After years of rumors, it looks like the Google Drive has finally arrived. While we are still waiting for official word from Google, but earlier today, the company apparently mistakenly posted the French translation of its announcement to its French blog (and quickly deleted it, of course). Thankfully, intrepid Google+ user Gerwin Sturm made a copy and ran it through Google translate. → Read More
And just like that, Google is selling smartphones again. Andy Rubin, Google’s SVP of Mobile and Digital Content, just officially pulled back the curtains on a new section in the Google Play Store where Google will offer hardware directly to customers. The first device to go on sale is the unlocked GSM version of Samsung’s venerable Galaxy Nexus, which will sell for $399 but only in the U.S. (for now, anyway).
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User Hariprasanth sent us a strange missive: it seems that if you upload something to Google Docs today, your storage space immediately increases from 1GB to 5GB. I didn’t believe him at first – it said 1GB as I was uploading – but immediately after the upload finished it read 5GB. Given everything we know about GDrive so far, including that it should launch with 5GB free storage and that the original Docs accounts were capped at 1GB, things look pretty good for an imminent release.
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Ever since it launched earlier this year, Google’s “Search Plus Your World” initiative has been heavily criticized for favoring results from its own social network over those from larger and more popular services like Facebook and Twitter. Even though Google’s focus on Google+ is keeping the market open for competition, social search isn’t exactly an easy field to enter. Wajam, however, a startup based in Canada, is determined to try to beat Google at its own game. The service integrates its social search tools directly onto the search result pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and a number of other popular sites. Today, Wajam is launching a big redesign that makes it easier to use and integrates it into even more services. → Read More
Google started rolling out its new user interface for Gmail late last year. Not everybody is in love with it, of course, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that a little cottage industry of Gmail enhancement tools has cropped up over the last few months. Google will soon migrate even those users who have, until now, resisted this change to the new version. Even if you hate the new Gmail design, though, you can reclaim some of your sanity – and screen estate – with a browser extension like Gmelius, which came out of beta today. Among the most useful features that Gmelius offers are the ability to customize Gmail’s navigation icons to show both text and icons, for example, as well as tools to remove Google’s people widget and Google chat from your inbox. Gmelius is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. → Read More
More dollars were poured into the Beltway from technology companies in the first quarter of 2012. As shown through previous lobbying spends, each quarter, Facebook and Google continue to spend more and more on lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. In the most recent disclosure reports filed in the U.S. Senate’s lobbying database, both of the companies hit all time highs in terms of lobbying dollars.
Google’s lobbying spend hit an all-time high again this quarter, with spending coming in at a whopping $5.03 million, tripling its spend from the same period a year ago. Last quarter, Google spent $3.76 million on lawmakers. Microsoft only spent $1.8 million on lobbying for the quarter. In 2011, Google spent $9.7 million on lobbying, and has already surpassed half of that spend in this past quarter alone.
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Facebook has revealed that its HTML5 site has twice as many users as its iOS and Android apps combined. But that’s actually a problem, because Apple and Google’s mobile browsers don’t support photo uploads or high-performance animation for HTML5 — features that a crucial to getting Facebook mobile site users sharing more and convincing app developers to port to HTML5 where Facebook can tax payments.
To encourage mobile browser advancement, Facebook formed the W3C community group, but Apple and Google, the two partners it needs most, have refused to join. Since these oft-rivals to the social network own the dominant mobile browsers Safari and Chrome, Facebook’s efforts may have little impact, HTML5 apps and games will stay inferior, and both Facebook and the end user will miss out. → Read More
The amount of harried printing situations I’ve been party to has dropped dramatically since I finished school, but Google’s new update to their Cloud Print service should have you covered if you can’t say the same.
According to a post on the official Chrome blog Google has baked the ability to print to any FedEx Office location right into Cloud Print, so you’ll be push your documents from Chrome, Google Docs, or your Android device to a participating store and pick up it whenever you need to. → Read More
If you needed any more proof that Google Drive was alive, look no further than this screenshot of the app. I’ve been able to download and run the app and it is currently idle, sitting quietly in the corner, unable to connect to the mothership.
The version we were given is 1.0.2891 and seems to run without issue. I was able to log in using my Gmail account and I suppose I’ll have to wait to play with it further. It currently throws an error stating that “Google Drive is not yet enabled for your account.” → Read More
Rumors and reports of Google Drive’s imminent launch have been coming hard and fast lately, but this one may just take the cake. The folks at The Next Web managed to get their hands on a draft of an announcement from one of Google’s official Drive partners, and have just revealed a few titillating details about the storage-service-that-almost-wasn’t.
Earlier reports noted that the long-awaited cloud storage service would make its official debut sometime this week, but that no longer appears to be the case. Instead, Google Drive will reportedly launch next week, bestowing all interested users with 5GB of free storage to play with right out of the gate.
