Google gobbles display ad startup Teracent
Google is growing its display advertising dominance, today with the acquisition of Teracent, a startup that provides companies with the tools they need to customize display ads like web banners and interactive modules. Still making most of its revenue from text ads listed next to search results, the tech giant sees display as the next biggest area of opportunity.
Right now, Google is actually coming in second to Yahoo in display advertising — having only launched… Continue Reading
Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely
Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.
Yesterday, Google rolled out a series… Continue Reading
Google creates automatic captions for YouTube videos
Google announced today that YouTube will be able to automatically include captions in videos. Previously, you had to enter the caption manually while the video was uploading, an option that was usually overlooked. That was also a problem for those impaired or might have language barriers that are looking to consumer video.
Google notes that the number of captioned videos does is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, but with the new automatic caption services, that should… Continue Reading
Google aims to release Chrome OS for netbooks by holiday season 2010
Google gave its first public demonstration today of Chrome OS, the operating system it’s developing for PCs (primarily cheaper netbooks). It presented the demo via webcast from its headquarters in Mountain View, and it looked pretty solid.
Although there’s been some hope that Google might launch the OS in early 2010, Vice President of Product Marketing Sundar Pichai said Google plans to work with manufacturers to bring Chrome OS netbooks to market in time for next… Continue Reading
5 O’Clock Roundup: Moving into a networked era, Tumblr envy, Open Web
Watch out Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw! Google’s coming: You can now read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts with Google Scholar. Expect an oligopoly (as in the legal research industry) to feel some pressure as Google rolls out another free and disruptive service. You can search by cases, topics or specific phrases. You can also explore how different rulings are cited by other judges and later opinions.
Google also experiments… Continue Reading
Google Sites now offers templates for company web sites
Google is about to make it easier for businesses to get started with Google Sites, its tool for internal collaboration sites and public websites, by offering templates for creating starter sites.
Sites is intended primarily as a way for companies to share their documents, videos, and other material either internally or externally. (It’s pitched as a competitor to Microsoft SharePoint.) For example, Google’s PR team uses it as a way to share all the relevant materials… Continue Reading
Motorola probably sold 250,000 Droids in first week, Flurry says
Motorola probably sold 250,000 Droids in the first week, making it the Android platform’s first legitimate challenger to the iPhone, according to analytics firm Flurry. Those figures are more than four times what HTC and T-Mobile were able to do with the MyTouch phone and about one-sixth of what Apple pulled off with the iPhone 3GS in their first weeks. (Keep in mind that Apple launched that model in eight countries, not one like the… Continue Reading
Former Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge joins Google, discovers Gmail
Don Dodge, the Microsoft startup evangelist whose layoff earlier this month was much-bemoaned in the tech community, has landed on his feet, and then some. He has accepted a new job at Google, where it sounds like he’ll be occupying a role similar to his job at Microsoft — convincing startups and other developers to build using Google’s technology and platforms.
In his blog post announcing the move, Dodge sounds pretty mixed in his feelings about… Continue Reading
Google Earth adds custom map-viewing to iPhone app
Google Earth is adding custom map-sharing to its iPhone app — so you can share anything from your favorite places in Barcelona to a preferred hiking trail with friends. (They’ve given a few examples, including Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler’s favorite destinations and Ferran Adria’s recommendations for places to eat.)
While logged into Google Maps on a computer, you can save maps you’re interested in so they’ll appear when you log in to your iPhone app… Continue Reading
Hohm vs. Powermeter: A side-by-side rundown
Much has been written about how the bitter rivalry between Google and Microsoft has extended to their respective home energy management systems, Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm. But most of these stories make it sound like the tools render the same service: reporting how much energy people are using and how much it is costing them. Few have sussed out their subtler differences.
With so many smaller players in the home energy monitoring field (think OpenPeak,… Continue Reading
Slowpokes to get penalized in Google search rankings?
WebProNews dug up a pretty interesting nugget in an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts over the weekend at PubCon — there’s a faction of Googlers who are lobbying for site speed to be a factor in search rankings.
