Adobe just reported earnings for its second financial quarter of 2013. The company reported revenue of $1.011 billion and non-GAAP operating income of $247.3 for an earnings per share of $0.36 (though diluted GAAP earnings were only $0.15). That’s a little bit better than most analysts expected, especially with respect to the company’s earnings per share. → Read More
At the end of last year, Google introduced a new design for some local search results on tablets that put a carousel with the top results at the top of the page. Today, it’s bringing this design to the desktop, too. This new feature can be triggered by searches for restaurants, bars and other local places, Google says, and it’s currently rolling out in English in the U.S. and should roll out for… → Read More
The world of alternative browsers is littered with also-rans like Rockmelt, but there are also companies that have managed to make a name for themselves in the shadow of Microsoft, Mozilla and Google. One example of this is Maxthon, but another browser that’s quietly gaining a following is Torch, which the company tells us just passed 10 million monthly active users on Mac and Windows after about… → Read More
Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import. For a flat fee of $80 per hard drive, Google will take the drive and upload the data into a Cloud Storage bucket. This, Google says, can be “faster or less expensive than… → Read More
Google sure isn’t giving up on its Chromebook initiative, even though it’s not clear that the company’s Chrome OS-based laptops are selling all that well. Today, Google announced that it’s expanding its brick-and-mortar retail efforts for Chromebooks through partnerships with Walmart and Staples. → Read More
Digg today announced that the first public beta of its Google Reader replacement Digg Reader will launch next week and will be available to everybody by June 26th. Judging from the early screenshots the team just posted, we’re looking at a straight-up feed reader with a clean design and – at least for the time being – without any of the social media integrations the company hinted at earlier this… → Read More
Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while… → Read More
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired Poster, the popular iOS WordPress client. Its sole developer, Tom Witkin, will join the WordPress mobile team. Poster, which launched its 2.0 version in January, has already been removed from the App Store, but users who previously bought it will always be able to re-download it. Witkin also promises to continue to support it. → Read More
Yesterday, a CNET story that alleged that the NSA disclosed during a secret Capitol Hill briefing that its analysts can listen to domestic phone calls “simply based on an analyst deciding that,” got a lot of play in the tech and political blogosphere. Today, however, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement that denounces this story as “incorrect.” → Read More
The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has long worked with numerous non-profit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently… → Read More
Google X, the secretive lab behind projects like Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars, announced its latest project today: balloon-powered Internet access for those areas of the earth where regular terrestrial Internet isn’t a good option. Earlier this week, Google started testing these balloons, which are meant to provide Internet access comparable to 3G networks while sailing the… → Read More
In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was “Quick view,” an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google’s mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and… → Read More
Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months. → Read More
Mozilla today launched a new initiative that’s a bit different from the usual standards-based web projects the organization is usually involved in. Mozilla’s ScienceLab, which will be led by open science advocate Kaitlin Thaney and Software Carpentry founder Greg Wilson, wants to do nothing less than “help researchers around the world use the open web to shape science’s future.” The project is… → Read More
Google just announced that it is retiring Chrome Frame, its open source plug-in for bringing Google Chrome’s JavaScript and rendering engine to legacy versions of Internet Explorer. The company cites the fact that legacy browsers like Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are now finally on the decline and that most people are now using modern browsers as the reason for this decision. → Read More
Google today launched a large update to Google Maps that adds more than 1,000 new locations from around the world to the service’s Street View feature. These include numerous locations that can’t be reached by car, including the cathedral of Seville, the canals of Copenhagen and the Singapore Zoo. Overall, it seems, this update focuses on locations from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the… → Read More
Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with Best Buy to set up its own store-within-a-store in 500 Best Buy locations in the U.S. and 100 Best Buy and Future Shop locations in Canada. These stores, which will be up to 2,200 square feet in size, will go head-to-head with Apple’s mini-stores in many of these Best Buy locations. Microsoft hopes they will become the “premier destination for… → Read More
About a year ago, CloudFlare launched Mirage, a service for its paying users that aimed to speed up website loading times by delivering smaller images and using “lazy load” to just download images that actually appeared in the browser’s viewport. Today, the company is almost completely revamping this service based on what it learned from this first version. → Read More
It looks like Google is shipping something to its Glass Explorer community this week. Sadly, it’s not clear what exactly it is the roughly 2,000 first Glass users are getting.
As Jesse Stay, the author of Google+ For Dummies and Google+ Marketing For Dummies, notes on his blog, a number of Glass Explorers are reporting that they have received notifications about this package through their My… → Read More
Google says it’s seeing a massive increase in email-based phishing campaigns that originate within Iran and target Iranian users. These attacks, Google says, started about three weeks ago and the company believes that they are politically motivated. Iran’s next election is scheduled for Friday and this “significant jump” in phishing activity in the region started about three weeks ago. → Read More
Google today launched Cube Slam, an open source pong clone that you can play against the computer or a friend in the browser. That by itself wouldn’t be all that exciting, but Google created this game to show off the power of WebRTC, Web Audio and WebGL. → Read More
During its I/O developer conference, Google quietly introduced a massively improved version of its photo search feature in Google+, which now uses advanced computer vision to let you search your personal photos. The company didn’t make a big deal about this tool, but it works extremely well. Today, Google is opening up a bit more about how it got to acquire DNNresearch and how the new photo search… → Read More
Google today launched a small but nifty new feature for its Gmail people widget that allows brands and businesses to highlight their Google+ profiles and recent Google+ posts right in their customers’ inboxes. → Read More
Google is one of the companies that were implicated in the PRISM leak last week, but the company continues to deny that it provided the NSA with special access to its servers. It is, however, now asking the U.S. government to be allowed to publish at least a little bit more information about the FISA national security requests it receives, which it isn’t currently allowed to publish in its… → Read More
It’s still not quite clear what PRISM really is, but what has become clear is that the NSA is doing its best to tap into as much online communications as it can. To protest this, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, the ACLU and numerous other organizations with both technical and political backgrounds have launched StopWatching.Us. The campaign, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler… → Read More
As expected, Apple is introducing a completely new design language for iOS 7. For developers, this means they will have to adapt their apps to match the rest of the operating system if they don’t want them to look antiquated. Thankfully, Apple today also published a pretty extensive guide to designing for iOS 7 and transitioning apps to the new version that helps developers understand how they… → Read More
Google today launched a new dashboard for businesses and Google+ page owners that will provide them with a single dashboard to manage many of their daily activities around Google’s tools. The new dashboard will, for example, allow businesses to update their info, including their website URLs, store hours and phone numbers, across Google Maps, Search and on Google+ right from the tools Overview tab → Read More
At its WWDC keynote today, Apple announced an update to Siri that brings a number of new features to Apple’s voice-driven personal assistant for iOS. Not only is Siri getting a number of new high-quality male and female voices and support for multiple languages (English, German and French, for example), but it’s also getting quite a bit smarter. In this version, Apple has integrated Twitter… → Read More
At its WWDC developer conference today, Apple announced the next version of Safari which will launch with OS X Mavericks. The new version, Apple’s Craig Federighi, will feature significantly improved JavaScript performance which Apple says will beat Chrome and Firefox. Safari will now also support OS X’s new Power Nap feature, which will significantly reduce the browser’s power… → Read More
The Google Art Project got a major redesign today that includes a much improved and faster navigation and new search features. The improved search tools now makes it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. → Read More
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