Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional funding – it… → Read More
Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their… → Read More
While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for… → Read More
Mozilla today bumped up Firefox Aurora, the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old blink element, a former staple of… → Read More
About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own WebP image format in its Google+ Android app, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving… → Read More
Native Client – a technology that allows developers to run native compiled C and C++ code as part of their web apps – has long been a part of Google Chrome. Even though other browser vendors haven’t adopted it yet, Google is clearly putting quite a few resources behind this technology and at I/O this year, it announced Portable Native Client (or PNaCl, which Google says we should pronounce as… → Read More
Google’s underwater Street View launched last September, but Google’s Ocean program actually started six years ago when one of the founders of Keyhole (which, after being acquired by Google, later became Google Earth), was inspired to also look into mapping the ocean. For several years now Google has been mapping the oceans, but bringing Street View underwater is still very challenging. → Read More
Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday, at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million… → Read More
Google today announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages. → Read More
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a new Maps API for mobile developers, updates to Maps for Android and iOS and a completely refreshed Google Maps experience on the desktop. After the main keynote, however, Google also announced a major visual refresh for sites that use its Google Maps API. → Read More
At its I/O developer conference today, Google previewed the next version of Google Maps for mobile. Google’s director of Google Maps, Daniel Graf, demoed the new version onstage and showed new features, including integrated lists from Zagat, more reviews in more places and a revamped directions and navigations experience (which now includes real-time incidence alerts and dynamic rerouting). The… → Read More
Amit Singhal, Google’s senior VP of search, today announced that Google’s Knowledge Graph will start exposing a number of statistics as graphs on the search results pages today. Google is also adding Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to its lineup of supported Knowledge Graph languages. With regard to the statistics, Singhal said the system will also try to… → Read More
Photos have always been at the center of the Google+ experience and at I/O today, Google announce a major update to Google+ Photos that now makes use of the many of the tools the company acquired when it bought Nik Software last September. The focus of this update is squarely on automating a lot of the photo editing and sharing process. Google+ can now, for example, automatically enhance the tonal… → Read More
Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users. Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google… → Read More
At its I/O developer conference, Google just announced its new Play Games Services API, a new API that allows game developers to save game states and sync them between different machines. This service will be available for Android and iOS developers. The API will also include the usual achievements, leaderboards and multiplayer services that developers have come to expect from similar services. → Read More
At its sixth annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google today announced that Android users have now installed over 48 billion apps. Just in the last two months, users installed 2.5 billion apps. Android’s senior vice president for Android product management made this announcement at the outset of the I/O keynote, in which Google also announced that it has now reached over 900… → Read More
Google’s annual I/O conference in San Francisco kicks off this morning at 9am PT/noon ET and, as usual, the good folks from Mountain View are making a live video stream of the event available for all of you who can’t be there in person. Unlike other years, when Google ran two separate keynotes on the first two days of I/O, the company is only running a single keynote this time around. → Read More
Open Garden, the San Francisco-based startup that allows Android, Windows and Mac users to create mesh networks between their devices to share Internet connections, today announced that it has managed to get Google Glass to connect to its network. This matters because Glass users typically need a tethering plan to connect to the Internet (which is pretty much essential to using Glass). Those plans… → Read More
Ever since Google launched its new Google+ Sign-In for mobile and the web, the company has been saying that one of the most popular features on the platform is the ability for publishers to direct users to install their native Android apps with a single click during the sign-in process. These over-the-air installs, Google today revealed, have indeed turned out to be a nice way for publishers to… → Read More
Mozilla today launched the latest version of its Firefox browser for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the highlight of Firefox 21 is additional support for Mozilla’s Social API. This API allows social providers to integrate directly with Firefox and the organization it launched in cooperation with Facebook at the end of last year. Today, it is adding Cliqz, Mixi and msnNOW to the mix. → Read More
Windows Blue will be called Windows 8.1 and will launch as a public preview on June 26, Microsoft revealed today. While the company remains mum about what exactly we can expect from Windows 8.1 (boot to desktop? the return of the Start menu?), Microsoft says that Windows 8.1 “will help [it] to deliver the next generation of PCs and tablets with our OEM partners and to deliver the experiences… → Read More
Cisco today announced the results of its study into consumer’s thoughts about connected and driverless cars. While a large part of the study focused on the role of technology in the car shopping experience (unsurprisingly, nobody likes car dealerships), the study also looked into drivers’ attitudes about driverless cars. Surprisingly, 57% of all of the respondents said that they would… → Read More
Here is something you probably didn’t see coming: Outlook.com just enabled chat interoperability with Google Talk. This new feature, which is rolling out worldwide over the next few days, allows Outlook.com users to chat with their friends on Google, just like they can already do with their Facebook friends. Given the somewhat strained relationship between Microsoft and Google, this move… → Read More
Google today launched version 1.1 of its open source Go programming language. It’s been more than a year since Google launched version 1.0 of Go. The language, which puts an emphasis on concurrency and speed, has seen three maintenance releases since then, but the team has been conservative with bumping up its version numbers. This new version, however, the Go team writes, introduces a… → Read More
Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. LanguageTwin, a startup I met at the Willamette Angel Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the… → Read More
Bing recently introduced its updated people search feature and today, Microsoft is adding a few improvements to its people search that will make it even easier to find information about celebrities, politicians, athletes and many people with public LinkedIn profiles. Bing’s search box now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this also means that it’s now easier… → Read More
Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+. These recommendations will appear as small widgets at that bottom of the screen as users browse a news site that has enabled this service. Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations… → Read More
We’re just a few days away from the start of Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer conference, and while we actually know very little about what Google plans to announce during its massive, three-hour keynote on Wednesday, there is something brewing in Mountain View that has Microsoft’s Office division on edge. Over the course of the last week, Microsoft started a very negative… → Read More
After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one hones in on document fidelity, the other – which includes a number of user testimonials – argues that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for primetime. → Read More
At last year’s I/O, Google launched its Cloud Messaging push notification service for Android. This week, it extended this service to Chrome and Chrome OS, which, Google says, allows Chrome apps and extension developers to wake up their apps remotely and/or send alerts to users. → Read More
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