Reports out of India suggest that Google will be releasing their rumored "Google Phone" worldwide in two weeks. The report is questionable for a number of reasons, the first of would probably have to be that it is only coming out of India, and the second of which is the unlikelihood that Google would stab their tech buddy Apple in the back by releasing a phone so soon after iPhone.

It does seem to be fairly well assumed that Google is going to release a cellphone at some point in the future - and that it might even be free thanks to advertisements that would run on it. Also fairly likely is a phone from Microsoft, which may or may not be a ZunePhone.

Labels: Google, iPhone

Zoho customers can now work with their Zoho Writer documents while offline via the new Go Offline feature in Zoho Writer. Additionally, Zoho Writer's new Comments feature lets users add contextual comments to their personal and shared documents.

The offline move is Zoho's first step toward making its online office applications available for offline use via the open source Google Gears platform. To see Zoho Writer's Go Offline feature in action, visit http://www.viddler.com/explore/Raju/videos/7/.

"When our customers ask for new features, we do our best to implement them as quickly as possible," said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. "For Zoho Writer, we added support for nine languages last week, comments and offline support this week, and yet another significant new feature will be added next week."

Initially, Zoho users will have read-only access to their Zoho Writer documents when offline. Read/write functionality will follow shortly. Going forward, Zoho plans to bring offline capabilities to other Zoho applications.

Labels: Google, Internet

To recap: we decided to end the Google Video download to own/rent (DTO/DTR) program, and are now refocusing our Google Video engineering efforts. The week before last, we wrote to Google Video DTO/DTR program customers to let them know that videos they'd already bought would no longer be playable.

Here's how we're hoping to fix things:

- We're giving a full refund -- as a credit card refund -- to everyone who ever bought a video.

- You can still keep the Google Checkout credit that you've received already.

- We're going to continue to support playing your videos for another six months.

Labels: Google

Google Pack, the collection of applications recommended by Google, includes a new software: StarOffice, an office suite developed by Sun. In 2000 Sun released StarOffice's source code, which became the foundation of OpenOffice.org, an open source project sponsored by Sun.

The software normally costs $70, but it's available for free in Google Pack. It's worth noting that StarOffice has a huge installer (more than 140 MB), so you should download it only if you have a fast Internet connection.

It will be interesting to see why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.

I asked Sun what gives. I received the following response from a spokesperson:

“Sun is soon going to make an important announcement regarding Sun’s StarOffice software, and it is related to the questions you asked (which was, “What’s up with Google distributing StarOffice for free”?). The announcement is likely to have significant impact in the industry about the adoption of Open Document Format and availability of free MS Office-compatible comprehensive office suite.”

Labels: Google

After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.

Labels: Digital media, Google, Internet

the Picasa team is pleased to tell you that we [are] rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets). That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums.

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy.

We're live! To buy more storage, go here.

Labels: Google

Google's cameras are everywhere these days. They photograph us from space, and now even from street level in some cities. This got filmmaker Scott Blaszak musing about how Google's technology could cause big trouble in the wrong hands. Here's his fictional video short Happy Anniversary.

WARNING: Some viewers may find this video disturbing.

Labels: Google

Reto Meier of the Radioactive Yak blog recently turned his cell phone into a “Google Phone,” and he’ll explain how you can do the same through the different mobile-optimized sites and Java clients Google offers.

Google Mobile Homepage
Mobile Blogger
Google Maps (and local search) Java client
Google Calendar mobile
Picasa Web Albums mobile
Gmail mobile
Google Reader mobile (RSS Feed Reader)
Google News mobile
Google mobile Search

Labels: Google, iPhone, Mobile

Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, Mobile

Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, Mobile

A Microsoft attorney says the company has learned how to deal with antitrust regulators and that Google could glean a thing or two from the experience.

Marshall Phelps, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, said that if Microsoft had negotiated sooner with the US Department of Justice, it might have avoided further trouble. The company has had a running battle with regulators for more than a decade, and in 2002, it signed a landmark settlement with the federal government that called for more stringent oversight of the company's practices.

"Had Microsoft been a little quicker to give in on this, that and the other, [it] wouldn't be in the same pickle," Phelps said.

Phelps, who spoke at the Red Herring East conference here, said "one of the problems companies get into [is] when they don't realise how powerful they are and how powerful they are perceived as being". He then directed his comments at Google, one of Microsoft's main rivals in online search and applications.

"Google is going to face the regulatory burdens that Microsoft faced. It's going to be legislation by bad example. Something awful is going to happen, and legislators will run off and draft something that deals with privacy issues," Phelps said.

