Normally, when a company claims that it’s bringing the helpfulness of a Federation starship’s onboard computer to everyday technology, I sort of roll my eyes and prepare to be disappointed — except this time, that didn’t really happen.

Today, Google demonstrated its new conversational search feature during its annual Google I/O developers conference. Conversational search basically means that you’re asking questions rather than strategically typing in search terms to get the answer you want from a query, something that’s been available on Android mobile devices and Apple (via Siri) for a while now. However, Google is now bringing that conversational search to the desktop. (Check out a demo video below for a better look at voice search.)

To take advantage of this tool, you need to use Google’s Chrome web browser and also have access to a working microphone. From there, you can start by saying “OK, Google…” and proceed to ask it a question or bark out an order. (But beware of barking too harshly in case this new tech is really just the precursor to a future where Cylons take over our planet.)

During the demo, Google’s conversational search was able to pull up travel destinations for a long trip, pull up restaurant data, see flight itineraries, etc. — nothing we haven’t already seen. But what is impressive is how much the voice instructions are actually like talking to someone who had information you need to know. Part of that is in anticipating what the conversation would be and what the person making the query actually wanted to know. Obviously, the technology is getting better, and its far closer to the Enterprise‘s computer than it was when the service first rolled out.

But just because the conversational search is branching out to the desktop doesn’t mean the company isn’t still working to improve the mobile experience. More specifically, the company will be adding plenty of new cards that will appear in its Google Now service, including those for public transit, music album, movies, TV shows, reminders, and books.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Starting today, iPhone and iPad owners can finally get their hands on Google Now.

Think of it like an evolved form of Apple’s Siri personal assistant baked within Google’s iOS search app. In addition to receiving voice commands (a feature that’s already been present on on Google’s search app for some time), Google Now also presents useful information without your prompting.

It could, for example, tell you an estimated commute time to your office or the status of your package deliveries.

In my brief testing with Google Now on my iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, I found it to be just as easy to use as on Android. Google Now’s Cards (little boxes that it uses to deliver different types of information) are all located on the bottom of Google’s search app. Typically, the software presents the most relevant cards to you — so since I tested it in the morning, it displayed cards for my work commute and weather.

You can tap a card for more information (typically retrieved through a Google search), or swipe to remove them. At first glance, the biggest difference between the iOS and Android versions of Google Now is the available screen space. It’s a bit different juggling Google Now’s cards on the iPhone 5′s 4-inch screen, as most Android phones are approaching 5-inch screens. I also noticed that the Package Card doesn’t show any images for shipments on iOS — but that’s a fairly minor complaint.

Check out my hands-on video below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Now is officially invading Siri’s home turf.

Google announced today that an updated version of its iOS search app brings Google Now to the iPhone and iPad. Just like on Android, it’s focused entirely on bubbling up information that’s directly relevant — like warning you if there’s traffic before your next appointment, or if it’s going to rain later in the day.

Unfortunately, iOS users won’t get access to all of the Google Now Cards (each of which offer different functionalities). According to a handy comparison chart provided by Google, the iOS version of Google Now won’t have the following cards: Boarding Pass, Activity summary, Events, Zillow, Fandango, and Nearby events.

On Android, Google Now has access to a lot more information, since it’s a core part of the operating system. Google will likely never be able to give the iOS version of Google Now all of the features its Android sibling has — but Google has managed to bring over most of the core functionality.

It also looks like Google is gearing up to bring Google Now to Chrome on your desktop, according to some recently discovered testing code.

I haven’t had a chance to try out the app yet (look for a hands-on later today), but it’s pretty obvious Google is turning its iOS search apps into a mini-ecosystem. It’s like the reverse of what Facebook Home is doing on Android. With Google Now, you’ll have even less of a reason to leave the Google search app on your iPhone. It doesn’t need specific commands like Siri to retrieve useful information, which could make it an even better digital personal assistant.

