Apple likely to launch smartwatch this Quarter

This is Concept Watch, may be not

Apple intensified speculation this month when it said the upcoming version of its mobile operating system, iOS 8, will include tools for managing health data.

Apple is likely to launch a computerized wristwatch this fall that includes more than 10 sensors to take health measurements and other data, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal also said Friday that Apple Inc. is planning multiple screen sizes for the device, which some people have dubbed the iWatch.

Samsung, Sony, Qualcomm and others have already released smartwatches, but the gadgets have mostly functioned as companions to smartphones, offering email notifications, clock functions and the like. Samsung’s Gear 2 line, released this year, added fitness—related apps and has a heart rate sensor.

There’s been longstanding speculation that Apple has been working on a smartwatch. The main question has been when it would come out.

Apple intensified speculation this month when it said the upcoming version of its mobile operating system, iOS 8, will include tools for managing health data. The software is expected in September, along with new iPhones.

Apple has been under pressure to release new products, as investors question whether the company that popularized the smartphone and the tablet computer is still able to innovate following the death of co—founder Steve Jobs. CEO Tim Cook has hinted at new products coming this year, but the company hasn’t provided details.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the Journal said production of the smartwatch is expected to begin in two or three months at Quanta Computer Inc., a Taiwanese company that has worked on Apple’s Mac computers. Sales of the device could begin as early as October.

Apple declined comment in line with its policy of not discussing future products.

Amazon enters smartphone market with Fire

Amazon has introduced a new smartphone with audio and object recognition technology that seeks to make it easier for consumers to locate and purchase products and services from the nation’s largest e-commerce company.

The new Fire phone also adds such features as the ability to render images in 3-D.

The Fire phone doesn’t differ much from other smartphones on the market and shares many characteristics found in other Amazon devices. For instance, the phone will have X-Ray for supplemental content about movies and TV shows and Mayday for live tech support.

Amazon’s new Firefly feature allows users to take a photo of an object, such as a toaster or a soup can, and get more information about it, including a way to purchase it through Amazon. Many of the new features have been available elsewhere as separate apps. Sony, for instance, has a tool for getting information over the Internet by snapping a bar code or a landmark. Firefly goes further, though, by incorporating audio recognition.

“It goes back to the mission of Amazon, which is to sell you stuff,” said Ramon Llamas of the research firm IDC. “It reduces the number of steps it takes to buy things on the phone.”

The phone will have a screen measuring 4.7 inches diagonally. That’s smaller than leading Android phone, but larger than Apple’s iPhone. CEO Jeff Bezos calls the Fire’s size ideal for one-handed use.

The phone will be available July 25 in the U.S. exclusively through AT&T. People can start ordering it Wednesday. Prices are comparable to other leading high-end phones, but the Fire will have double the storage. It will cost $200 for a base model with 32 gigabytes and $300 for 64 gigabytes. Both require two-year service contracts. Without contracts, they will cost $650 and $750.

The phone will come with 12 months of Prime membership, which is normally $99 a year. Existing Prime members will get their term extended.

Competing won’t be easy, though, particularly because Fire’s prices aren’t lower, Llamas said. With tablets, Amazon has been able to beat Apple and its iPads on price. Amazon makes up for that by selling more content.

Amazon is also arriving late to a tightly contested marketplace. Samsung and Apple dominate worldwide smartphone sales with a combined 46 percent share, according to IDC. And in the U.S., Apple leads with more than 37 percent, with Samsung at nearly 29 percent.

As the phone was announced in Seattle, Amazon’s stock rose $8.82, or 3 percent, to $334.44 in afternoon trading.

Firefly is the centerpiece of the new phone. Snap a photo of a book, and it’ll help you buy it, either as an e-book or a physical copy. Listen to a song playing in the background, and it’ll direct you to that tune on Amazon.

It can even direct you to facts and data, by showing a Wikipedia entry with information about a painting you snapped.

The feature will also let you snap bar codes, phone numbers and more.

Another distinctive feature is 3-D images. You can rotate the phone and get a different view depending on your angle of vision. CEO Jeff Bezos calls this “dynamic perspective” and said the phone is basically redrawing the image 60 times per second.