Labels: Google, Microsoft

Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, iPod, Mobile

Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a report released Saturday by Privacy International.

The London group assigned Google its lowest grade, a category reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

None of the 22 other surveyed companies fell to that level, according to Privacy International.

In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record.

Labels: Google, Internet

At the San Jose Convention Center on Thursday, as Google Developer Day 2007 gets underway in the U.S., Google engineering VP Jeff Huber plans to demonstrate how one of his company's online applications, Google Reader, can be used without an Internet connection.

"Ajax-based applications, browser-based applications, are great and have many, many wonderful properties," said Huber. "But we found that every so often, people get on airplanes."

Google's recently disclosed purchase of browser security startup GreenBorder suddenly makes a lot more sense: Google is moving into Microsoft territory, the desktop.

"With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in a statement. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone."

Google hopes Gears will become the standard for adding offline capabilities -- data storage, application caching, and multi-threading -- to online applications.

Labels: Google, Internet

Google and Dell have teamed up to install some software on Dell computers that borders on being spyware. I say spyware because it’s hard to figure out what it is and is even harder to remove.

About a year ago Google and Dell announced a partnership to include the Google Toolbar on new Dell computers. At the same time, Google was trying to convince the Department of Justice that changing the default search engine in the (then) new IE7 was too difficult (when in reality it’s really simple). Installing the toolbar meant that users would have Google as their default search engine in IE7. It also meant that Dell and Google would share some of the revenue from the advertising clicks that resulted from these installations, much like The Mozilla Foundation does with its Firefox browser.

The computer hardware business has razor-thin margins which means making a profit is tough. So the opportunity for Dell to get a recurring revenue stream from an existing customer long after the sale of the computer is more than just enticing, it’s huge. It also means a couple other things:

1. Dell and Google have an incentive to make it very hard for users to turn this off.

2. Because users can’t get rid of it, Dell and Google can get away with putting more ads on the page and pushing user-relevant content off the page.

They’re now doing both of these things.

Labels: Google, Internet, PC

Google Desktop is a desktop search application that gives you easy access to information on your Mac and from the web. Desktop makes searching your own email, files, music, photos, and more as easy as searching the web with Google.

Labels: Google, Mac

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Installing TiSP

Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process -- provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.

#1 Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.

#2 Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.

Labels: Google, Humor, Internet

So, you've turned your back on traditional mail clients and get your mail fix via Gmail these days. The only problem is getting to all those old message that are stuck in your old email client. One way to stuff that old mail into your shiny and capacious Gmail account is to use Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader.

GML is GPLed and written in Python, and available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

GML is a simple utility, and not one that you'll need every day, but if you want a simple way to archive all those pre-Gmail messages, then it's just the tool for the job.

Labels: Google

The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. "Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone," Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish news Web site Noticias.com.

Earlier this month, Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners wrote in his blog that an inside source told him the Google Phone will be a BlackBerry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap and optimized Java and that it would offer voice over Internet Protocol.

Google's mobile initiatives were designed for developing countries, suggesting that a Google Phone might not be a competitor to the Apple iPhone.

Labels: Google

Despite their best efforts, Google's search engine rivals still aren't making much of a dent in the company's commanding lead in the space. Apparently, their latest strategy is to convince users that Google's position allows it to wield a frightening amount of control over the world's information. Of course, they don't just come out and say this; rather, a marketing firm hired by Yahoo and Ask has started promoting a site that cryptically warns users to "Stop The Online Information Monopoly". It warns that it's only a matter of time before Google has the power of mind control, and that the way to stop this is to try a rival search engine. The problem is that Google really doesn't exhibit the ominous behavior that this marketing campaign claims it does. Consumers do have choice when it comes to search engines, and for the most part, they're choosing Google.

Labels: Google, Internet

Google Inc. is adopting new privacy measures to make it more difficult to connect online search requests with the people making them — a thorny issue that provoked a showdown with the U.S. government last year.

Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months. The timetable is designed to comply with a hodgepodge of laws around the world that dictate how long search engines are supposed to retain user information.

Authorities still could demand to review personal information before Google purges it or take legal action seeking to force the company to keep the data beyond the new time limits.

Labels: Google, Internet

In a widely expected move, media conglomerate Viacom on Wednesday announced that it was suing Google for $1 billion over rampant copyright infringement on Google's YouTube video site. Viacom says that Google has shown "brazen disregard" for its multiple requests to have content from such Viacom entities as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "South Park," and even movies like "An Inconvenient Truth" removed from YouTube.