What will that Google user do now?

According to some testing code that Google Operating System caught in the wild, Google is testing a Google Now experience for its home page. Google Now, of course, is the home screen on the latest versions of Android, which brings together relevant and contextual information like weather, traffic conditions, how your favorite stocks are doing, whether your sports teams won, and so on.

“Just the right information at just the right time,” Google said. Now it’s testing that mobile experience on the web.

Sounds almost … Yahoo-ish?

The code on the page in testing shows functionality that will allow Google users to set and edit their home and work locations, as well as their current location, and “Discover Google Now.” Presumably, those location settings — as well as other preferences entered — would create a customized page with news, events, personal information, and perhaps even Google offers or deals close to you.

Google has long had iGoogle, a personalized homepage with your latest mail, calendar events, weather, tweets, bookmarks, and more. It’s — frankly — an ugly, almost awkward widget-ized implementation of what Google Now has become on Android phones, and nowhere near Google’s current level of user interface sophistication.

It has also conveniently been scheduled for “retirement.” In an announcement dated April 8, just a couple of weeks ago, Google said it will retire iGoogle on November 1, 2013. The reason? A Google Now-like experience on mobile:

We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today’s web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for something like iGoogle has eroded over time …

Almost certainly, a Google Now for the web would include integration with Google+, the social glue between each of Google’s services. And in fact, this might be seen as a way to drive more of the social features of that network to the average user of Google’s search engine who does not currently use that social network.

If Google is planning to release a Google Now product for the web, presumably it would do so some time before iGoogle is fully retired.

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update this post with the company’s response.

Image credit: Google

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Search Spammers are a blight on Google’s reputation.

When Google introduced its Panda algorithm update in 2011, the company’s goal was to weed out and punish low-quality sites that had manipulated their way to the top of search results. 2012′s Penguin update tackled the same issue but from a different angle. This time Google was targeting bad guys guilty of over-optimizing their sites with tactics like keyword stuffing and intentionally created duplicate content.

Google’s desires here should be pretty clear: It’s an advertising company, so the better its search results are, the more ad revenue it can pull in.

But while improving results is obviously helpful for web search, it’s far more important for the mobile world, where all of the problems with search spam are amplified.

“With mobile devices, search quality is a far bigger issue than it is on the web,” Ian Lurie, the CEO of Internet marketing company Portent, said.

Basically, when you’re dealing with smaller screens, every little bit of screen real estate is hugely important. This means that companies have less margin for error — especially with search.

Source: Chris Chabot/Google+

Sergey doesn’t want bad search results to ruin your Glass experience.

Mobile also affects searchers’ patience for crappy results:  You may be able to tolerate a few unhelpful spam links while at home, but that restraint goes out the window while you’re flicking through search results on your smartphone. On mobile, accuracy matters.

“With mobile, I want the number one, two, or three result to be what I want,” Lurie said.

This reality obviously puts a lot of pressure on Google, which makes its money by giving searchers fast, useful results and selling advertisements against them. Every false, gamed search result is a tiny failure for Google’s search algorithm. It’s death by a thousand spammers.

These pressures are even worse for products like Google Glass and Google Now, which are part of “ubiquitous and embedded” future of search, as Lurie puts it.

Both of these products take Google’s search finesse to a new level: Glass is literally about seeing the world through Google, and Google Now is about giving you relevant, accurate information before you even realize you need it.

Neither one of these products will have a particularly high tolerance for crappy spam links or inaccurate search results of any kind. Just imagine making a search on Glass and getting a result that a spammer had manipulated to the top of Google’s results (or, heck, even a search that returned an unhelpful result). These kinds of situations would completely destroy the experience of using Glass, which is supposed to be simple, seamless, and largely invisible.

If the tolerance for bad search results is tiny on mobile phones, it’s nonexistent on Google Glass: As the interface options disappear, the acceptance for bad search results also vanishes. (Let’s call it the Law of Search Frustration Tolerance.)

