VentureBeat

Google-Admob: A storm for Weather.com?

If you’re looking for some consequences from Google’s bold acquisition of leading mobile ad network company AdMob yesterday, consider Weather.com.

Weather.com, a subsidiary of the Weather Channel, has done well because of its focus. You want weather? It will give it to you, wherever you are. It has roughly 100 million viewers on TV, 40 million viewers on the web, and more than 10 million users on mobile devices.

Weather.com is the fourth most popular mobile destination… Continue Reading

Google to buy mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million

Google said it will buy mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock today, letting the search giant further muscle its way into mobile advertising and extend the dominance it has built on the web in search-based advertising.

San Mateo-based AdMob (see our profile) is the biggest player in mobile web and app ads, a market that has become particularly sexy now that smartphones such as the iPhone and other mobile-browser friendly devices are driving an… Continue Reading

Google maps fun places with Street View “trike”

With Google Maps, you can use a feature called “Street View” to take a virtual drive across town, or pretty much anywhere there are public streets.

But until now some of the funnest places haven’t been accessible by car, and so Google’s Street View car hasn’t captured them. Now Google is blitzing through all kinds of more private, inaccessible places such as scenic running trails, private universities and zoos with a new tool: a 3-wheeled bicycle… Continue Reading

Google Earth deepens crowdsourcing with Building Maker

Building a comprehensive 3-D model of the world is definitely not going to be a top-down task. So Google Earth is taking a page from the company’s crowdsourced success with Map Maker and is asking people to help create 3-D versions of buildings around the world.

They’ve kept the program fairly simple. You don’t have to create a building from scratch: instead you make it from photos that already exist within Google Earth and give them… Continue Reading

From CTIA: The rise of open mobile (and congratulations Android team)

[Richard Wong, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners, submitted this piece to VentureBeat.]

Mobile has never been hotter with the iPhone, Android,  the explosion in mobile advertising, and the rise of mobile apps, but, you’d never know it walking around the mobile conference called CTIA, held here in San Diego today.

The CTIA show that once was the key meeting place for the mobile industry seems less and less relevant with each passing year.  We wrote about this… Continue Reading

Google launches AdSense for mobile phones — reveals “high-end” strategy

Google has just released AdSense for high-end mobile phones.

It’s a way for advertisers to places ads beside content that is browsed on smartphones, a move that further highlights the search engine giant’s strategy for mobile: It wants to target high-end mobile users.

It’s also significant in that it makes development of applications and content for smartphones so much more appealing.

The offering is basically a mobile version of Google’s AdSense product for desktop computeres (see video below… Continue Reading

Google races Facebook to simplify its Friend Connect platform

Call it feature envy. Google is simplifying the process for developers to use Friend Connect on their sites, just two days after Facebook essentially did the same for its competing Facebook Connect identity platform.

Instead of uploading files to activate Friend Connect, a developer can now just use their site name and URL.

Both companies are in a race to have their log-ins be a person’s primary identity for destinations across the web. For example, if you… Continue Reading

Google’s new search update “Caffeine” changes both look and feel

Google has unveiled a new architecture for the company’s web search, which it says will improve speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

The project, called Caffeine, has been worked on secretly by a large number of employees for several months, the company said in a blog post yesterday afternoon. Engineer Matt Cutts provided more information about the changes today, explaining that Caffeine is being worked on primarily “under the hood.” Short term, the company isn’t integrating much of… Continue Reading

Microsoft, Yahoo may finally embrace with search, advertising deal

Update: Such a deal has just been announced.

Yahoo and Microsoft are close to a search and advertising deal that would finally bring them together in a fight against Google’s dominance, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo would use Microsoft’s Bing search engine for its properties and handle sales for some text ads in search results. The deal would deliver the pair 30 percent of the search market against Google’s 65 percent.

For Microsoft, the agreement… Continue Reading

Google sells AOL stake after writing down more than $700 million

Google sold its 5 percent stake in AOL to Time Warner Inc. for $283 million, down from the $1 billion it paid in 2005. This puts AOL’s overall value at about $5.7 billion, less than 30 percent of the company’s $20 billion valuation based on what Google paid four years ago, according to Bloomberg News.

