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Google SPDY aims to make web faster
By Paul Ridden
15:00 November 16, 2009 PST
Loading pages from the Internet into browsers or accessing your favorite applications may seem pretty fast now, but the folks at Google think it could be a lot faster. Designed specifically for minimizing latency, the new SPDY protocol currently undergoing testing is proving to be an awful lot faster than more familiar HTTP and will shortly break out of the lab and head for the real-world. Read More
Google rolls out new music search
By Paul Ridden
16:12 November 3, 2009 PST
Google latest innovation has taken the power of its search engine and our insatiable lust for music and combined the two. Those lucky enough to live Stateside can now enter an artist, song title or lyric into Google's normal search window and the first results offered will link to audio previews, information and details of how to buy. Read More
Google announces free turn-by-turn maps app for Android - looks the goods
By Darren Quick
01:37 October 29, 2009 PDT
Every platform needs a killer app and for the Android OS the early contender for that title has to be the just announced Google Maps Navigation for mobile. Only available for Android 2.0 phones, the new application takes the current Google Maps for mobile and gives it a hefty shot of steroids. Most of the new features that set the app apart from most in-car turn-by-turn navigation systems come courtesy of its Internet connectivity, which makes it possible to access a wealth of relevant information residing on Google’s servers while out and about. Read More
Google releases developer build of Chrome for Mac
By Darren Quick
21:48 October 28, 2009 PDT
Mac users keen to give Google’s Chrome a try have had to endure a long wait compared to Windows users who have had a public stable release available to them since December last year. The wait is finally over with Google publicly releasing an official developer preview but, although it seems stable enough for daily use, there are a few caveats that may make it a good idea for most users to wait a little longer before using Chrome on a day-to-day basis. Read More
Google to feature Twitter updates in search
17:35 October 26, 2009 PDT
Since it was founded three years ago, Twitter has quickly grown into a social phenomenon used by presidents and bloggers alike for breaking news, political protests, marketing and personal blogging, offering a unique real-time cross-section of today's society. In a recent announcement made by Google's VP of search products and user experience, Melissa Mayer, the search giant said it had reached an agreement with the microblogging service and would soon be able to integrate status updates with its standard search results. Read More
Google investigating smart charging solution for electric vehicles
By Paul Ridden
02:52 October 5, 2009 PDT
A lesser-known fact about the operator of the world's most popular Internet search engine is that it's been running a small fleet of hybrid vehicles for the past few years to support its effort to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. Google engineers have put the cars through numerous tests to both prove and improve electric vehicle technology whilst publishing the results on the Internet. More recently, Google has confirmed that the fleet is currently running smart software to enable communication between the grid and the vehicles. Read More
Today on The Mobiler - Vertu's luxury Constellation Ayxta
By Gizmag Team
08:04 September 25, 2009 PDT
Today on The Mobiler we take a look at luxury brand Vertu's latest handset, the Constellation Ayxta, the imminent release of BlackBerry Desktop Software for OS X, NTT's gorgeous TOUCH WOOD prototypes, CyanogenMod receiving a C&D from Google, and the fact you can buy a Palm Pre for under $100 without a single rebate to deal with. Read More
Motorola’s Android phone, CLIQ, has clear social benefits with MOTOBLUR
By Jeff Salton
00:09 September 11, 2009 PDT
Motorola is boasting the first and only solution to sync contacts, posts, messages and photos from sources like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, work and personal e-mail through MOTOBLUR, which automatically delivers the services via easy to manage streams to a live home screen. Motorola is hoping MOTOBLUR will help differentiate its product portfolio of Android-powered devices from its competition by appealing to social networking fanatics who need to keep up to date with information from a variety of sources. Read More
Build a lunar lander and win $1 million
By Paul Lester
17:38 September 1, 2009 PDT
The X-Prize foundation, who teamed up with Google in 2007 to create the USD$30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition, has recorded plenty of interest. Since Odyssey Moon’s registration, a further ten parties moved swiftly to take up the gauntlet last year. Read More