All of which should make it very clear that Google is sure to get increasingly tough on search spam as the mobile web, Google Now, and Google Glass become more important. Google has to kill search spam before search spam kills it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You have to give Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt some credit — he’s not afraid to respond to tough questions directly.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent Summit in India, Schmidt confirmed that Google doesn’t have any plans (yet) to unify Android and Chrome OS, Reuters reports. He noted that the two operating systems could end up overlapping in some features down the line.

Last week Andy Rubin, the head of Android for the past decade, stepped down from his role and was replaced by Chrome OS head Sundar Pichai. That led to speculation that Chrome OS and Android would eventually be joined — it would be an easy way to bring apps to the barren Chrome OS, and it would also give Google a way to bring Android apps to the desktop.

When it comes to bringing the company’s Google Now virtual assistant to iOS, Schmidt said at the event, “You’ll need to discuss that with Apple.” [You can watch Schmidt's entire talk here.]

A video published last week by Engadget showed Google Now running on iOS, which led to plenty of speculation that it would hit Apple’s platform soon.

Schmidt’s comment seems to hint that Google has already submitted a Google Now application to Apple, where it’s stuck in approval limbo. Google has had a contentious history with its iOS applications — the Google Voice app notoriously took a long time to get approved — something that Schmidt also commented on during his talk.

Google already offers its fast voice search feature on its iPhone application, but the addition of Google Now would mean iPhone users would be able to take advantage of the assistant’s more advanced features, like automatically generating information about your commute and tracking packages.

Via TechCrunch; @ScepticGeek; Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With Apple’s Siri and Google Now leading the way, the race is on to create the perfect mobile virtual assistant.

Nuance, whose Dragon voice recognition technology powers Siri, is taking another stab at the field with version 3.0 of its Dragon Mobile Assistant for Android.

The free app does the usual voice-powered tricks, like telling you the weather and performing web searches, but its new features are worth a close look. You can tell the new Dragon Mobile Assistant to share your location with a friend, and it will automatically send out a text message with a link to your location. Similarly, it can also help you find lost friends (with their permission, of course).

And if you’re the type of person who books a lot of conference calls and phone meetings, Dragon Mobile Assistant can automatically dial into a call using information from your calendar entries. This could be particularly useful for conference calls that require annoying passcodes.

The app supports Android 2.3 phones and above, but it’s not as useful for modern phones that have access to Google Now (those running Android 4.1 and above). Google’s homegrown virtual assistant is far faster than Dragon’s app, in my experience. Asking Google Now for weather or a web search almost feels instantaneous, whereas Dragon’s app takes a few seconds to process your request. And while you can use Dragon Mobile Assistant to create calendar entries, it doesn’t yet have access to your calendar to read you the day’s schedule, something Google Now does with ease.

In my brief testing, I was surprised at how often Dragon’s app simply led me to a page of information, rather than actually dictating an answer. For example, if you ask it for the weather, it will simply point to a small WeatherBug widget. If you ask Google Now for the weather, it will actually read the forecast aloud.

For the most part, Dragon Mobile Assistant is an appealing option for Android phone owners with older devices, who want some of the benefits of Siri and Google Now without upgrading to a newer phone. It’s certainly a huge step up from Nuance’s first foray into Android, which came via the dictation function on Swype.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Robin Vasan and Prashant Fuloria are, respectively, managing director and executive in residence at the Mayfield Fund.

There are over a billion smartphones being used around the world today, but most apps running on them are still quite dumb, in that they throw away a lot of valuable information that could be harnessed to serve users better and to provide a better overall experience.

Don’t believe us? Just look at the highly popular apps from Yelp and Amazon. Yelp’s app search ignores your implicit cuisine preferences, which it could easily extract from your prior queries and navigation. Yelp also overlooks contextual factors like weather and time of day, showing “Bars” and “Nightlife” prominently in its Nearby feature, even at seven in the morning!

