Real-estate firm eyes agility, lower cost with Google Apps SINGAPORE–Local real-estate agency HSR International Realtors is “going Google” to achieve better cost savings and business agility, and deliver relevant information in a timely fashion to its mobile sales staff. HSR CEO Patrick Liew said that its existing Linux-based [Read More]

With the platform burning, Nokia also talked to RIM before jumping into Redmond’s arms (Source: TechCrunch) The battle of mobile ecosystems is now a three horse race: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Or so says Nokia CEO Stephen Elop now that the Finnish handset maker has jumped off of a burning platform [Read More]

Google Crowdsources Content Farm Detection With A Chrome Extension (Source: TechCrunch) Google has launched a quick hack that allows users to block sites they don’t want showing up in their results. Aside from eliminating all search results from a given domain, the Google Chrome Personal Blocklist extension allows you to see what sites are [Read More]

Google Launches Chrome Extension to Block Websites From Search Results (Source: Mashable) Google has released an experimental Chrome extension that attempts to curb the proliferation of so-called content farms. The extension, Personal Blocklist, adds a new link underneath any Google search result that lets users remove an entire website from [Read More]

Why Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups (Source: TechCrunch) Editor’s note: Guest author Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes, a word-of-mouth ad network funded by former Googlers. Previously at Google she managed a team of product managers in charge of various Google apps including Google Docs, Google Sites, and Blogger. Her last guest post [Read More]

Sortfix tries a different approach to improving search – suggesting better search terms (Source: TechCrunch) While few players feel able to take on the might of Google for searching, there remains a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles. One of them is Israeli startup SortFix. Previously, SortFix tried [Read More]

Search Still Sucks (Source: TechCrunch) Everyone, those who tried Google for the first time a decade ago, said it was magic – the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who’d been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before [Read More]

Google Explains, Apologizes For, CR-48 Spam (Source: TechCrunch) People who have received a Google CR-48 notebook, and people who’ve requested one, got hit with 100 or more emails from a newly created Google Group. Google sent out an email the evening apologizing for the emails and explaining what happened. Google was planning on launching the [Read More]

Google Adds Extra Layer of Security to User Accounts (Source: Mashable) For those worried about the threat of being hacked — and these days, who isn’t? — Google is here to help. The company is rolling out an optional extra layer of security for all Google accounts, mostly to boost the confidence of Gmail and [Read More]

Google CR-48 Notebook Owners (And Hopeful Owners) Besieged With Flood Of Google Group Spam (Source: TechCrunch) We’re still trying to figure out exactly whats happening, but Google CR-48 Notebook owners, and even some people who just signed up to get one but haven’t yet, started getting hit with dozens, and then over 100, emails this [Read More]

Samsung Google Nexus S review Another year, another heir to the Droid throne – and Google are trying to be democratic about it. Which is a roundabout way of saying they’re not monogamous. For the Nexus One, Google teamed up with HTC. This time around, they trusted Samsung to do the job, using the Galaxy [Read More]

HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship (Source: TechCrunch) HTML5 versus native apps. It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 [Read More]

Google Continues To Embrace Native iPhone Apps As Google Translate Hits App Store (Source: TechCrunch) At one point, as tensions were rising between Google and Apple, it seemed as if the search giant would forgo native app development on the iOS platform and instead only offer service those users through HTML5-based web apps. But lately, [Read More]

After Failing To Get Hacked Last Year, Google Paying For Chrome To Be In Pwn2Own 2011 (Source: TechCrunch) Last year, after two full days of hacking, only one web browser emerged from Pwn2Own unscathed: Google Chrome. IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, and even Safari on iOS actually all fell after just one day, but no [Read More]

Google I/O Tickets Sell Out In 59 Minutes (Source: TechCrunch) Maybe Google hasn’t lost its mojo, after all. This morning, a little after 9 AM, tickets to the tech giant’s annual developer conference Google I/O went on sale. 59 minutes later, Google VP Vic Gundotra tweeted that tickets were now sold out. To put that [Read More]

Egyptian Google Exec Who Was Detained Tweets: “Freedom…Deserves Fighting For” (Source: TechCrunch) As we heard this morning, detained Google Middle East Marketing Director Wael Ghonim was finally released. He just issued this Tweet after a nearly two week long absence from social networking: “Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for [Read More]

