailable for, among a few other features including aggregated circle add notifications, huddle settings, and the usual “Performance and stability improvements”.
You should be able to update the app now via the App Store or swing by iTunes and grab the new version now. We’ll keep you posted with any other discoveries we might make in this latest update.
Much like the long-forgotten Buzz social service, Google also quickly abandoned their Realtime Search feature after an agreement to display Twitter updates in search results expired on July 2, 2011. However, it seems the success of Google+ may have encouraged the team to revive the product and possibly integrate it right into search results within the Google+ stream.
Mashable reports Googler Amit Singhal told a crowd during a search panel, while “The value the product was providing was not enough,” the team is, “actively working” on reviving realtime search in one way or another. He also noted that Google+ integration and data from other social and realtime services is something the team is evaluating.
Why not just bring realtime search results right into your Google+ stream you ask? When SearchEngineLand asked the panel about a potential search engine within the recently 25-million strong service, Singhal responded, “We are on it.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gvHaX1cwY&]
Have Google+ notifications been unreliable on your Android device? Thanks to a rather hefty update to the Android app last night, Google has now introduced much needed “improved notifications reliability”, among the other dozen or so improvements and fixes included in the update.
Version 1.0.5 of the Google+ app for Android includes some of the enhancements made to the browser version of the service such as grouping new Circle related notifications together, rather than bombarding your notifications bar with each new addition.
The notifications system is said to be more reliable in this latest update, but whether or not it will cure issues users are having with infrequent, outdated, and often non-existent notifications is yet to be seen. Even if you haven’t experienced these issues, we recommend dropping by the Market now and grabbing the 1.0.5 update to take advantage of the other handful of welcomed fixes listed below.
What’s in this version:
Expand
Expanding
Close
To add a new social experience, Youtube Live has been integrated into Google+ Hangouts reports GigaOm. In the past, Hangouts users could watch Youtube videos together, but today, they can now watch Live events Youtube hosts on occasion. Past events include concrets and speeches from the Whitehouse. Want to give it a try? Follow the directions below.
- Start a Hangouts session in Google+ and invite your contacts to join you.
- In a separate browser tab, head over toYouTube.com/Live and select a live stream of your choice
- Copy the YouTube video I.D. of the selected live stream. Not sure how to find it? Just click on theshare link below the video. You’ll get to see a link like http://youtu.be/XXXXXXXX – the cryptic code after the slash is the video I.D.
- Switch back to hangouts, open the video tab and search for the I.D.
- Click play, and you’re all set.
