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.
Today is the last day to take advantage of Google Music’s blowout MP3 sale that has lasted for about a week now. Google is offering popular albums for only $4.99 and popular tracks for only $0.49. The lineup Google offers is pretty good, ranging from Lil Wayne to DeadMau5. Sadly, the sale does not include every offering on Google Music, but it has a decent list that you should browse through. Songs purchased will be saved to your Google Music locker and can be downloaded as an MP3. What are you waiting for?
Are you dreaming of a white Christmas online? Don’t worry, Google’s gone all out this year to make winter festivities memorable for both its employees and users. As we reported this morning, Google staffers, also known as Googlers, were treated with a free Galaxy Nexus smartphone sporting a customized back cover depicting Android and Google Plus icons.
Then, in another display of holiday spirit, the company brought in much ice and snow and sprayed it in front of building B44, also known as the Android building, at their Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The company’s social biz head Vic Gundotra posted the above image on his Google Plus profile with the caption: “Who says it never snows in Mountain View, California?”
The time-lapse clip below that shows the event was posted by Jason Chen, a technical program manager with Google. The search company did not forget about its users, surprising and delighting them with a few big improvements to Google Plus ahead of New Year. Google also let folks call Santa right from Gmail to leave him a Holiday message (Google Voice number 855-34-SANTA).
Lastly, Google tweaked its search engine with a snowflake animation. Go to Google.com and search for ‘let it snow’. This search term should produce snowflakes that will fill the page and eventually whiten out thesearch results. You can even click the left mouse button and drag the pointer around for fog removal. On an unrelated Holiday note, Google also revamped their Doodle website with the Google Plus design language.
Have you ever been curious to find out who spends the most money advertising on Google Search? AdAgehas put together a list of Google’s top ad-spot buyers. If you’re a frequent Google Search-er you’re probably familiar with a lot of them, and probably have clicked on their ads before.
The media company IAC has earned the top-spot, spending $174,000 from January 2011 – September 2011. IAC owns popular online media properties like Match.com, Dictionary.com, Excite, and more. Amazon holds the second spot, with $118,000 spent within the same time period. It’s worth noting, pointed out by AdAge, that the fourth quarter is typically the most busiest time for advertising. These numbers will be much higher for 2011 as a whole.
Search still proves to be Google’s number one source of income. You might be thinking Android would, with 500,000 activations a day, but you have to remember Google makes Android open-source for all to use. All Android does for Google is draw traffic to their web products, which in turn could drive revenue through ads — Search being an example. Curious to see who else made the list? Check it out after the break.
Google has acquired San Francisco based startup Apture, for an undisclosed amount AllThingsDreported today. Aperture is a downloadable browser plugin that presents users with contextual information from sources like Wikipedia to match the current webpage they’re on.
A Google spokesperson told AllThingsD, while they’re not only after Apture’s product, they’re after Apture’s talent to add to the Chrome team.
There’s no word on what the team will actually do inside of Google, but it would be cool to see this technology implemented somehow. Aperture raised $4.1 million in venture funding before being acquired by Google.
Google+ engineer Vermont Lasmarias revealed today that a new section displaying all of your recently played games has been added to the Google+ homepage. The new section can be found in the bottom left, and allows you to quickly launch into a game where you left off. Luckily, if you’re not a fan of the new games section, or just want to free up your side bar, you can get rid of the widget right from the homepage too.
Coming up tonight on Charlie Rose, Mark Zuckerburg has made comment that “Google is building their own little version of Facebook”. While that was certainly a hit towards Google, Zuckerburg was happy to give props to Amazon and Apple as partners.
Amazon and Apple “are extremely aligned with us,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there.” Meanwhile, “Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.
Kevin Fox, a former lead designer for Google Reader, has made an offer to Google on his blog. Kevin offers that he will sign a three month contract to come back to Google to help restore the Reader product after this week’s changes — which he isn’t a fan of by any means. In fact, most people aren’t happy with Google getting rid of old social features to implement Google+.