Another AdMob Exec Leaves Google; Kevin Scott Joins LinkedIn As VP Of Engineering (Source: TechCrunch) Back in 2007,  Google engineering manager Kevin Scott moved to mobile ad network AdMob. Back then AdMob was just a fledgling startup. Of course, two years later AdMob was acquired by Google for $750 million and Scott joined his previous [Read More]

Detained Egyptian Google Marketing Exec Wael Ghonim Released (Source: TechCrunch) New channel Al Arabiya has reported that Google Middle East Marketing Director Wael Ghonim has finally been released. CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman also Tweeted that Wael has been released. We heard yesterday that Wael was expect to be released from captivity at 4 pm [Read More]

Google Ventures Invests In Web Security Company Dasient (Source: TechCrunch) Dasient is an Internet security company that protects websites from web-based malware attacks that cause losses of traffic, reputation, and revenue. Dasient’s proprietary Web Anti-Malware (WAM) service monitors websites for malware infections. If and when an infection [Read More]

Google Tried To Buy Path For $100+ Million. Path Said No. (Source: TechCrunch) Yesterday we reported on Path’s new $8.5 million venture round, led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. A stunning story about a startup that almost ran out of cash, a rebuffed $100+ million buyout offer from Google, and, finally, a new round [Read More]

In-App Purchasing Finally Coming To Android; Disney Brings Tap Tap Revenge To Take Advantage (Source: TechCrunch) Today at their Honeycomb event at the Google HQ in Mountain View, Google had a lot of information to share. First, they gave a demo of the new Honeycomb features. Then they shared the new Android Market Webstore. And [Read More]

Latest WikiLeak Reveals Google And The State Department Talked To Unblock Egyptian Videos (Source: TechCrunch) In response to the escalating Mubarek protests, the latest release of WikiLeaks have been Egypt or MENA related. One cable from November 2008 is particularly interesting, revealing that the State Department spoke to YouTube in 2007 [Read More]

Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face Right In Front Of Us! (Source: TechCrunch) By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the news. Google set up a sting operation (how cool is that?) in an attempt to catch Microsoft red-handed stealing their search results. And according to them, they did just that — [Read More]

Microsoft Calls Google’s Cheating Examples “Extreme Outliers” (Source: TechCrunch) At the impeccably timed  “Who Will Win the Spam Wars” roundtable at the BigThink conference this morning, Google’s Matt Cutts, Bing’s Harry Shum and Blekko’s Rich Skrenta got together to discuss recent dramatic turn of events in the search market, [Read More]

2 Years And 10 Million Users Later, Google Latitude Locates The Check-In (Source: TechCrunch) It was almost exactly two years ago that Google launched Latitude, their location-based service. Two years may not seem like a long time, but it’s “the equivalent of a decade in location services,” Latitude PM Ken Norton jokes. Most importantly, it [Read More]

Google Spent $5p2 Million On Lobbying In 2010; Up 29 Percent From 2009 (Source: TechCrunch) Google’s Q4 lobbying spend is in; and the search giant continues to spend more money on influencing policy and lawmakers than in previous years. In the fourth quarter of 2010, Google spent $1.24 million on lobbying, which is up from [Read More]

The Googlers Behind Pubsubhubbub Are Back At It With a new project, Camlistore – Open Sync, Store, Share (Source: TechCrunch) You may recall that back in the summer of 2009, there was a lot of hubbub over a Google 20 percent project with a near impossible name: Pubsubhubbub. Creators Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin actually [Read More]

Google dumps real estate search on Maps due to poor response Google will dump a feature on its Maps portal that allows users to search for real estate listings due to low take-up rates, back-end infrastructure challenges and the vast array of competition in the online real estate sector, the company has announced today.      [Read More]

If Search Engines Played Jeopardy, Which One Would Win? (Source: TechCrunch) The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them [Read More]

Google Begins Soft Censorship Of Arbitrary Piracy-Related Queries (Source: TechCrunch) The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A [Read More]

Eric Schmidt At DLD11: Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe (Source:TechCrunch) In the closing keynote of the DLD Conference in Germany, soon to be former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage, notably less than a week after passing on the reins of Google to Google co-founder Larry Page. These are live notes [Read More]

