Google has seen immense growth, poking it’s nose in each and every sector, healthcare, biotech, cleantech, software, news delivery, books and nearly everything.
Google is very hungry. It wants to capture everything that belongs to you, your entire digital life. From Email to health records online, from entertainment to books, Google wants to know everything about you. It wants to track your online activity and store it for 18 months. Google Buzz breached privacy also, Google Maps has been under a lawsuit for containing unwanted images of people vomiting and naked children.
Google wants to know everything about you. But why? 97% of Google’s revenue is sourced from Advertising and Google wants to know more about you so that it can target you with right types of ads and get more conversions and high numbers on it’s yearly revenue score cards.
Yahoo!, the so called internet giant which is losing its vigor due to immense competition from Google and Bing. If you were following the recent news, you might know that Twitter made few bucks signing a deal with Google and Bing, allowing them to index the tweets.
Lately, we also came across the fact that even Yahoo was indexing tweets from twitter, but there was no such deal. Yahoo! was just using the most famous – publicly accessible API (Application Programming Interface).
Here’s what the news is. Twitter confirmed that they have partnered with Yahoo on their blog.
According to this deal, Yahoo will index the public timeline from Twitter, second by second from all over the globe and will show relevant tweets in all their searches and portals. What more? Yahoo will make clients for twitter to make tweets directly from anywhere on the Yahoo! network. It’s no surprise that Yahoo still has 600 Million users which is no small figure.
Google rules all the market except one, Social Networking. They did try to tap it using Orkut which worked out only in Brazil and India and few other parts of the world. Facebook gained 400 Million users this week which proves Social Networking is a massive market and Google does not want to leave it.
There they come. No, not with a new product, but with new features! It’s Google Buzz that is making all the buzz in the town. Google buzz is a new Social Addon to Google’s existing product Gmail which is used by masses.
I would term it a very smart move, and the biggest reason being that Google doesn’t need a new user base to make up for the social network, they already have the Gmail users. So existing users can get into the network. Another great concept of Google Buzz is that it’s directly from the Inbox so no hazzles of logging into seperate websites. Just log into Gmail and you are there!
Social Web is huge and every second there is something or the other to know. Too many tweets, messages would make one go haywire. Google claims that it will cure all the problems, or perhaps the social disease and sort it the right way. Google Buzz will arrange all the social happenings in the timeline systematically and the best feature is that you can integrate it with service like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader. (Where’s Facebook?)
Everything here is real time, so no F5 required. Your content can be private or public, as simple as this. Another key feature is the inbox integration of this service. Comment’s are sent into your inbox so you can easily keep track of conversations. This is photo friendly and will show all thumbnails and full screen pictures for service using them.
It’s like a huge timeline with updates from people you follow. You can comment, like and email a reply too. Seems like a mashup of all service around! Google’s timeline aggregater promises that it will include only the stuff you might care about and neglect crappy useless stuff like “brb” messages.
Google Buzz would be surely concentrating on the mobile market too so they are iPhone, Android ready from the beginning. As we said, the location aware internet is on the rise and geo tagging with every post is automatically done with every post. Now this is the complete mashup of all good parts of the best services on the web!
Apple and Adobe are having a kind of coldwar. This all started when Flash was not included in the iPhone OS and now not on the iPad OS too. Recently at a town hall meeting, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs slammed Adobe and called it lazy.
There have been huge discussions, lengthy blog posts written, tweets all over. Tablets could be the future of browsing and Apple is already a leader in Mobile device manufacturing so it could be a major game player in the future and Adobe knows this fact very well. Apple had skipped flash with the launch of the iPad and perhaps this could be a huge loss to Adobe as they miss a lot of consumers and to consumers as they miss a lot of content.
Apple is not interested in integrating flash in either of it’s platforms (iPhone or iPad) and their CEO in a town hall meeting with their execs said that the future is HTML5. Folks at Adobe did take it seriously and constantly forced on the fact that Flash is installed on about 98% on computers all over the world and 75% of video content is flash and flash covers a huge portion of active content on the Web.
They are announcing Flash for top platforms like Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and these partnerships are a part of the Open Screen Project which has over 50 partners.
For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.
Adobe can do two things
Either get flash integrated or
Stop consumers from buying Apple Products
They say they have tried first method whose failure leads them to no other option than the second one. Apple and Google have also grown hostile and as they saw Sharing a common enemy makes way to a great friend, and same applies here. Adobe and Google are taking each other’s cover in their fight against Apple.