Kevin says that he will keep with the design changes that Google is making across all products, but will restore and enhance Google Reader to the product it should be. Here’s to the best Kevin.
It seems about every week that Google is testing out new features inside of Search. Today, Google Operating Systemdiscovered a small tweak inside of Search — that is pretty redundant. Google has put new specialized search options in a horizontal view under the search box. Previously it was a feature in the black bar and to the side.
As you can notice, quickly things are getting a bit redundant, but hey, that might be a good thing in this case. That’s three places you can now refine your search!
Google announced on their blog last week that they’d be redesigning Google Reader, and today the redesign has hit the interwebs. The redesign takes shape like almost every other Google product in terms of color, shapes, and speed.
Google Reader now also features Google+ functionality built in, after turning off friending and following in Reader. Users will be able to +1 a post and then from there have the ability to share it with their Google+ friends. Check it out after the break.
The redesign will begin rolling out to users in the coming days, so hold tight if you’re not yet seeing it. For me, the new redesign is welcomed, because I thought the last one was just plain bleh. Having the new look around Google is giving the company a cutting edge feel.
A few members of the Google Maps team answered some pretty interesting questions on Reddit about the platform, from the community. Business Insiderposted some of the highlights from the thread:
Building shadows within Maps are astronomically correct with the time of day and sun. Google did however scale the shadows.
Antartica has a street view in Google Maps.
Google collects 3D views with three laser cameras on their street cars.
The team is excited about/considering making a 3D game using Maps data.
Google Maps has a street view partner program for anyone to add street view photos taken with their own camera.
For colorblind Maps users, Google is figuring out how to accommodate users with the red and green indicators for Traffic.
Google favors higher quality images that are older over blurry ones that are newer.
According to numerous music executives, Google is eager to open the store in the next several weeks. It would most likely be connected to Google’s existing cloud service, Music Beta, which lets people back up their songs on remote servers and stream them to mobile phones and other devices, said these executives, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private and continuing.
Being able to buy MP3s would be a big hole for Google to fill, but it is having a hard time convincing the music industry that it is genuine about stopping piracy. It will be interesting to see what concessions Google gives up to get MP3s and how their system will compare to Apple, Amazon and the other vendors.
Maybe they’ll be able to remove that pesky ‘beta’ tag as well.
Google announced today a new pilot program called Trusted Stores. Trusted Stores will give shoppers a piece of mind when shopping online, telling them which stores ship on time, have good customer support, etc. Once awarded the Trusted Badge, credited stores can display it on their website (seen after the break).
If a company would like to participate they need to provide Google with information regarding shipping, and Google will also collect information from the store’s customers. Here’s a part we really like: if a customer decides to select free protection from Google, they will receive help from Google if a problem ever arises. Google will also offer a $1,000 lifetime protection package. Expect this to start popping up around the web a lot more.
Google has just announced that they will be holding their Q3 earnings call on October 13th at 1:30 PST to go over financial results. We’ll be covering the whole thing, but if you’re interested you can listen to the audio here. Press release after the break:
Google has announced on their blog this afternoon that Google Analytics now features real-time data. In the past, Analytics was a great tool for viewing site stats from the past 24 hours, days, weeks, months, etc., but now the ability to see who’s on your site at any given time is an awesome feature.
The stats are pretty detailed showing the top referrals, active pages, and how many people are on your site at any given moment. There is even a graph that lets you know when your site peeked in terms of visitors.
Many other analytic services have had this feature, so it’s nice to see Google finally catch up. The ability to see real-time stats lets you know what content is doing well. Real-time will be rolling out to everyone in the coming weeks.
The Next Web is reporting that the US Government and Google are in talks over a contract that would license Google Apps to the whole US Government staff. The contract totals up-to $50 million dollars. The US Gov is also considering Microsoft’s productivity suite.
Microsoft’s suite could be considered pretty solid, but also pretty bland. Many corporations, and school districts, are currently using Microsoft’s suite. Some would say it’s in a good spot, but when compared to Google it just not up-to par (in my opinion). Many city governments are already using Google Apps.. so let’s call this a fair fight.