To make that happen, the phone has four front-facing infrared cameras to tell where your head is, even if your fingers happen to cover two of them.

That is on top of the regular 2 megapixel front camera for selfies, plus the 13 megapixel one on the rear for regular shots. The rear camera will have image stabilization to counteract shaking as people take shots, something available in other phones as well.

Amazon is offering unlimited free storage of photos on its Cloud Drive service.

The phone will also come with earbuds that have flat cords and magnets to clasp them together, so tangled cords will be history.

And it will have an auto-scroll feature that lets you scroll down website articles or books by tilting the phone. Samsung’s Galaxy phones have that, too.

The decision to make AT&T the exclusive carrier is similar to the approach Apple took when it unveiled its first iPhone in 2007. AT&T had exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S. until 2011, when Verizon and eventually others got it, too.

Amazon’s first gadget was a Kindle e-reader, released in 2007. Although there are plenty of devices that do more, many people still prefer stand-alone e-book readers because they typically have better screens for reading in direct sunlight and don’t have distractions such as Facebook and email.

The company started making Kindle Fire tablets in 2011. The latest models, HDX, are notable for a Mayday help button that accesses live tech support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

With Mayday, which the Fire phone will also have, you see the customer assistance representatives in a video box, but they can only hear you and see what’s on your screen. They can also help guide you by placing orange markers on your screen or taking control of your device completely.

In April, Amazon released its Fire TV streaming devices. What sets it apart from rival gadgets is a voice search feature that lets you speak the title, actor, director or genre into your remote to get matching content on the TV. On Wednesday, AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vegas said his Spanish accent wasn’t able to throw it off.

Samsung set to sell first Tizen OS phone in 3Q this year

Samsung Electronics Co. said on Monday it will begin selling a smartphone using its Tizen operating system in the third quarter of this year, advancing the company’s plans to reduce dependence on Google’s Android software.

Samsung, the world’s top smartphone maker by sales volume, said in a statement that the smartphone called Samsung Z will go on sale in Russia first. It said there are plans to sell the phone in other countries but didn’t name them.

Unlike Apple Inc. with its own operating system, Samsung’s popular Galaxy smartphones and tablets use Google’s open source Android platform, a reliance that prevents Samsung from challenging the dominance of Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the lucrative market for smartphone apps.

The Tizen phone will have preinstalled apps and users will have access to additional apps through Tizen Store.

Samsung has been encouraging the development of Tizen apps but the numbers available are likely to be small in comparison to the App Store and Google Play.

The South Korean company said the Tizen smartphone has a 4.8-inch high definition display, a fingerprint sensor for security and a “slim, angular” design.

It said the operating system will allow users to browse the Internet faster and utilize applications more effectively.

Superficially, users may not perceive much difference from the Android operating system because it and Tizen share Linux as the underlying framework.

The Samsung Z will be shown at a Tizen developer conference in San Francisco this week.

Sony launches Xperia Z2

Sony India on Thursday launched Xperia Z2 in India with a price tag of Rs.49,990. The smartphone, the successor of the Xperia Z1, was unveiled globally at the Mobile World Congress held in February this year at Barcelona. With the current pricing and features, the phone would compete with the HTC One (M8) and Samsung Galaxy S5. However, to woo customers, Sony will be bundling a free smart band worth Rs.5,990 and a phone case worth Rs.2,990 with the smartphone.

Sony India Managing Director Kenichiro Hibi said, “We are very excited to launch Xperia Z2, the flagship phone from Sony for 2014. Our focus on the smartphones segment was renewed last year with the launch of Xperia range of smartphones in India which received a tremendous response from our customers, helping us achieve a 10 per cent share in the smartphones business.” The company was targeting a sales of Rs.5,500 crore during this fiscal and planned to launch over 30 new smartphones this year, he added.

The company has earmarked Rs.350 crore as the budget for marketing of its mobile phone range.