Adobe could possible start promoting Google products publicly surely as they’ve got Adobe technology integrated and this would be profitable to both of the companies.
No more missing multi touch interface on Nexus One, Google just issued a OTA (Over the Air) update for Android running on Nexus one’s which brings in multi touch capabilities to your Web Browser, Gallery and Google Maps. Earlier some third party patches had enabled Multi Touch only in the browser.
This means all those pinch and zoom gestures which iPhone users are much used to have now arrived at Nexus one. Also the Google Maps version is upgraded to 3.4 which brings the talked about “Night Mode” feature to Maps.
Nexus one’s hardware was completely capable of Multi touch gestures but they had not been added initially. Rumors were up that the reason behind Google not adding these features was due to patent infringement matters with Apple as they used the same technology in their popular products, iPhone and iPod touch. Few other market analysts say that it was because Google wanted to track user’s initial reaction to Multi-touch’s absence.
This is an automatic update so it’s not in your hands for the update to start and end but you can surely get the update manually if you don’t have it yet [Instructions here].
Internet Explorer 6 has been a huge problem for developers from sometime as they (including me!) are having difficult time optimizing websites for a browser made in 2001 for websites developed in recent times as technology has evolved a lot in recent years.
Google will be phasing out browser support for Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor from the first of march which means that Google will no longer guarantee the working of their products on the older browsers from that date.
Google will use technologies like HTML5 and faster javascript processing which are not supported by older browsers. They will also be showing updates on their website to upgrade browsers if you are using them. The worse part is that 100+ computers at my school use Internet Explorer 6 (I hope to break in and download Firefox soon!) . Support for services like Google Mail and Google Calendar for older browsers will be phased out later this year too.
The few prominent supported browsers would be Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
This is a great news for all those people who had started and participated in the campaigns, for driving out IE6 from computers around the world as apart from lack of functionality, these old browsers hold a huge threat to data security too.
Things got even more worse and Google’s CEO, Eric Schimdt left Apple as a board of director. Then we smashed in the news that it was coming to iPhone with a Web Interface. Bang! Here it is!
Just go to m.google.com/voice to access the mobile version of Google Voice from your iPhone.
Google Voice for iPhone has arrived with a web interface. It’s designed using HTML5 which is responsible for most of the applications functionalities. There’s one problem. It’s in the browser Safari, Right? Want it as app on your SpringBoard? There is a simple trick that we used with Google Wave too, bring the app near the mail icon on my springboard!
By the way, its not just iPhone, but Palm Web OS has also got Google Voice now!
Voice to text sometimes can be embarrassing or even disgusting at times. If you want to text your friend, “Would you like to have chocolate fudge tonight?” and then the word Fudge is mistaken by your device and output is real disgusting, “Would you like to have chocolate fu** tonight?” and the * does stand for the rest of the words.
Anyway, the text receiver would surely break your bones next day. This won’t happen to you if you use your Nexus one which has a inbuilt feature as to hash of all such F and S words. But still, won’t it look weird?
Would you like to have chocolate #### tonight?
Google has a nice reason to state as to why this done in their devices.
“We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent.”
Some real good news for die hard cricket fans, especially Indians! Indian Premiere League (For others, it’s a cricket tournament featuring world class players) is going to be broadcasted live on Youtube as per their 2 year agreement.
So you can expect 60 matches to be up on YouTube starting this March! Remember the U2 concert which was broadcasted live on YouTube? It had got over 10 Million viewers and this time Google hopes to do something like that.
IPL is the craziest thing out here in the south east and huge number of people watch it, so lot of potential Google! Also with this Google steps into the market of sports broadcasting for the first time!
Google is currently looking for sponsors for the broadcast and i hope they will surely get a lot of them if we see the number of people who viewed IPL on television which was well over billions.
Apple Vs. Google war couldn’t have got more bigger. This time Apple is planning to remove google search from it’s browser Safari and guess who would be taking it’s place? Bing!
Apple was planning to replace Google Maps and advertising marketplace with their own products and this time they aim to chuck out search also.
Apple is supposed to be in talks with Microsoft to kick off Google as default search provider and let Bing take it on according to Business Week. This fight is just getting better and better. Apple won’t loose out much if this happens, but possibly Google could loose quite a few million users, yes thats it.
Yahoo!, the so called internet giant which is losing its vigor due to immense competition from Google and Bing. If you were following the recent news, you might know that 
No more missing multi touch interface on Nexus One, Google just issued a 