Google Wave - the end of email as we know it
By Loz Blain
01:31 July 24, 2009 PDT
E-mail has been dawdling along in much the same form since the early days of the Internet. In fact, e-mail now feels like a pretty stodgy, clunky and formal style of online communication. But hold onto your seats, because Google is about to turn e-mail on its head with the release of a revolutionary new technology called Google Wave that's due to start trickling into users' hands this September. Wave combines the strengths of e-mail with the immediacy of instant messaging and the collaborative power of social networking - and wraps that all up into a killer web application that can then be embedded into any web page or used as a private communication system. Sound complicated? It is - but you'll understand it perfectly after watching this ten-minute video. Read More
Microsoft Office for Web reaches testing phase
By Mick Webb
19:01 July 22, 2009 PDT
In a move anticipated for some time, Microsoft has announced that the next incarnation of its ubiquitous Office software will include free web based versions of several of the suites popular applications. Although late to the party, Microsoft’s foray into online applications - which have now entered the technical preview phase - is set to put the squeeze on well established online office suite rivals like Google and Zoho. Read More
The new space race: first courier service to the moon
23:05 July 19, 2009 PDT
As we commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing this week, it’s worth asking what happened to those old dreams of lunar colonies and missions to Mars. NASA is reportedly struggling thanks to a general lack of interest and, it claims, funding. But, even with USD$187 billion, their Project Constellation is unlikely to reach the moon before 2020. The best hope right now seems to be driven by the private sector: Google’s USD$30 million Lunar X PRIZE and one of its most promising contenders, Odyssey Moon, which has announced plans to become the first private company to supply payload delivery services to the Moon. Read More
Google Chrome OS - coming soon to a netbook near you
By Paul Ridden
23:20 July 9, 2009 PDT
After a gestation period of nine months, Google Chrome is about to have a baby. The father (Google) has announced that it is gearing up to launch a new open source, lightweight operating system. Aimed initially at the netbook sector, Google is working with the likes of Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo to bring the system to market in the second half of 2010. Read More
What would happen if your town got nuked?
By Loz Blain
21:03 June 28, 2009 PDT
Not that it's particularly likely, but as long as nuclear bombs exist, there's the chance - however slim - that one might go off somewhere near you. This little Google Maps overlay might be a bit morbid, but it's also pretty fascinating. It shows you the heat, pressure and fallout spread of a range of different nuclear bombs detonating anywhere in the world. It's particularly sobering to get a sense of the scale of the devastation caused by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in World War 2 - and then see how tiny those bombs are compared to the USSR's enormous Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuke ever detonated. Read More
Eyes-Free dialing just a swipe of a finger away
By Mick Webb
21:47 June 3, 2009 PDT
Google engineers have shown an experimental “Eyes-Free” touch interface for Android powered mobile phones. Through tapping, sliding and releasing, the interface can be used to quickly enter a phone number without having to look at the screen, and it’s not only vision impaired users that are set to benefit from the technology. Read More
Recently on The Mobiler
By Tim Hanlon
03:27 June 2, 2009 PDT
Over at The Mobiler, we've recently looked at Google's plans to enter the e-book market, Samsung's 12-megapixel Pixon12 camera phone, spy shots of the new iPhone, the Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian, Verizon releasing OS 4.7.0.148 for the BlackBerry Storm 9500, Qik for the iPhone, the underwhelming Palm Pre keyboard, and the Jitterbug phone for seniors being recalled. Read More
Google gives sneak peek at Android 2.0
By Darren Quick
23:25 May 27, 2009 PDT
Over at The Mobiler, we’ve taken a glimpse at what Google has in store with Android 2.0, also known as “Donut”. In the first keynote at Google’s I/O conference Google has managed to whet our appetites with a number of Donut’s new features including universal search and a text-to-speech API. Read More
The Android handset war begins in 2009
By Loz Blain
15:45 March 16, 2009 PDT