Ditto for Amazon’s PriceCheck app, which seems to not only ignore your purchase history but also whether you’re searching for that toaster oven from your home or at your local Target.

We don’t mean to pick on Yelp and Amazon – we’re confident that if you spend some time thinking about any favorite app, you’ll come up with several ways in which it could make your life easier by intelligently utilizing your prior usage, your social graph, your location, time of day, and so on.

The good news is that things are quickly changing for the better, thanks to the emergence of a new class of apps which embody the definition of “smart” by being personalized, contextual, and proactive. Just as the rise of services like Pinterest changed user expectations around visual design and intuitive interfaces, we believe that these new smart apps will train users to expect all their mobile apps to:

• know them (who);
• remember their past interactions and preferences (what);
• factor in their context (when, where);
• and even take permission-based actions on their behalf.

The hottest area for this trend is the personal productivity space. Three years ago, Siri gave users a glimpse of how smart apps could make them more productive. However, while Siri continues to provide a convenient speech interface and integrates nicely with core iOS apps (phone, calendar, reminders, etc.), it has been leapfrogged by Google Now, which leverages deep Android OS integration and connection into Google services (Gmail, Google Apps, Google+ and your search history) to provide a more personalized, contextual and proactive virtual assistant experience.

Google Now has its own limitations, especially the lack of integration with other key services like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Exchange or other email providers. Entrepreneurs are hoping to exploit these limitations: witness the recent debuts of apps like Mailbox, Tempo, Cue, Grokr and EasilyDo. These apps use intelligence to organize inboxes with a simple swipe, show you useful details for calendar events, provide routes that avoid traffic, dial into conference calls, and suggest friends who need to be congratulated or consoled.

Smart apps don’t all have to be virtual assistants or personal productivity apps. We see a raft of opportunities across the board for entrepreneurs to disrupt entire categories. To share a few examples:

• Newsreaders are getting increasingly smart. Prismatic incorporates not only your interests (personalization), but also your location (context) to determine what articles to show you. The Relevance app explicitly asks you for an important piece of context (how much time you have to spare) to serve you just the right number of stories. We hope that these and other recent newsreaders are intelligently using user-level engagement feedback in the way they rank articles.
• In the world of commerce, Walmart has built some modest smarts into its new mobile app. If the app senses that you are in a store, it offers you a store-specific experience, including local ads, rollbacks and new products. We’d love to see Walmart take the next step and provide in-store aisle-level directions so you don’t have to ask an employee where the diapers are stocked.
• We’ve all heard about the holy grail in local: As you walk down the street, you get notified about a special offer on your favorite coffee at the nearby café. While we’ve yet to see anyone actually deliver on this promise in a meaningful way, we’re optimistic that apps like Spindle, which claim to use both personal and contextual signals to push relevant local information, might actually get us there this year.
• Why should consumer apps have all the fun? On the enterprise front, ServiceMax (which Mayfield has invested in) is a company providing solutions for field service management (think Pitney Bowes repairmen). Its mobile app automatically updates a technician’s schedule with incoming service requests, based on parameters like customer revenue, customer and technician location, technician skills and prior interaction with the customer. If you work in a field services organization, this is actually a lot more exciting than having your news organized smarter or getting that surprise special on your coffee.

Why is this change happening now? We see several factors converging to unleash smarter apps:

• Mobile First – Mobile has become the primary entry point for all types of users, who are using smaller form factors with much less real estate, yet want to be able to do the same or more as they do on their desktop. While many companies realized this a couple of years ago (think Facebook implementing mobile-only signup), most apps that go beyond passive consumption are still mere companions to their desktop counterparts. Personalization, context and proactive suggestions are tools to reduce the number of steps required by a user to accomplish a task on mobile.