Xperia Z2 that comes in white, black and purple colour options, is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Quad Core processor, a 3GB RAM and a 3,200 mAh battery. It runs on Android 4.4 KitKat operating system. The dust-resistant and waterproof phone sports a 5.2 inch full HD Triluminos Display and will be available for sale from May 12. With 16 GB built-in storage, the handset supports expansion up to 64 GB. It also features 20.7 megapixel rear camera.

Windows Phone OS became Free-ware for lesser than 9-inch screen Mobile Hardwares

Windows Phone OS in HTC Hardware

Microsoft took an enormous step forward this morning. It unveiled a free version of its Windows operating system.

Revealed at the company’s annual software developer conference in San Francisco, this new OS is called Windows for Internet of Things, and Microsoft will license it for free when hardware makers use the software on devices with screens smaller than nine inches. The door is still open for the company to charge Windows licensing fees for PCs, tablets, and other larger devices, but Microsoft will compete head-on with Android — Google’s free mobile operating system — on smartphones and wearables.

It’s a big, bold move, but it’s one that Microsoft needed to make. Because the code behind Android is open source, anyone can use it without paying a penny, and that has made life difficult for Microsoft in recent years, as the company continued to charge manufacturers about $10 for its Windows Phone operating system on each smartphone and tablet. In a world where Apple is also pushing operating system prices towards zero, Microsoft must forgo its licensing fees just to get Windows onto a more substantial number of devices.

Presumably, Windows for Internet of Things will use the same code base as Windows Phone 8, and Microsoft says it will only run mobile apps, not desktop software. But today, the company also announced a new system for building applications that can run on both Windows and Windows Phone as well as XBoxes. So there could be ways of bridging that gap. It’s not clear whether home users and independent developers — and not just commercial hardware makers — will be able to download and install the new operating system on their own devices.

There was no talk about open sourcing the Windows code base, a la Android. That means serious hackers can’t get into the guts of the operating system — and ensure the code is sound and secure — and it probably means that this new version of Windows won’t spread nearly as far or as fast as Android. But the move does show that Microsoft is serious about competing in the mobile market, and that the company is slowly shifting its business strategy, so that it relies more on revenue from cloud services instead of OS licensing. In other words, it’s transforming itself into a company that operates more like Google.

The transition won’t be easy. Windows has always been a cash cow for Microsoft. It makes sense for the company to keep some of that revenue for now, especially on the desktop, where it faces less competition. But the cloud is where the industry is headed. Everything from Apple consumer service iCloud to IBM’s enterprise cloud services like SoftLayer is pointing in that direction. For its part, Microsoft now has a number of cloud services services that can lead the way into the future, ranging from Skype and OneDrive for consumers and professionals, to enterprise services such as Azure, Dynamics CRM, and Office 365.

Convincing people to buy from Microsoft and not one of its myriad competitors will be a challenge in itself. But at least Microsoft realizes what it has to do.

Nokia unveils there X-family mobiles runs with Android OS; but no Google Play support

Nokia has announced its first-ever smartphones based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), that can run Android apps and are powered by Microsoft and Nokia services.

Nokia X and Nokia X+ are dual-SIM phones that come with 4-inch 480x800 displays and are powered by 1GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Both have identical 4GB internal storage, with expandable support up to 32GB via microSD card, and are powered by a 1500mAh battery. While the Nokia X comes with 512MB RAM, the Nokia X+ comes with 768MB RAM. Both phones have a 3-megapixel rear camera, but no front shooter. They are powered by a 1500mAh battery.

Nokia XL comes with a 5-inch 480x800 display, a 5-megapixel camera, a 720p front camera, 768MB RAM and a 2000mAh battery, while sharing other specifications with its younger siblings.

All three phones come with 3G support and take Micro-SIMs instead of regular ones.

The Nokia X will go on sale immediately, starting at EUR 89 (approximately Rs. 7,500 not including duties and taxes) in Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The Nokia X+ and Nokia XL are expected to roll out in these markets starting early second quarter, priced at EUR 99 (approximately Rs. 8,400 not including duties and taxes) and EUR 109 (approximately Rs. 9,300 not including duties and taxes), respectively.