The US Government is currently reviewing the terms, and will soon select which company they’d like to side with. At any rate, both companies are probably opening their arms to $50 million, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Google continues to dance around China with the news today that it is constructing a US$100 million, 15-hectare (37.07-acre) Data Center in Taiwan.
Google plans to complete the data center in 1-2 years and is expected to create 5-20 full-time jobs and a number of part-time jobs. By locating in Taiwan, Google will be close to the Chinese Mainland without falling under the laws of ‘Communist’ China which could theoretically sieze data if the data center were located within its borders.
Update: Reuters adds that Google will be building out Singapore and Hong Kong data centers as well.
Google has made a small tweak to their Google News algorithm, which will enable the news aggregator to display featured stories alongside their usual content. A publication can attempt to get their story featured by adding a certain metadata code, and if picked the story will then be recognized by a “featured” tag.
If a publication misuses the tag by adding it to stories more than seven times a week, the algorithm will learn to disregard or sometimes not even recognize the publication. We’d certainly hope they wouldn’t.
From some slides of an internal presentation given by Google, it appears that where there is now Google Docs, there will soon be ‘Google Drive’. Most of the functionality, like uploading files of any type, of the mythical Google Drive now lies in Docs Hopefully, with this upcoming rebrand, Google allows more storage (let me buy it) and also has some utilities like backing up the home folder on Windows or Mac. Seriously, what better way to get users to adopt your system than to offer to sych your files to the cloud.
Oh, now that we have all of your files, you might as well get a Chomebook.
The Logitech Google TV console has just dropped to $90 at Tiger Direct (New, free shipping). Interestingly, this box will be upgradable to GoogleTV 2.0, due out in the next month or so. Why is Google/Logitech in such a hurry to get rid of these? Certainly when GoogleTV 2 comes out, they will be worth more to the consumer, won’t they?
I think this also hints that the second round of GoogleTVs will be much cheaper than the first. Expand Expanding Close
Aardvark has announced in a blog post this afternoon that Google has shut them down. For those of you who don’t quite remember Aardvark, a question and answer site, was acquired by Google for $50 million in 2010. Today, Aardvark is being closed, and the team will be moved to Google+ and other products.
We’ve been excited to share these lessons within Google over the past year, especially as part of the effort behindGoogle+. It has been gratifying to see how well this project is doing — even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! — and there is much more to come very soon. In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information.
The closure of Aardvark comes along with Google’s closure of Labs we reported on last month. Google’s CEO Larry Page has gone on record saying Google is killing off smaller products, in order to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. This is evident when Google killed Labs, Slide, and now Aardvark.
Update: Google has also announced the closing of Google Desktop.
Update x2: Google has posted the full run-down of what is being closed.
As reported by Google Operating System, Google will release a “smarter” spell checker in a future update of Chrome. Currently, Chrome only uses the dictionary to spell check, not taking context into consideration. The future update, however, will work like Google Search’s “did you mean” feature.
Google has been hesitant to add the updated spell checker citing privacy concerns. As Google Operating System explains, a JSON-RPC request is sent to the “did you mean” service in the background, where the context-menu will then be updated. It will be interesting to see how fast Google can get results to come back.
We already showed you how to give Google’s new search UI a try, but yesterday The Next Webdiscovered that you can also give Google’s new sign-in page a try. The new sign-in page goes along with the rest of Google’s general new design we’ve been seeing spring up across products, ever since the launch of Google Plus. Enabling the new design is much easier than what we showed you yesterday. You could just go and click the option to preview the new sign-in page, but here’s the link to make things easy.
While there isn’t much of a change, we do like the new colors and general spacing.
Google has been on a role rolling out new designs across all of their products, including Google Search. Techno-Net (viaGoogle Operating System) has discovered that with a small cookie change you can try the latest version of Search. The new version features a less uncluttered look, but we’ve read it isn’t as fast as the version you know and love. Head on past the break to see how it’s done.