That’s not taken into account at the moment, although Google tries to boost the speed of its own services with a religious ferocity. (Consider that even a 100 to 400 millisecond delay can reduce daily searches per user… Continue Reading
Google’s Dave Girouard: Google Docs could be an Office killer next year
Google Docs seems to get a lot of flack — not surprising, since it’s pretty bare bones, as word processors go. But that will change next year, Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard told ZDNet Asia.
Specifically, Girouard said Google plans to make 30 to 50 improvements to Docs’ features, performance, and more — it might not match Microsoft Word (which Girouard described as “an overkill tool”) feature-for-feature, but it will make be capable of serving “the… Continue Reading
Google’s Sidewiki: The good, the bad and the ugly
Today, Google mentioned on its blog that it has been 2 months since the company officially launched Google Sidewiki – the feature that appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of any website.
50 days into the launch, Google felt compelled to share some of those entries. Here’s an excerpt from the post:
“We’ve been really excited by these uses of Sidewiki and wanted to share 10 of these great entries… Continue Reading
Wave adds ‘follow’ feature, promises more inbox improvements
Google Wave, the still-very-much-in-development communication tool, got a new feature today that should make it easier to navigate your inbox — the option of following public waves. And there are more changes coming, as the Wave team introduces other tweaks to how the service highlights conversations and updates.
The follow button lets users opt-in to seeing public waves. Previously, once you clicked on a wave to read or comment on it, it would automatically be added… Continue Reading
Google tries to speed up programming with a new language: Go
A team of Googlers just announced a project called Go — it’s a new, experimental programming language that Google is making available as open source at the Go website.
The Go team says its big programming frustration has been the slowness of existing languages. Go changes that by compiling (i.e., turning programming code into an executable file) complex programs in a few seconds or less. Other features include the ability to use multicore processors to perform… Continue Reading
Happy Droid Day!
After weeks of speculation, followed by a real announcement, followed by more waiting, Motorola and Verizon have finally released the Droid, the supposed iPhone-killer which is the first device using version 2.0 of Google’s Android operating system.
The reviews have been positive so far, with gadget king Walt Mossberg calling it “a more credible alternative to the iPhone” as well as “the best super-smart phone Verizon offers, the best Motorola phone I’ve tested and the best… Continue Reading
Google Dashboard: All Your Data That Are Belong To Us
OK, so all that personal data doesn’t really belong to Google, but it would be nice to know how much the search giant has on us — embarrassing e-mails, search histories and all.
The company released a dashboard today that shows all the data it has from the Google products you use. That includes Gmail, Docs, Web History and YouTube among others. For example in the Gmail category, Google tells you how many e-mails you’ve sent and… Continue Reading
Blogger gives Google Friend Connect a 9-million site lead on Facebook
Google released some interesting statistics today about Friend Connect, which is part of the search giant’s push to build a social layer across the web where visitors can get tailored experiences depending on their interests and friend network. So how has Friend Connect done since its launch last year?
It’s on nine million sites
Friend Connect sites attract about half a billion unique viewers over a 30-day period
And over two people join a site every… Continue Reading
Google Friend Connect sites start offering tailored web content, ads
More than a year ago Google and Facebook started a head-to-head race to build a social layer across the web with Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. The vision was, if you visited a web site, you’d get a custom experience based on your own interests and what your friends have been doing.
Today that’s becoming a bit more of a reality.
Google is releasing a series of widgets for its Friend Connect-enabled sites to give them… Continue Reading
Google announces turn-by-turn GPS navigation — for free
There’s a good chance you’ve driven with someone who’s bought a fancy GPS navigation system for their car that gives them voice directions for each turn as they drive. You may have purchased one of those systems yourself, or maybe you went for the $100 iPhone version from TomTom. Now Google says it’s releasing a version of Google Maps that does the same thing, and you won’t have to pay anything for it.
Google Maps Navigation… Continue Reading