• Device, Network, and Cloud Infrastructure – Mobile devices are much more powerful in terms of processors, sensors (cameras, GPS, etc.) and improved battery life, always-on cellular or Wi-Fi access is a relatively safe assumption, and low-cost, geographically distributed, high-performance cloud infrastructure (thanks to Amazon Web Services) has enabled analytical processing across vast amounts of data.
• User Behavior – Users are now more willing to share data with apps if they believe that this will result in a better experience for them. It has become quite easy and commonplace for mobile apps to get access into contacts, calendar, location and even services like Facebook and email. EasilyDo (a Mayfield portfolio company) reports that virtually all its users give the app access to their contacts, over 50 percent of its users give access to their Facebook accounts, and over 30 percent of users give access to three or more connections including an email account.

If you’re excited about this new wave of smart apps, join the club. We believe we are just in the first innings in the creation and delivery of smart apps and looking forward to partnering with entrepreneurs building disruptive mobile apps and companies.

[Editor's note: The mobile app experience discussed in this article will be explored in greater depth at VentureBeat's upcoming Mobile Summit, an invitation-only gathering of 180 top mobile executives, April 1-2, 2013. Find out more about the Mobile Summit here.]

Robin Vasan, Managing Director, is a former software entrepreneur who has been on the Mayfield Fund investing team since 1999. He invests in early-stage companies that leverage the drivers of mobile, cloud, SaaS and big data.  Some of his notable companies include webMethods, Trigo and Akimbi and some of his current investments include Alfresco, CloudPhysics, Couchbase, EasilyDo and Marketo.

Prashant Fuloria, Executive in Residence, brings a decade of product management experience from Facebook and Google. At Facebook, Prashant led the product team for Facebook Ads and subsequently managed commerce products, including Facebook Credits. At Google, he managed all of Google’s products for the Asia-Pacific region, led its global billing & payments product efforts, and served as an early member of the AdWords product team.

Image: Blake Patterson/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google had its first $50 billion year in 2012. But with its massive investments in mobile, someday it might make that much just on the little plastic and metal devices we carry in our pockets.

In fact, digital ad company WordStream has counted no fewer than 21 ways that Google is monetizing mobile, from good-old-fashioned Google AdWords to Groupon-light Offers to augmented reality assistant Google Goggles and, someday, Google Glass.

Google even wants to replace your dead-cow wallet with a shiny digital one. But if you won’t buy what you want with Google Wallet, it hopes to at least guide you to your next purchase with Google Shopper.

Here’s the full list, in visual form, along with WordStream’s perception of how well Google is using its mobile tools to generate mobile money:

photo credit: Louish Pixel via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google used a primetime advertising slot during Grammy Awards last night to show off the popular Nexus 4 smartphone and many uses of Google Now, its Siri competitor.

The Nexus 4 is one of the hottest Android phones on the market due to solid feature set and its relatively cheap off-contract pricing. It was originally plagued with supply issues, but Google and manufacturer LG have mostly fixed those issues and it can be purchased in the Google Play store for $300.

While the Nexus 4′s placement in the commercial was key, the real star might have been Google Now. Google clearly wants people to see what its competitor to Apple’s Siri can do. In the commercial, we see many uses for Google Now: a mother gets weather updates, two girls are helped with translations, a couple finds a place to eat, and a father looks over his busy calendar.

Check out the video above to see the full ad and let us know what you think in the comments.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Today Grokr is releasing a Google Now for iOS. Except, not exactly. Actually, it’s much better than Google Now, and it is likely to stay that way for a long time.

Google Now is a background-level app embedded in Android (as of 4.1, Jelly Bean) which provides ambient access to relevant data: weather, time, traffic conditions around you, and the score of the big game. Grokr does that, too, but it also does much, much more. And it accesses information that Google will likely never be able to get its hungry little data paws on.