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When Google launched Gmail in Germany in 2005, it was quickly barred from using the Gmail name for its email product there. German entrepreneur Daniel Giersch, after all, had registered the ‘G-mail’ trademark (short for Giersch mail) for his physical and electronic mail service in Germany in 2000, long before Google had even announced its own service. Instead of ‘Gmail,’ German Internet users who wanted to use Gmail had to go to googlemail.com. Google tried to appeal this decision, but ran out of legal options in 2007, after Europe’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market rejected its appeal. For a long time, it seemed like that was the end of the story, but last week Google quietly settled its dispute with Giersch. According to Germany’s GoogleWatchBlog, the gmail.de domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google on April 13. → Read More
CEO Larry Page did a good soft-shoe routine yesterday explaining the company’s new stock-split scheme amid results that generally beat expectations, but some investors are not buying it. The stock at the moment is trading nearly four percent down (around $23) at the time of writing.
Part of this could be to do with classic investing behaviour: investors were hungrier for the stock before results in anticipation of good news and that drove up the price. Just before the results, the stock had a five-day high of $651 per share. Now they are trading at around $627. → Read More
The presidential election season in the U.S. is now in full swing and both the Democratic and Republican conventions are just a few months away. Google just announced that it will be the “official social platform and livestream provider” for the Republican convention in Tampa in August. Google promises “a convention without walls” and will use both YouTube and its Google+ social network, to provide coverage from the event. → Read More
It’s Google Q1 earnings day, and because we all know that you have better things to do than listen to executives dryly read prepared statements, we’re taking one for the team and keeping you in the know about the important stuff. Google beat Q1 expectations, reporting revenues of $10.65B and a net income of $2.9B. During the company’s earnings call, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora touched on the progress of the company’s top products, in particular sharing one interesting stat about Google Analytics — that more than 10 million websites are now using Google’s cross-platform website stats service. → Read More
While Google’s top brass were busy dissecting the company’s Q1 earnings on their scheduled conference call, it was business as usual for the rest of the company. Over on the official Android Developers blog, for example, Google announced that developers in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Israel, and Poland can now sell Android apps and in-app additions in the Google Play store (and in their native currencies to boot).
“But wait,” you may say. “Developers from Israel and Mexico have been able to sell their apps for years now!” You’d be absolutely right — the Czech Republic and Poland are the only really new additions, but there was a bit of a catch for the other two. → Read More
Larry Page kicked off Google’s earnings call today with a run-down of his statements in the Founders’ Letter and some broad brushstrokes around the company’s new stock structure, which will see Google create a new class of shares, effectively a two-for-one stock split for existing shareholders.
As with the company’s original two-class voting structure, Page today reiterated that this new structure is a sign of the company’s long-term investment in its future, but not a signal that it is planning “any big acquisitions.” It is also something of a bold statement on the part of Google — possibly to show the company’s confidence in its business in the run-up to Facebook’s IPO, and to give its founders more control over how Google develops in the future.
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Google just released earnings this afternoon, reporting revenues of $10.65 billion for the first quarter which ended March 31, 2012, an increase of 24% compared to the first quarter of 2011 ($8.58 billion). But minus traffic acquisition costs, Google pulled in $8.14 billion in revenue. Non-GAAP EPS in the first quarter of 2012 was $10.08. GAAP Net income came in at $2.9 billion, compared to $1.80 billion in the first quarter of 2011. The company was expected to report a profit of $9.64 a share, on revenue of $8.1 billion (minus traffic acquisition costs).
“Google had another great quarter with revenues up 24% year on year,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “We also saw tremendous momentum from the big bets we’ve made in products like Android, Chrome and YouTube. We are still at the very early stages of what technology can do to improve people’s lives and we have enormous opportunities ahead. It is a very exciting time to be at Google.” → Read More
Ever since Microsoft launched the Bing API, this service was available for free to developers who wanted to use data from the company’s search engine in their own products. Today, however, Microsoft announced that it will soon start charging for access to the Bing Search API. The subscription price will start at around $40 per month and will include 20,000 queries. As part of this change, Microsoft will also start using its Windows Azure Marketplace to manage access to this service. → Read More
Google launched a massive redesign of Google+ earlier today. The reaction to this new interface for the company’s fledgling social network have been generally positive, but most users are somewhat confused about why there is suddenly so much whitespace on the site. Indeed, the #whitespace hashtag is currently trending on the site and it’s probably the most discussed “feature” of the new design. I think there is a reason behind this madness, though. → Read More
Last December, Google launched Currents, its attempt at challenging mobile apps like Flipboard and Zite. Since then, the company has added about 400 new publishers and over 14,000 self-published editions to its lineup . Until now, though, Currents, which runs on Android and iOS, was only available in the United States. That’s changing today, as Google is taking Currents global. Local publishers can now start adding their content to the app and U.S. publishers can now turn on a translation feature to make their texts available in any of the 44 languages that are supported by Google Translate. → Read More
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