AOL’s slump isn’t new, however: Google already wrote down its investment last year by more than 70 percent as global equity markets plummeted. It’s… Continue Reading

Google finally adds Latitude to iPhone, but as a toothless web app

Commence geostalking on the iPhone.

Google added Latitude to Apple’s smartphone today, but it’s on the web instead of in the app store. Latitude, which came out in February, is a social layer over maps that shows your location in real-time. Google said it chose the web route because Apple was concerned users would confuse Latitude with Maps. However, Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra provocatively declared last week at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference that it… Continue Reading

Google adds layers to its mobile maps; multiple search capabilities

Google Maps’ mobile phone experience is becoming a richer experience with the addition of layers that you see public transit, Wikipedia entries or your friends’ location on Latitude. For example when coming to a new town, you can turn on a Wikipedia layer that lets you learn about notable sites nearby. Or you can turn on local search results to pull up restaurant or bar listings on your phone while you’re meandering around a neigborhood…. Continue Reading

MeetMe iPhone app solves pesky problem of finding a meeting point

Finding an appropriate and convenient place to meet a business partner, friend or stranger can get pretty time-consuming. Ann Arbor-based iPhone application publisher Basara is trying to solve that problem with Meetme. It’s a fairly simple solution: the app combines Google Maps with Yelp recommendations to suggest a handful of meeting points between two locations.

Suppose you’re trying to meet a business partner between San Francisco and Palo Alto, Calif., and you have a hankering for… Continue Reading

MobileBeat2009: Learn about Chrome OS from the horse’s mouth

In case you haven’t heard yet, Google has just surprised the business world by announcing a new operating system called Chrome OS, designed to kill what Google thinks is an outmoded but dominant operating system: Windows.

Google’s Chrome OS is bound to spark significant debate at MobileBeat2009, our mobile industry conference next week (July 16) in San Francisco. At 8:45am, I’ll be opening with a fireside chat that includes Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra… Continue Reading

Android netbooks on their way, likely by 2010

[Update: Since posting this story, we've had a lot of inquiries from readers, with questions ranging from whether Android is ready for laptops and full-scale PCs, why Android can't rely fully on Linux, and so on. See our follow-up Android FAQ post.]

The image above shows a netbook Asus EEEPC 1000H running on Google’s mobile operating system Android. Huh? You thought Android was for mobile phones, right? Well, as we’ve written before, Google is planning to… Continue Reading

LightPole’s software mobilizes web sites and adds geo-context

Putting “geo-context” into information is a hot topic these days on the mobile web.

The phrase means making data more useful by putting geographic context behind it, like listing all of the wireless Internet hot spots nearest you on a map on the phone. Adding geo-context to the mobile web is what LightPole, a start-up that launches today, is banking its business on.  LightPole says it can take just about any web site and turn it into… Continue Reading

Latest action: ThinkGreen, MingleNow shuts, Freewebs relaunches, more

Here’s the latest action:

1) Bizarre claim made by academic: France shipping nuclear waste to U.S.
2) Google up against new rivals, which can see what you surf
3) MingleNow is leaving the party
4) Solar’s scaling challenges may have an answer
5) Incandescent lighting heading for the door
6) Gaming feud could cause aftershocks
7) Freewebs relaunches as Webs.com
More money heads to Hollywood

U.S. denies France is shipping nuclear waste to South Carolina — At the ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco, University… Continue Reading

Google releases useful “my location” feature for cellphones

Google today released a revised version of its maps for mobile phones, including a new “my location” feature that uses cell tower ID information to provide users with their approximate location.

This is a very significant release, for a few reasons: Location information makes search faster and more convenient, and there are a ton of advertisers willing to advertise locally to grab your attention as you shop, dine or date. The Google feature helps people find… Continue Reading

Confirmed: MySpace joins Google’s OpenSocial movement

updated
MySpace, the large social networking company, has joined the anti-Facebook coalition led by Google, we’ve confirmed.

Meanwhile, SixApart, the blogging software company, has confirmed with VentureBeat that it is joining the ever-growing coalition.

The grouping, called OpenSocial (see our coverage here), is setting open standards for sharing user information across applications that run on social networks. It is supposed to go live today. The MySpace rumor first came from AlleyInsider, which said an announcement could come by… Continue Reading