Up until now, you’ve had to track your free storage on Google products separately. It was just another thing that Google hadn’t brought together to make it easier on users. Today, the company announced that you’ll now have 15GB of free storage to share between Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. Google Apps customers are getting a bump for Drive and Gmail, to the tune of 30GB. → 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
Google’s Sundar Pichai spoke to Wired in an interview published today ahead of Google I/O this week, describing what it’s like to be taking the helm of both Android and Chrome going into the annual conference. Pichai took over for Andy Rubin, who stepped out of his role heading up Android back in March.
These days, he says not much has changed around his thinking about Chrome and Android, but… → 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
Games dominate the app ecosystem.
It’s easy to forget that as we all dig for the next app of the moment, but it’s the truth. 9 of the 10 highest grossing apps in the App Store last year, all games.
Combine this with the fact that Apple’s Game Center was launched 2.5 years ago, and it’s a bit strange that Google has yet to launch a Game Center-esque hub for Android. That’ll change soon, it… → Read More
Google is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in one fell swoop, but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search. → 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
Google’s I/O developer conference is happening next week in San Francisco, and one of the big questions around what we’ll see there includes hardware. Now KGI securities analyst Mingchi Kuo (via 9to5Google), who unlike other analysts actually has a good track record of predicting things accurately, has let slip that one big reveal will be an updated Nexus 7 tablet, with a 1920 x 1200 7-inch… → Read More
In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees to access their channels. Subscriptions will begin at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial and discounted yearly rates. YouTube gives the examples of Sesame… → Read More
Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some research out today from Google indicates that among smartphone owners, some 79% can be classified as “mobile shoppers,” using their devices for some aspect of the shopping experience, from finding store locations through to finding… → Read More
“Google And The World Brain” is a new documentary about Google’s plan to scan all of the world’s books, which triggered an ongoing lawsuit being heard today. The hair-raising film sees Google import millions of copyrighted works, get sued, lose, but almost get a literature monopoly in the process. It’s scary, informative, and worth watching if you recognize its biased portrayal of Google as evil. → Read More
Whether you think Google Glass is something you’d wind up using one day, you have to admit that the technology is impressive. Packed inside of the pair of specs is a computer running Android, camera and all of the wireless capabilities you’d need. The idea of wearable computers is nothing new, and a team that explored Antarctica actually had their own pair of “Glass” long before it was en vogue. → Read More
Today, Google announced the eventual rollout of a brand new look for its Admin Console, an area that only admins of Google Apps will see. The aim of the redesign is to help admins get to information quicker, manage user accounts easier and keep their companies running as smoothly as possible. The company boasts that “millions” of businesses, schools and government agencies are using Google Apps… → Read More
Google Glass is still very much a pre-release product, but a new update today edges it closer to a shipping device, thanks to some core functionality additions that you’d expect to see in consumer Google hardware. The “XE5″ update adds inbound notifications from Google+, so you can see direct shares, comments and mentions, as well as comment and +1 those updates. There are also now Hangout… → Read More
Google’s bound to pull back the curtain on some goodies at its annual I/O conference next week (though it’s being characteristically quiet about the whole thing), but could a redesigned version of Google Maps be one of them? That’s what the folks at the (completely unofficial) Google Operating System blog hint at — they’ve come into possession of a pair of screenshots that supposedly depict… → Read More
Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating… → Read More
Google Docs, now Drive, have always had an option to create forms that would drop data right into a spreadsheet. This is super handy until you tried to do something like…collect date and time information. For whatever reason, those structured fields were never an option with Forms, but the team has finally added both as an option today. The product has always been “there,” but… → Read More
Google just reminded developers that they can use Chrome as the default browser for their apps and easily switch back and forth between app and browser. With x-callback, Google says, developers can open links in Chrome and once the page has loaded, Chrome will show a link back to the original app in the top left corner of the screen. This should make it much easier for developers to allow users to… → Read More
Google has become the king of maps because of the technology that it has developed over the past eight years. One competitor, OpenStreetMap, has developed its own tools and built a community of map enthusiasts that now powers services like Hipmunk, Evernote and Foursquare. Today, as promised, the non-profit has released a brand new map editor, code-named “iD,” which was built from the… → Read More
Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood held a “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” and beat on a Google bus pinata before cops broke up the crowd. The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families. But they’re being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket. → Read More
Aaaand the Google Glass jokes have officially gone mainstream.
Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update — the bit that long ago became the best reason to tune into SNL — took on Glass last night… and, well, they kind of nailed it. → Read More
A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned.
I’m not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it’s released, as ever. It won’t be as customizable – no Swype, no Facebook Home – but those… → Read More
Google Glass is finding its way to developers and others and the reaction has been, well, predictable. So far, there are those who think that Glass will absolutely change the world, that it’s our version of the flying car. Those people are full of shit. On the other side of the coin, there are those who say that Glass will never find a place in the hearts of consumers, that it’s… → Read More
If Google is worried about Google Glass being too “nerdy”, they probably wouldn’t be sending people rockin’ the Glass into the heart of the most gloriously nerdy thing in the world, the Large Hadron Collider.
Fortunately, Google doesn’t seem to care (nor should they) if their amazing little experiment gets a few knocks along the way. As a result, we get videos like this one. → Read More
Well, what do we have here? Somewhat under the radar, Google has hired the computer games veteran Noah Falstein to the position of Chief Game Designer. Yes, that’s right, the search giant, not normally known for its games development, appears to have a major gaming project in circulation, at least something that requires someone as experienced as Falstein at its helm. → Read More
Companies like Google, BlackBerry, Earthlink, Red Hat, and others in the tech community, have been piling pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stand against companies that file patent suits but don’t actually make any products themselves — known formally as “patent assertion entities” but more commonly as patent trolls and patent privateers (a term favored by Google). Now someone in… → Read More
Google’s Web Fonts collection of open source fonts is now available on the desktop (Mac and Windows). At first glance, that doesn’t make all that much sense, given that the whole idea of Web Fonts is that they bring new typography options to the Web that were previously only available on the desktop. As Google notes, however, having these fonts available locally on your desktop means… → Read More
After Google’s announcement and demo of app activities being introduced into its Search product, I spoke with Seth Sternberg and Ardan Arac about how Google+ sign-in is coming along and what the company is doing to get developers to adopt the platform. The integration is yet another signal that Google is trying to unify all of its products, with Google+ being the glue that holds everything… → Read More
Google always said that its Chromebooks were “for sharing,” but even though they always had a guest mode, they weren’t necessarily set up to be used as public Internet kiosks. Today, Google is changing that with the launch of the new and imaginatively named “Managed Public Sessions” feature. Google says this new feature, which lets you turn your Chrome OS device into… → Read More
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