The highlight of the three devices of course is the highly customised version of Android, with its Metro-inspired UI and access to Nokia's own store. While there's no access to Google's Play Store, users can side-load Android apps from any third-party source. Nokia has used AOSP corresponding to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean as the baseline for its operating system.

All devices come with free access to Here Maps, with offline maps and integrated turn-by-turn navigation, and Nokia MixRadio for free music streaming and downloadable playlists. All devices are also pre-loaded with a variety of third-party apps and games.

Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL come with free cloud storage from Microsoft's OneDrive (earlier called SkyDrive). With the purchase of any Nokia X family smartphone in select markets, people will get one month of Skype's Unlimited World Subscription for a limited time.

Both the Nokia X and Nokia X+ will be available in bright green, bright red, cyan, yellow, black and white. The Nokia XL will be available in bright green, orange, cyan, yellow, black and white. Colour availability may vary across regions.

Hackers find hole in Google Glass security

Charles Arthur

 Google Glass, the wearable computer being developed by the search giant, might be a threat to its owners’ privacy because it has no PIN or authentication system, hackers have discovered. 

Jay Freeman, a Santa Barbara-based programmer who specialises in cracking smartphone security for both iPhone and Android devices, discovered that Glass has a “root” capability which can be enabled by attaching it to a desktop computer and running some commands. 

Graphic: How Google Glass works

 

That would then give a hacker the ability to take control of the Glass’s output — meaning a hacker could monitor everything the owner was doing from a smartphone in their pocket. 

“Once the attacker has root on your Glass, they have much more power than if they had access to your phone or even your computer: they have control over a camera and a microphone that are attached to your head,” explains Mr. Freeman in a blogpost. 

“A bugged Glass doesn’t just watch your every move: it watches everything you are looking at (intentionally or furtively) and hears everything you do. The only thing it doesn’t know are your thoughts.” He points out that “it knows all your passwords, for example, as it can watch you type them. It even manages to monitor your usage of otherwise safe, old-fashioned technology: it watches you enter door codes, it takes pictures of your keys, and it records what you write using a pen and paper. Nothing is safe once your Glass has been hacked.” Even if the device shows a red light to show others when its video camera is on, a user probably wouldn’t notice it — because the light would be facing away from them. 

Mr. Freeman reckons that about 10 minutes would be enough for a hacker to install a “rooted” version of the software that Glass ships with. “Sadly, due to the way Glass is currently designed, it is particularly susceptible to the kinds of security issues that tend to plague Android devices,” he writes. 

“The one saving grace of Android’s track record on security is that most of the bugs people find in it cannot be exploited while the device is PIN-code locked. Google’s Glass, however, does not have any kind of PIN mechanism: when you turn it on, it is immediately usable.” Mr. Freeman got hold of one of the demonstration units of Glass, and quickly found that there is a “Debug Mode” which lets it connect to computers over a USB connection. That in turn lets anyone who has access to the device to install their own software if they use certain technical tricks. 

He recommends that Glass should have a protection system that functions when it is taken off by the owner, such as a biometric — either using patterns in the iris or voice — or a PIN. 

And for the privacy concerns, both that users have expressed and that Freeman has now opened up, he suggests there would at least be a simple one over worries about the camera: a plastic shield that could slide over the camera. “This makes it clear that ‘I’m not recording right now’,” he suggests.

Google celebrates Earth Day with an interesting doodle

Popular search engine Google celebrated World Earth Day 2013 on April 22 with an interesting and interacting 3D doodle which intends creating awareness against a common enemy called “climate change”. 

Earth Day 2013 aims to raise awareness among the people on global warming and provides solutions to the people to counter climate change. 

On Monday visitors to the Google search page were greeted with the doodle which has a play button that can play-pause the sun or moon in four different images depicting the four seasons of autumn, winter, spring and summer. By clicking the play button one can see the moon in its crescent, half, full and gibbous phases. 

The animated doodle with the word Google drawn through a landscape also has animals that emerge by clicking the button and that includes a bear, a badger, fish, ants, birds and fireflies. Rain, snow and wind can also be experienced. A row of dandelions on the left is shaped like a “G”, then two caves each depicting an “o”, again a “G” in the form of a lake, a tree symbolizes the “L” and a stream from the lake shaped like an “E”. 