Google Creates An Opt-Out Extension For Those Likely Blocking Their Ads Already (Source:TechCrunch) It’s awesome that Google has finally created a simple solution to allow users to opt-out of advertising tracking. This new Chrome extension already seems like a much better idea than the somewhat convoluted controls or browser plug-ins that Google [Read More]

Google looks to its next decade (Source: NDTV Gadgets) Google, which prides itself on helping people navigate the Internet, is facing a tangled Web as it weaves its own future. While more profitable than ever — with nearly $30 billion in revenue last year — Google is under pressure from new rivals such as Facebook [Read More]

Google Says Removing ‘Reader’ Link In Gmail Was A Mistake, Aims To Bring Back Monday (Source: TechCrunch) After the replacement of the Google Reader link in Gmail with a link to Google Photos caused a user revolt on Friday, Google has vowed to bring the beloved RSS product back and tells its removal was accidental. [Read More]

Google to Strengthen Rules on Spammers and Content Farms in 2011 With about 66-percent market share of the total U.S. online search market, Google is the largest online search engine in the world. Google has always been the target of marketers and spammers who create low quality and highly unreliable content across thousands of topics [Read More]

Android source code, Java, and copyright infringement: what’s going on? So it’s been a fun day of armchair code forensics and legal analysis on the web after Florian Mueller published a piece this morning alleging Google directly copied somewhere between 37 and 44 Java source files in Android. That’s of course a major accusation, [Read More]

Google’s earnings get a boost from E-commerce (Source: NDTV Gadgets) Google’s strong fourth-quarter earnings proved that it is now firmly ensconced in e-commerce, and also showed that, with its Android operating system and related apps, it is smoothly transitioning to the mobile world. But that news, reported on Thursday, was quickly [Read More]

Google Replaces ‘Reader’ Link With ‘Photos’ In Gmail, Users In A Tizzy (Source: TechCrunch) More proof that RSS is on its way out, and the apocalypse is nigh: Google has seemingly replaced the top link to its RSS reader product, Google Reader, with a link to ‘Photos’ (Picasa) at the top of the Gmail web [Read More]

What Does Google Offers Mean for Groupon? (Source: Mashable) It’s confirmed: Google is preparing to launch Google Offers, a direct competitor to Groupon. If you can’t buy them, join them. Google is already beginning the push for its new group-buying service, reaching out to local businesses for the first test run of its daily [Read More]

Google to Launch Groupon Competitor (Google Offers) (Source: Mashable) Google is preparing to launch Google Offers, the search giant’s Groupon competitor. “Google Offers is a new product to help potential customers and clientele find great deals in their area through a daily email,” the fact sheet says. Google Offers looks and operates much [Read More]

Eric Schmidt to Sell $335 Million of His Google Shares (Source: Mashable) Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt intends to sell more than half a million of the company’s shares in a transaction that would be worth approximately $335 million today. In a filing with the SEC, the technology giant disclosed that Schmidt has adopted a [Read More]

Schmidt: Decision Made Over The Holidays, It’s About Execution, And Larry Is Ready To Lead (Source: TechCrunch) We’re still digesting the huge news today that co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO of Google on April 4. It’s a move that no one saw coming — or did they? After reading over [Read More]

Big Bang At Google: Larry Page To Replace Eric Schmidt As CEO On April 4 (Source: TechCrunch) Google has just announced their Q4 2010 earnings.Looking them over quickly, they look good. But that’s the secondary story right now. The bigger story is that Google has just announced that co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric [Read More]

Google Voice Is About To Take Off: Number Porting Coming Soon For $20 (Source: TechCrunch) We’ve been huge fans of Google Voice for quite a while now — it makes screening calls and managing multiple phones a breeze — but there’s always been a huge thorn in its side: it didn’t allow people to port [Read More]

In The Race To 10 Billion Downloads, Apple Uncovers The Top All-Time Apps (Source: TechCrunch) As they countdown to 10 billion total app downloads, Apple has unveiled a page within the iTunes Store that shows the top app downloads of all time.These are broken in to four categories: Top Free iPhone Apps, Top Paid iPhones [Read More]

Yahoo Turns To The Enemy To Simplify User Registration (Source: TechCrunch) Yahoo is poised to let people use their Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. identities to sign on to Yahoo. In fact Yahoo has let users create new accounts on Flickr with their Google credentials since last summer. It’s been tested as part of an [Read More]