In the unlikely event that you're not familiar with YouTube, the site came to prominence a few years ago as sort of a video version of Napster: Users log onto the site and upload videos, which can run the gamut from home movies to ripped versions of commercially available Hollywood movies. Indeed, most of the content on YouTube seems to be stolen directly from TV and movie sources. After Google purchased the site for $1.65 billion last year, the company moved quickly to make arrangements with various content creators in order to avoid this sort of lawsuit. But Viacom has held out refused to give Google permission to host its content on YouTube.

According to Viacom, YouTube has displayed over 160,000 unauthorized video clips that have been viewed over 1.5 billion times by users.

Labels: Google, Internet

A very nice checkin has just hit the Mozilla source code. Support for read and write of Google Calendar. So now both Lightning and Sunbird has support for Google Calendar. Please note that the support currently is minimal but it's being worked on. It's being build as an extension.

And no, I dont know where to get this extension. I dont think it's getting build right now. So you have to wait for more information.

Labels: Google, Internet

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie yesterday described the company's most recent Internet-based competitor, Google, as a "wake-up call."

Despite Ozzie's internal efforts, Microsoft has only floundered in the online space since Google's rise. Part of the reason is corporate inertia: Microsoft's biggest businesses, Windows, Office, and Windows Server, are traditional software products with entrenched teams of backers who have only slowly realized the dangers of Web-based software services. Microsoft fears that it will have to cannibalize its most successful products in order to effectively compete with companies such as Google.

One thing is pretty clear: A decade ago, Microsoft was willing to do whatever it took to take down Netscape, including the ill-advised bundling of its Web browser into Windows, despite internal protestations about the technical and moral problems with such an approach. Stung by the innumerable antitrust battles that followed, today's Microsoft seems unwilling to change as dramatically. And its current complementary approach, from what I can see, has failed. Put simply, Microsoft may indeed have gotten a wake-up call, but it's been punching the Snooze button ever since.

Labels: Google, Internet, Microsoft

I'm excited to tell you that our baby has finally graduated and is entering the business world. Google Apps Premier Edition is a new version designed to take on all the challenges presented by businesses with complex IT needs. For $50 per account per year, you get the whole Google Apps package plus many new business-oriented features, including access to our APIs and partner solutions (so it’s easy to integrate with existing systems), conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of inbox storage, extended business hours phone support, and mobile access to your email on BlackBerry devices (just in case you can't get enough at the office).

Already, companies big and small, like Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, Prudential, and SF Bay Pediatrics, are talking about how this new version of Google Apps makes it easy to offer low-cost communication and collaboration tools to all their employees so they can get on with what they do best.

Google Apps also won't forget its roots anytime soon. The Standard and Education Editions will continue to be offered for free, and we'll keep working on all three flavors of Google Apps with the help of feedback from all of you. As a start, we’ve just integrated Google Docs & Spreadsheets in all three editions so that everyone can share and edit documents online. Since August, we’ve also added five more major features you've requested, including customized service URLs (mail.yourcompany.com) and domain registration for organizations that don’t yet have a custom domain. Our appearance has matured too, with updates to the administrator control panel that make it easier to setup and manage your services.

Labels: Google, Internet

Nearly three years after Gmail was first released, the free Web-based e-mail from Google is being opened up for anyone in the world. Beginning Wednesday, everyone and their mother can sign up instead of having to get an invite from a Gmail-using friend. Google has been phasing out the invitation restriction geographically, with total general availability offered in Europe last week and in North America, South America and Asia this week. The service is still in beta test mode, however.

Labels: Google, Internet

When the Google founders talk about the decision being bad for Google, it’s purely on a business level. They could care less about ethics, about doing what’s right, about living up to their “Don’t be evil” slogan, and about principles. As long as things are good for business, they’ll go ahead with it no matter what. And this was ofcourse their motivation to help censor information at the very beginning as I wrote. But when they don’t get what they want from the Chinese government, then suddenly the “principled approach makes more sense.”

So remember, it is very important to know why Google regrets censoring information in China. Not because they came to see that it was against their “Don’t be evil” slogan and that it was a bad thing to do, but because they didn’t get the business results from it that they hoped to get.

And when you know this, it is also easy to understand why there has since been no reversal of that decision. Since this is purely about business, a reversal would mean losing even more business, so that’s not an option. If this was about doing what’s right, about living up to their false “goody two shoes” image, they would have reversed their decision a year ago already.

Labels: Google, Internet