Once the play button is hit, the sun starts moving to the west to set and it coincides with rising of the moon. As night turns into day the seasons too change. If the clouds are clicked it starts to rain and if the clouds are clicked during winter it starts to snow. One can make the wind blow, make a bear or badger come out of the cave, see a moving colony of ants or enjoy birds in flight. 

This is the 13th Google doodle to celebrate Earth Day since it was launched forty three years ago. Each year the Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 to mark the anniversary of the birth of modern environment movement in 1970. It was the idea of the then US senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill at Santa Barbara. 

He then designed a movement to create consciousness about air and water pollution which aimed at catapulting environmental protection on the political agenda. It produced results and on April 22 the next year about 20 million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy sustainable environment. 

In 1990 Earth Day went global mobilizing 200 million people from 191 countries and paved the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro and Mr. Nelson was honoured by the US president Bill Clinton in 1995 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US for his role as Earth Day founder.

EU nations take action against Google privacy policy

Led by France, organizations in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy agreed on Tuesday on the joint action. 

Regulators in Google’s largest European markets are taking joint action to try to force the company to overhaul its privacy policy.

Led by France, organizations in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy agreed on Tuesday on the joint action.

The regulators claim Google has failed to make concrete changes to its privacy policy, leaving customers in the dark about the information the company has about them and how long it is kept. Last year the company merged 60 separate privacy policies into one universal procedure.

Officials from Google Inc. have said the policy was a necessary and legal streamlining.

Privacy experts say Google’s ability to gather and combine user data is key for the company, 

whose search engine has about 95 percent market penetration in Europe.

Google Reader is to be Close as "Spring-Cleaning"

A decision by Google to close its popular Reader, which allowed users to easily follow updates from around the web, has sparked a storm of criticism by devoted fans of the service.

Google announced the move late on Wednesday as part of a “spring-cleaning” strategy pushed by founder and chief executive Larry Page to cull non-essential projects at the web software giant.

The company announced a shake up of its top ranks on Wednesday with Android chief Andy Rubin stepping aside in favour of Sundar Pichai, boss of the company’s Chrome browser and operating system. Google broke up its mapping and commerce unit, with executive Jeff Huber moving to research division Google X, which is working on projects like Google Glass and the company’s self-driving cars.

Urs Holze, senior vice-president of technical infrastructure, said the decision was made to close down Google Reader because it had been steadily losing users over the years as people switched to Facebook and Twitter to keep track of web updates.

“It’s been a long time since we have had this rate of change - it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago,” he wrote. “To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus - otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact.” Within hours of the announcement, online petitions calling on Google to reverse the decision had attracted thousands of signatures, including one on online petition site that had been signed by more than 63,000 people by midday Thursday.

“Our confidence in Google’s other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requires that we trust you,” wrote petition organizer Dan Lewis. “This is about us using your product because we love it, because it makes our lives better, and because we trust you not to nuke it.” Users took to Twitter to vent their frustration.

“Google’s shutdown of #Reader is a painful but important reminder of how much time we invest into platforms we neither own nor control,” said one user.

Google expands Gmail attachment size upto 10 GB

For some time now, the cap on the size of email attachments have been hugely outdated across email services. The more tech-savvy among us have already moved to cloud-based file hosting services such as Dropbox, Microsoft’s Skydrive and latest entrant Google Drive. 

But this week, Google Inc announced in a blogpost that it was upping its game. A new feature, which is being rolled out over this week, allows users to attach files up to 10 GB. Compared to the measly 25 MB that was being offered early, making it impossible to send anything but text files or resized pictures, the 10GB offer is something that will open up new possibilities in sharing content. 

However, this new feature is available for those who have signed up for Gmail’s new ‘email compose experience’ (that uses a floating screen giving email a messaging-like look and feel), which was launched in October. This is still in its testing stages and offered only to a section of email users.

