Tag: GOOGLE

Microsoft, citing Google's tyrannical 95% share of the European search market, has lodged a formal complaint with the European Commission. It's not like Microsoft is breaking any ground here -- the European Commission has been investigating Google's alleged violation of European competition law since November 2010 -- but there's no doubt that the addition of Microsoft's gravitas will affect the ...

It's a big day for Google, what with the announcement that Kansas City (not that Kansas City, but the other one that's actually in Kansas) has been selected to be the lucky town to get wired up with Google Fiber -- but that's not all they've gone public with today. Their "+1" project, which has been the subject of conjecture for months, was finally unveiled as well. Google didn't exactly ...

Google is preparing to make the ads in Gmail even more accurately predict your tastes and needs. While Google has been relying on the contents of each individual email to help it target the ads next to it, the coming overhaul will make ads learn from the entirety of your email correspondence. To become more relevant to you, Gmail ads will start using some of the same signals that are ...

Google and the FTC have just announced that they've reached a settlement in the FTC's investigation of Google's privacy violations committed during the rollout of Google Buzz, the company's social network built inside of Gmail. One of the reasons Buzz never quite took off may have been the enormous backlash surrounding its launch, and Google's handling of Gmail users' privacy. The FTC claims ...

Right on cue, Google has launched in-app payment support for Android applications. Developer testing began last week, and now many popular apps -- like the ones pictured above -- can begin charging users for add-on functionality, content, or whatever the heck else they feel is worthy of additional bits of your pocket change. If you were wondering, Google will take the same 30% cut that Apple ...

Google's been busy with its pedal-powered Street View trike, going where no Street View car can reach, bringing us some of the most impressive virtual tours of significant landmarks across the globe. Now Google has made available Street View imagery of some of the most historic and impressive places in both Italy and France. Have you ever wanted to take a look round the Colosseum in Rome ...

The Android Market is still missing a few key pieces of functionality. Among them is in-app payments -- which Google has now announced will begin rolling out next week. The company is encouraging developers to upload apps that include in-app purchases, and instructions have been provided to walk submitters through the set-up and testing process. Google has made sure test apps can't actually ...

One day soon, we may actually get to spend some hands-on time with the oft-delayed Google Music service. According to CNET, Google is currently testing the service internally. Unfortunately for the rest of us, until Google works out all the licensing details with the major record labels, there's not really any chance of us being able to set up our own cloud-based music lockers on Google ...

Google, in an interesting but not entirely unexpected twist, will not be open-sourcing Android 3.0 Honeycomb for the foreseeable future. Historically, Android is usually open-sourced via the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) a few days or weeks after the code is finalized. While this departure from the norm won't affect OEMs like HTC and Motorola that have access to internal builds of ...

Toying with spreadsheets is just about the most mundane office work you can possibly do these days, and it's a world that is dominated by Microsoft Excel. Google's fairly basic offering, Spreadsheets, has just been bestowed with yet another reason to eschew Excel: Filtering. Filtering allows you to instantly deep dive into both large or small amounts of data in ways which would take hours if ...

Who would've thought it: First Netflix dives into the original content foray, and now the ultimate aggregator is also getting in on the action. In a rather weird twist of fate, Google has published the first edition of its new online magazine: Think Quarterly. Think Quarterly is, in the words of Matt Brittin, Google's UK & Ireland Operations Managing Director, "a breathing space in a ...

Google Drawings has just been updated to bring it into line with the rest of the Google Docs suite. The update includes revision history, which lets you see who added what and when, with the same interface used in both Documents and Spreadsheets. Presence indication has been added too, with shapes highlighted with a color linked to the current user. It mimics the text colors used to highlight ...

Google Chrome 11 has arrived on the beta channel, and while there's not a lot reported in Google's official release post there have been a few important additions. As we've come to expect from Chrome version bumps, both the Webkit core and V8 JavaScript engine have been updated and tweaked for better performance. GPU-accelerated 3D CSS transforms and compositing are now enabled as well, allowing ...

Google has just updated its cloud-based YouTube video editor to include the fruits of its recent purchase, plus a bit of 3D thrown in for good measure. The in-browser editor can now dramatically reduce camera shake using technology acquired from Green Parrot Pictures. It works by charting the best camera path for you, as if you were using a dolly or tripod, using a 'unified optimization ...

If you thought the crazy, Wild West days of the United States Patent and Trademark Office were over... think again! Google has been awarded a patent for its famous Doodles. The application was originally filed in 2001, some three years after Google began using custom logos on its home page. With the awesomely vague title "Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site" we can ...