While Apple's iPhone has enjoyed enormous success using a highly controlled, locked-down handset, operating system and application store, Google's touchscreen smartphone platform takes the opposite approach. Android is a completely open-source operating system, meaning that developers can write whatever abilities they want into it - and Google doesn't make or recommend any particular handsets. The HTC Dream (AKA the T-Mobile G1) gave Android a start in the market - but several big-name competitors are working on Android smartphones to be released sometime this year. The battle for Android handset supremacy is about to begin - let's take a look at the challengers. Read More
GigaPan: 1500 megapixel landscapes with any camera
23:03 February 27, 2009 PST
The folks over at GigaPan Systems, a collaboration between Google, Carnegie Mellon University and the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, have finally released to the public a new and very special toy. The GigaPan Epic mount is a robotic tripod for a standard digital camera that has the ability to create large panoramas and pictures with many magnitudes more detail than the average camera could take on its own. It works by positioning the camera automatically and taking potentially hundreds of photos. Specially designed software will then stitch the pictures together to create a seamless panorama which can be navigated and zoomed in on in the style of Google Earth, which has itself been upgraded to incorporate uploaded panorama’s into a layer that can be viewed in the mapping software. Read More
Google Earth goes to Mars
By Darren Quick
00:30 February 5, 2009 PST
Anyone not familiar with Google’s virtual globe program Google Earth would have to have been living on another planet – maybe Mars. But a new initiative by Google and NASA might pique even Martian interest with the advent of a Mars mode in Google Earth 5. Google Mars 3D brings the red, red hills of home to any Earth bound Martian’s desktop and enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars, higher than any found on Earth. Read More
Measurement Lab detects blocked or throttled ports
By Tim Hanlon
21:51 January 28, 2009 PST
Google, the PlanetLab consortium and the Open Technology Institute today launched the Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform for Internet measurement tools, along with three tools for users to test their Internet connections - including Glasnost, which tests whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled. Read More
Google Earth presents artworks from the Museo del Prado in ultra-high resolution
By Loz Blain
07:45 January 15, 2009 PST
Google has become by default the gatekeeper of global information for this generation, and the company frequently takes great pains to demonstrate how seriously it takes this responsibility. In the latest of a series of moves to catalogue and present the vast amount of human knowledge and achievement it doesn't already index, Google has harnessed some wonderful technology to present some of Europe's greatest artworks in 14 thousand-megapixel resolution. Using Google Earth, you can now browse through some of the finest works in Madrid's Prado museum in detail so fine that you can see every crack in the paint and almost smell the canvas. Read More
Google releases Picasa for Mac OSX
By Loz Blain
22:06 January 5, 2009 PST
Good news if you're frustrated by iPhoto's limitations - Google Labs has just released a 'beta' version of its Picasa photo management system for the Apple OSX platform. Picasa will import a copy of the contents of the iPhoto library and offer an alternative management tool that includes the ability to manage and synchronise selected photos, with their comments and tags, with an online Picasa Web Albums photo gallery. The original iPhoto data is left alone, so you can try out the Picasa beta without fear of losing or modifying their original image files. Read More
T-Mobile G1 hits stores
17:56 October 22, 2008 PDT
T-Mobile has announced that the first Android powered mobile phone handset - the T-Mobile G1 - is now available in retail stores across the US. The G1 features full touch-screen functionality plus a QWERTY keyboard, 3MP camera, built-in Google applications and access to the open platform Android market. Read More
Google's vision for a greener planet
23:55 October 5, 2008 PDT
While the current Wall Street financial crisis has many on edge in regard to the short term future of the economy, Google has displayed some far-sighted corporate leadership in releasing its plan for how to reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. "Clean Energy 2030" is designed to stimulate debate on a range of energy consumption issues and includes proposals to slash vehicle oil consumption and CO2 emissions by 38% and reduce US reliance on fossil fuel-based electricity generation by 88% through a significant boost to solar, wind and geothermal output. Importantly, the report also focusses on the "win-win" potential for this aggressive attack on climate change, citing a figure of $1.0 trillion net savings over the 22-year life of the plan. Read More
Sam Munro
- November 26, 2009 @ 08:08 UTC