In essence, what you’re really sending is a link to a file hosted in Google Drive, much like what you would do when you use any of the cloud-based file sharing services. The only advantage here is that you don’t have to sign up for or move out into another service; you can do it from the comfort of your email inbox. 

According to Google’s blogpost, now with Drive, a user can insert files up to 10GB that is 400 times larger than what you can send as a traditional attachment, from Drive directly into an email. An added advantage is that as the file you are sharing is stored in the cloud, recipients will have access to any changes that you may make in the file even after you have sent the file. 

Given that the service is not yet accessible for all, there’s a lot of excitement and impatience on online forums to use this new service. But given bandwidth issues and poor network speeds that continue to dog our experience, there is room for a dash of scepticism. A small test attempt to attach a movie file (around 4GB) to email on a fairly basic Internet network (which promises the usual 100 MBPS speed) failed after 10 minutes. 

Trilok Nathan, a software engineer who tried to use the service from the home network, says that while the move was indeed exciting, and opened up a world of opportunity, without high-speed networks, “it's a bit of a waste.”

Google unveils Nexus 7 tab

Google made its long—awaited debut into the tablet wars on Wednesday, unveiling the Nexus 7 to compete with Apple’s dominant iPad as well as the recently announced Microsoft Surface.

The Nexus 7, developed in conjunction with Asus, features a 7—inch (17.8—centimetre) screen, making it smaller but more portable and lighter than its main competitors, which both feature screens of about 10 inches (25 centimetres). That places it in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, which is by far the most successful running on Google’s Android operating system.

The Nexus 7 goes on sale for $199 effective immediately on Google’s online store Google Play, with delivery starting in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia in mid—July, Google said. That makes it far more affordable than Apple’s cheapest iPad, the older model iPad 2, which sells for $399.

The Nexus 7 weighs just 340 grams, features an Nvidia Tegra quad core processor and a battery allowing for up to nine hours of video play on its 1280x800 pixel screen, or 300 hours of standby. It ships with Google’s popular Chrome browser as the default programme for surfing the web. It also features Google Now, a refinement of Google’s search service that provides personal information gleaned from your Google history, rather than mere internet links.

Android upgraded

Google unveiled the device at its developers conference in San Francisco, where the company gave details of its latest version of Android, nicknamed Jelly Bean, which improves major components such as touch, search, notifications and Google Maps.

Also revealed at the conference was the Google Q, a home entertainment hub that streams movies, music and other content, designed to compete with Apple TV and other entertainment hubs.

Google said some 1 million Android devices are newly activated around the world every day, with 400 million Android devices now in use.

In another mark of the rocketing popularity of Google’s mobile operating system, Google said that its online store now boasts more than 600,000 apps, with 1.5 billion apps downloaded by users every day.

Google charge for new internet suffix names

American internet giants Amazon and Google were the top applicants on Wednesday for a broad range of new top level domain names that could dramatically change the functioning of the internet address system.

ICANN, the non-profit organization that regulates the internet, announced the new name applications on Wednesday, saying the introduction of the new domains would “change the internet forever.” The new domains will mark the biggest ever expansion of internet addresses, with almost 2,000 applications posted for a total of 1,700 new top level domains that will supplement the current limited supply of suffixes such as .com, .biz, .org and other country-specific suffixes.

Google appeared to be the top bidder. A registry company that applied for such names as .google, .gmail and .android made a total of 100 applications, including for such names as .lol, .baby and .blog.

Amazon was also heavily represented with 76 applications, including .book. Apple applied for the .apple top level domain, but there were no applications for .facebook or .twitter. Other applications were made for names such as .love, .pizza and .kids.

The most applied-for domain was .app which saw 13 applications, followed by .home and .inc with 11 applications. Other popular names were .book, .blog, .llc, and .shop with nine each.

Anyone could apply to own the new domains, provided they could come up with the 185,000-dollar application fee. According to ICANN, the most applications, 911, came from the US, with 675 from Europe, 303 from Asia Pacific, 24 from Latin America and just 17 from Africa.

ICANN will decide who will receive the contested names, with the first of the new names coming online at the beginning of next year.

