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
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
The Google deal to buy Waze — reportedly for $1.1 billion — is a strong move for both companies to enhance their respective mapping services, and to help monetize them better. But it could also serve as the tipping point for Nokia to turn the screws on getting Google to take licenses for certain mapping patents that it owns, or else face legal consequences. According to a source… → Read More
Google, the worldwide leader in mobile advertising, today made another move that could help consolidate its position a little bit further. The company today announced to developers that it would be shutting down AdWhirl, a platform that let app developers switch between different ad networks on the fly. AdWhirl was a part of AdMob, acquired by the mobile ad network after a flurry of competition… → 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
Thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree would culminate with its $1.1 billion Tumblr purchase? Well, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours — in two completely different verticals, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning’s purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait… → 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 just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.
The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud… → 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
Running a website not optimized for smartphones? Guess what, you’ve been put on notice. Google is using its influence and the power of its algorithm to finally force web publishers to fix their mobile website configuration issues, or risk getting downranked in Google Search. Directing smartphone users to 404′s? You lose. Sending smartphone users looking for specific content to some generic mobile… → Read More
Google Glass isn’t in the hands of consumers yet, but a pair of intrepid Glass explorers didn’t let that stop them from taking the thing apart to see what makes it tick. This teardown is also especially pleasing in terms of shot composition and image quality, so if you’re hankering for a really good, close-up look at the tech inside of Google Glass, I highly recommend checking out what the Catwig… → Read More
The tech industry has seen its fair share of acquisition whoppers lately, with Salesforce acquiring ExactTarget for $2.5 billion this month, and Yahoo putting the icing on its acquisition spree by snatching up Tumblr for $1.1 billion. But the news today that Google is buying popular iOS map and navigation app, Waze, (reportedly for around $1.1 to $1.3 billion) is a little different. Here’s why. → 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
After months of speculation, the fate of Waze, the social-mapping-location-data startup, is finally decided: Google is buying the company, giving the search giant a social boost to its already-strong mapping and mobile businesses. Speculation has had the sale at $1 billion to $1.3 billion, and so far there is no price on the deal, but a source tells TechCrunch that it was done for $1.1 billion. → 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
In an odd, throwaway line, Apple’s Eddy Cue mentioned that Siri, the voice control app for iOS 7, will let you search directly in “Bing.” In fact, the absence of Google was quite noticeable, reduced to a mention in the iWork portion of the event that the new web apps would work with Chrome. → 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
According to the Globes, an Israel-based publication, Google is reportedly set to acquire the Israeli transit and navigation company Waze for $1.3 billion, making it one of the larger Google acquisitions in recent memory. This news comes amid swirling rumors that Waze would be bought up by one of the big guys, Facebook, Google, or Apple. → Read More
All of the companies that are allegedly involved in the PRISM surveillance program have now issued short statements saying that they are not participating in this program and that they are not allowing the government “direct access” to their servers. Among these, of course, is Google. The company, however, also just issued a longer statement penned by its CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer… → Read More
PRISM is real. Even the U.S. government now acknowledges its existence. The question that remains unanswered, though, is how involved Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Paltalk and Facebook were. These companies are all named as “providers” on the original slides, including the dates the NSA started collecting data from them. The reporter with the most direct access to these documents, Glenn Greenwald… → Read More
The Washington Post today reported that Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company) and Yahoo participated in the so-called PRISM program which provided the NSA with what looks like virtually direct access to their servers and their users’ data. We have now reached out to all of these companies and so far, Facebook, Google and Apple have denied that they… → Read More
iOS and Android aren’t necessarily competing for one mobile crown anymore, according to the latest Flurry mobile report, which shows that in the two-horse race the smartphone and mobile OS market has become, both Apple and Google’s offerings in fact have room to earn their own separate crown. → Read More
Heads up Android keyboard aficionados — if your handset runs Android 4.0 or later and you’re just not thrilled with the keyboard you already have, you can now download Google’s stock keyboard app from the Google Play store.
According to a post on the official Android Google+ page, the app has launched in certain English-speaking markets with a wider rollout to follow shortly. That’s not to say… → Read More
All Google wants to talk about this week are APIs, it seems, but today’s announcement that it is not making the CalDAV API partner-only, as it announced during one of its latest “spring cleaning” purges earlier this year, definitely comes as a bit of a surprise. Later this year, the CalDav API, which allows developers to access calendar data, was scheduled to become unavailable for developers who… → Read More
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