“Our whole idea was to reimagine search, to building search where knowledge just finds you,” Grokr CEO Srivats Sampath told me when we chatted yesterday. “Search on mobile breaks down … search companies took what was built for the PC and put it on a phone, but the phone is a completely different user experience. The phone has so many sensors that you can make it more intelligent … make it predictive.”

So the goal is to get you the information you want before you know you need it.

Google Now does that too, using your calendar information (if you’re using Google’s calendaring functionality), your email (if you use Gmail), your search history (OK, everyone uses Google for searching), the weather (based on your location), and more.

But there’s a whole class of things that Google doesn’t include — and likely will never be able to include.

I’m talking about all the data and information about you, your friends, and the things you care about that is stored and transmitted via social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and, to a lesser degree, LinkedIn. That’s where Grokr shines, connecting to those services and integrating data from them — and 60 to 70 other sources — into its predictive algorithms which then work hard to surface just what you want, when you want it.

“That’s the key differentiating factor for us: We want to go where the users are – we are able to integrate with Facebook, with Foursquare, with LinkedIn, and Twitter,” Sampath says. “Google wants to keep you within their ecosystem.”

The end result is not telepathy, but it’s close.

For instance, Grokr noticed that I’m a journalist, and it showed me trending topics about journalism on Twitter. The app asked for access to my iPod app, analyzed the songs I have, and it told me about upcoming concerts with some of those artists. It noticed I’m interested in James Bond, and it showed me theater times for Skyfall. It saw that I’m a cofounder in a coworking startup and added coworking to my list of interests.

“We can only remember five to seven things at one time,” Sampath said yesterday. “But the number of things we want to remember is maybe in the thousands. We now can outsource that cognitive process to the cloud … outsource your brain to the cloud.”

Of course, Grokr’s not always right.

That’s partially due to bad information (yes, my kids used to listen to Raffi, and yes, that music is still in my iTunes library) and partially due to the failings of the algorithm (a jazz concert in Oakland, Calif. tomorrow by an artist I like is not really all that relevant, given the fact that I’m in Vancouver, Canada right now). And I’ve already seen Skyfall.

But it is helpful, and it is better than my experience in the past few months with Google Now.

“To build this service, we had to build your graph of graphs,” Sampath told me. “The app eventually knows more about you than your mom —  I’m learning so much about myself … it’s quite an eye-opener.”

The Grokr team has also put a lot of effort into understanding entities, not just terms. Web search is built into Grokr for those times when the knowledge does not just come right to you, and Grokr uses Freebase (as does Google) to understand not just terms but concepts, meaning that it can group search results by categories and help you refine your results.

The current list of data sources is just the beginning, Sampath says.

Coming soon are sources like Fitbit, Nike+, and other self-quantification services, including health data based on location, environment, and ethnicity.

Competing against Google, of course, is not easy, even when you’re doing it on iOS. But the fact that Google will have great difficulty convincing Facebook and other social networks to open social data to their biggest competitor does give Grokr something of a moat of protection.

This is just starting to get interesting.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’re now getting the first taste of a world where our computing devices fetch us relevant information without our asking. Google Now is the most notable example; it’s Google’s Siri-esque competitor that can learn from your daily routine and parse information in your e-mail.

In that same vein there’s Expect Labs, a small startup that’s been working on an “Anticipatory Computing Engine” that can understand conversations in real time and deliver relevant information to you. Today the company announced that its technology is getting a big accuracy boost with the addition of Nuance’s voice recognition technology, which also powers Siri, Google Now, and most other voice-recognition implementations.

“I really think, in the next 10 to 20 years, that the huge changes that we’re going to be seeing in software are really around becoming more intelligent,” said Tim Tuttle, the chief executive officer of Expect Labs, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s inevitable, and the way we’re going to use computers then will be fundamentally different.”

In that futuristic world, Tuttle predicts, we’ll be interacting with some sort of computing device every waking minute, and those devices will need a way to determine what you actually need. So Tuttle, who has a background in Artificial Intelligence, spent the past two years in stealth working on building that platform for the future with Expect Labs.