“This is an historic day for the internet and the 2 billion people around the world who rely on it,” said ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom in a press conference announcing the applications.

“The internet is about to change forever. Through its history the internet has renewed itself through new ideas; we’re on the cusp of new ideas and innovation which will give rise to new jobs and ways to link communities and share information.”

Google launches storage service for personal files

Google is hoping to build the world’s largest digital filing cabinet in the latest attempt to deepen people’s dependence on its services.

The Internet search leader’s latest product stores personal documents, photos, videos and a wide range of other digital content on Google’s computers. By keeping their files in massive data centres, users will be able to call up the information on their smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and just about any other Internet-connected device.

Google announced the long-rumoured service on Tuesday. Available immediately, Google Drive is offering the first five gigabytes of storage per account for free. Additional storage will be sold for prices starting at $2.49 per month 25 gigabytes.

Google Inc. will be competing against similar storage services offered by Microsoft, Apple and rapidly growing start-ups such as Dropbox.

Google glasses to stream info directly to eyes: report

It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. Search engine giant Google is developing a pair of electronic glasses that can stream information directly to the user’s eyes in real time.

The glasses, to be launched by the end of the year, will be more like smartphones with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

Loaded with a low-resolution, built-in camera, the Google glasses “will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby,” a New York Times report said.

“You will be able to check in to locations with your friends through the glasses,” a Google employee told the Times. Google would not confirm whether the ultra-modern eyewear is in development.

The report also says that the state-of-the-art spectacles, not designed for constant wear, will display information via a heads-up display “in an augmented reality view, rather than as a Web browser page like those that people see on smartphones.”

The glasses will be integrated with other Google products, like Google Latitude to share location, Google Maps to search for nearby places and Google Goggles to search images and identify what is being looked at.

For instance, a person looking at a landmark could see detailed historical information and comments about it left by friends. The glasses might also be used for virtual reality games that use the real world as the playground.

According to the report, the glasses are expected to start selling at the end of the year at a price of between $250 and $600 — about the cost of a smartphone.

The glasses, will be Android based, and will include a display that will sit inches from the wearer’s eye, streaming real-time info about his surroundings, similar to the various augmented reality applications seen on smartphones.

The data will be fetched through a 3G/4G data connection, and the glasses will retrieve information about their surroundings through GPS and several sensors.

Google to discontinue seven more products

Internet search titan Google plans to discontinue seven more products, including ‘Wave’, in a bid to simplify its services further after bringing down the curtains on its ‘Buzz’ social networking, microblogging and messaging tool.

The off-season “spring cleaning” would mark the end of various Google services such as Wave, Knol, Gears, Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect and Search Timeline, Google Senior Vice-President (Operations) Urs Holzle said in a blogpost.

In addition, Google said it will also shelve its ’renewable energy-cheaper-than-coal initiative, which was touted as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy.

This is the third time that Google has announced a whittling down of its products slate after they failed to generate interest among users.

Google said some of the services will stop working from next month and by next year, most of the products will be shut down completely.

“To recap, we’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts and ending several which have shown us a different path forward. Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” Holzle added.

The US-based firm said Google Wave -- which was an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration -- will turn off completely from April 30, 2012.

In addition, Google Friends Connect service -- which allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code -- would be retired from March 1, 2012.

Google Gears, which maintains web browser functionality when working offline, will stop working from December 1 and Google Bookmarks List, a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends, will end on December 19.

Last month, Google announced that it will shut down its social networking product Google Buzz. In September, Google said it will close as many as 10 products, including Aardvark and Fast Flip, as it streamlines operations and focuses on areas that have “higher impact”.

Motorola shareholders approve Google takeover bid

Shareholders of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc late Thursday approved a 12.5-billion-dollar takeover offer from Google Inc, gaining the internet giant a stronger foothold in the handset sector, and expanding its patent portfolio.

Motorola said shareholders voted with an “overwhelming majority” in favour of the deal, which put a premium of more than 60 per cent on the company relative to its trading value when the offer was made in August.

The deal remained subject to approval by the U.S. competition watchdog, which filed a second request for information on the planned takeover with Google in September.

Google already has some market influence in the mobile sector with its Android operating system for smartphones and tablet computers.

Motorola said it expected the acquisition to be completed in early 2012.

Buzz will be shut down

Google is getting ready to press the mute button on Buzz, an online social networking service that turned into a massive faux pas.

Buzz will be shut down within the next few weeks, according to a Friday post on Google Inc.’s blog.

The 20-month-old service probably won’t be missed. If anything, Buzz is destined to be remembered as Google’s botched attempt to build a social network to rival Facebook’s online hangout.

Google now is focusing its social networking efforts on Plus, a 3 1/2 month-old service that has been catching on quickly. Plus already has more than 40 million users, and Google CEO Larry Page seems confident that it will become an effective weapon for fighting the threat posed by Facebook and its audience of 800 million users.

In a conference call on Thursday to discuss Google’s third-quarter earnings, Mr. Page promised the company will be weaving more of the company’s products into Plus to ensure that users get an “automagical” experience.

Many of Buzz’s early adopters felt betrayed.

Buzz got into trouble because of the way Google tied it to its email service. After it was activated, Buzz automatically created social circles that exposed users’ most frequent Gmail contacts for everyone to see. That kind of transparency didn’t go over well with people whose contact lists included secret lovers, ex-spouses, doctors and prospective employers.

Google overhauled Buzz to give people more control over their information, but the changes came too late to placate outrage users and privacy watchdogs.

The uproar triggered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which reprimanded Google for violating its own privacy policies. Google apologized for its lapse and entered into a settlement requiring Google to submit its privacy program to independent audits every other year for the next two decades. The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., also agreed to give $8.5 million to Internet privacy and policy organizations to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by Gmail users.

“Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past,” Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president, wrote in Friday’s blog post. “We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google Plus.”

Buzz will join more than 20 other products and services that Mr. Page has closed since he replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO in April. Mr. Page says he wants to “put more wood behind fewer arrows” as Google tries to maintain its dominance of Internet search and advertising while it duels with Apple Inc. for supremacy in the increasingly important smartphone market.

The strategy seems to be paying off so far. Google third-quarter earnings rose 26 percent to $2.7 billion to blow past analyst estimates. The performance lifted Google’s stock price by $32.69, or nearly 6 percent, to close on Friday at $591.68.

Google buys Zave Network

Internet titan Google, which is on an acquisition spree, has bought digital coupons and incentives platform Zave Networks for an undisclosed amount.

Zave Networks is Google’s 19th buyout this year so far.

According to an estimate, Google has acquired over 100 firms in the last decade, starting with Deja, a company in the Usenet space that was later integrated with Google Groups.

This roughly translates into the purchase of 10 companies every year, on average, by Google.

Last month, the search engine giant said it would buy Motorola Mobility, the mobile phones division of Motorola Inc, for USD 12.5 billion in cash.

Zave Networks, a company founded in 2006, has announced on its homepage that it has been acquired by Google.

“We are delighted to share that Zave Networks has been acquired by Google. When we had the opportunity to join Google, we felt it was the perfect fit for our company and the perfect opportunity to rapidly drive the deployment and use of our platform to the next level,” Zave Networks said on its website.

“We’re humbled by the unending support our investors, retailers, advertisers and consumers have provided over the past five years and would like to thank each and every one of them. Going forward, we are excited about being part of Google’s efforts in this space,” it added.

The company did not disclose the financial details of the deal.

Google has relesed new service called Page Speed Service

Google announced a new service Thursday that it hopes will make slow web pages as anachronistic as manual typewriters.

The web search giant unveiled a new option called Page Speed Service that accelerates webpage loading times by running them through a special application that rectifies bottlenecks and loads the pages to end users through Google’s global network of servers.

Google engineering manager Ram Ramani said in a blog post that in tests the service had increased load times by 25 to 60 per cent.

“To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google,” Ramani wrote.

“Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times.”

The service is currently available to a limited number of website operators at no cost. Google plans to roll out a fee—based service later this year, Ramani said.