To show off its new tech, the company developed MindMeld, a group video chat app for the iPad that listens to your conversations and pushes useful information to the participants. One portion of the app is your typical video chat window, but you can hit a button to tell it to start listening to the conversation and collect useful information. So if you’re chatting with friends about seeing a movie or going to a restaurant, the app will pull up movie listings and restaurant reviews for all of you to see. (Check out Tuttle’s demonstration of the app below.)

It’s like searching without actually searching.

With the Nuance partnership, Expect Labs will integrate the Dragon Mobile SDK into MindMeld, which should make it even better at voice recognition. It expects to release MindMeld to the public early next year.

It’s not hard to imagine the far-reaching uses for Expect Labs’ technology. It could eventually power an evolved form of Twitter that keeps track of all of the topics we interact with daily. So if a friend recommends an article to you, it’ll automatically get logged for you to revisit later. Now imagine that functionality combined with Google’s Project Glass — it could be infoporn heaven.

After emerging from stealth mode in September, San Francisco-based Expect Labs was chosen as a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield. It also raised $2.3 million in funding from KPG Ventures, Google  Ventures, Greylock Ventures, and others.

Check out a demo of MindMeld below:

So far, Google Now has been accessed when you swipe upwards on your Android smartphone. But it hasn’t been distributed anywhere else, including on your desktop.

But this morning, reports started pointing to evidence that Google Chrome team programmers have accepted the addition of a “skeleton” for Google Now for Chrome, an early step in a larger project to show Google Now notifications in the Chrome browser. CNET reported the news here.

Of course, by making Google Now available in the Chrome browser, Google is making sure that it can reach as many users as possible. Chrome can be downloaded as a browser on most operating systems.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken inspiration from Apple’s Passbook to give its Android customers a more instantaneous way to pull up their boarding passes with Google Now.

Google Now is a personal assistant app for Android devices that aims to surface the information you want, when you need it: optimal driving route, weather, sports scores, and nearby restaurant options. Google Now also accepts voice commands, making it Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. Today, the app is starting to act like another one of Apple’s interesting apps: Passbook.

Wednesday, Google refreshed its Search application for Android. Version 4.1 comes with a few handy-dandy travel additions to Now, including a new card that automatically surfaces your electronic boarding passes from your Gmail account and shows them to you when you’re at the airport.

Sounds familiar, right? Essentially, what we have here is a Passbook feature-clone, but a pretty clever one at that. Why use a separate app when Google can connect the dots between Gmail and Now to find your boarding passes for you? For comparison, iPhone users add their boarding passes to Passbook from the vendor’s Passbook-enabled application.

Google said the boarding pass card is launching shortly for United Airlines, but will work with other airline’s in the future.

Travelers may also appreciate the addition of Google Now cards that display the weather of your destination city and highlight events happening nearby. Google Search for Android now comes up with other Google Now cards, including one for birthday reminders and one for using your camera to search when at a museum.

Photo credit: Wayan Vota/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google announced today that its new Google Now personal assistant feature is available on the latest version of its mobile operating system, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

The company showed off the new assistant at its Google I/O event in San Francisco. Essentially, this is Google’s answer to Apple’s virtual voice assistant, Siri for iOS, which remembers important dates on your calendar, reminds you of appointment times, and searches the web via voice controls. However, Google Now goes a bit further by taking the data from your daily routine, search history, and other behavior.

For instance, Google Now can learn your daily commute home. If your normal route is clogged with traffic, it sends you a notification suggesting alternate paths. It also updates you on restaurants and stores as you’re walking past them and provides reviews of those businesses and other recommendations.

Siri certainly offers all of these things, but you have to work to see all the same information that Google Now seems to provide in one easy stream. The same is true when you use Google Now to do a voice search. You get very specific search results, along with a stream of useful information related to it.