Google’s new unified privacy policy takes effect on March 1st, allowing Google to share users’ data among all of its products. This means that your entire Google Web History – everything you’ve searched for on Google, and every site you’ve visited while signed in to a Google account – will be pooled together.
Those of you who have been wanting Terminator-vision since the films first came out won’t have long to wait. The New York Times reports that Google is not only working on, but will be releasing “smart glasses” fitted with Android-based augmented reality software by the year’s end.
What’s up with today’s Google doodle? We’re used to sometimes crazy, always creative doodles from the company, celebrating some or other important day or person, but this one seems particularly abstract.
Hello, future! Nevada has become the first state to legalize self-driving cars, which are apparently pretty easy to get hold of in Nevada. Granted, the cars must have two humans inside, and be insured for around $1 million, but let’s focus on the part where people are allowed to have self-driving cars now.
Internet giant, Google offered a brief look into their California headquarters yesterday. Photos taken inside the 500 000 square foot complex, along with this message were posted on the search engine’s blog: “You asked for it, you got it: here are behind-the-scenes pictures of the Googleplex.” Have a look at the full gallery – after the jump – to see how your office compares to that of Google.
See, it turns out that Google doesn’t actually know everything about your online browsing habits. But boy, they’d sure like to! Which is why they’re rolling out two services that records users’ online activities in full, in return for Amazon gift cards or – in the sightly more intense version – hard cash.
Google has been saving up a tonne of creepy private information about you lately, which is unfortunate, but the company’s philanthropic arm just launched a new crisis response project to win back our hearts and personal data: emergency alerts on Google Maps.
Whoops. Looks like somewhere between Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Google forgot their ‘don’t be evil’ rule and turned into the creepy uncle of the internet. Well, the other creepy uncle of the internet. It now follows users’ activities across YouTube, Gmail, Google Plus and Google Search, among others. Everybody, clear your history.
Google has joined Wikipedia, BoingBoing and a number of other popular websites in the SOPA protest – not just by ‘blacking out’ their logo, which is cute but largely ineffective, but by putting together a comprehensive and informative infographic on the SOPA bill and piracy, along with access lines for voters to contact members of Congress through.
This year Facebook will go public and start to sell shares on the stock exchange. Thanks to all of us, the social network is now worth $100 billion – more than giants such as Google, Disney, Amazon, and McDonald’s. But who is going to pocket all this money? Check out this infographic, detailing which Facebook friends will be getting pieces of the pie, as well as some other interesting facts:
Earlier this week it was revealed that there are literally hundreds of bloggers who were bribed to promote Google Chrome and to claim that their blog’s were “sponsored by Google”. Google’s response has been to point the finger at ad agencies.
It’s that time when all the companies that collect your data start parceling it out to tell you what the year’s really been like – we’ve already had offerings from Facebook and Twitter. What makes Google’s version – Zeitgeist – a little different is that they offer pretty particular data about South African search trends.
True to the pledge it made back in July to digitally archive images of the parts of Japan affected by the March earthquake and tsunami, Google has uploaded imagery of post-earthquake Fukushima to Street View. They’ve also set up a ‘Build the Memory’ website which compares before-and-after shots of the affected towns.
The world’s largest search engine is busy rolling out technology that can track your face. Facebook has been doing this for a while, so this sounds like Google playing catch-up, but there is a neat difference: unlike on Facebook, Google+ users get to opt-in to the facial recognition feature, instead of being automatically dragged into it.
YouTube is launching what they’re calling their biggest redesign in history today – and, granted, every time a website changes they tend to say that, but the differences here are pretty striking, with sweeping changes to the homepage and channel pages, strongly emphasising social media integration.
In a worrying move for people who like their internet uncensored, a federal judge in Nevada has ruled that Chanel has the right seize 700 domain names that have been peddling fake Chanel products – and that search engines and social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and Google, are to “de-index” the domains.
Last month, Google Maps’ Street View functionality started displaying photos of retail spaces’ interiors; now Google Maps itself is headed indoors, too, with a proposed Google Maps Floor Plans feature. This would mean Google maps of airports, shopping malls, and other buildings that you might somehow be able to get lost in.
Google seems to be dabbling in the censorship game too, these days. They’ve added sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and 4Shared to their “blacklist”, which doesn’t prevent the pages from showing up if searched for, but does prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete services.
As part of it’s “off-season spring cleaning,” Google today announced the end of a handful of services, including Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google Knol. The thinking behind the initiative is to free up resources for Google+ and other higher-priority projects. While some of the shut-downs make sense, others are a little more unexpected.
It looks like Google is getting ready to reveal a new, more polished interface for Gmail, if only to distract us from the embarrassing quietness we’re seeing on Google+; it remains to be seen whether the overhaul is part of their wider Google+ initiative or not, but visually the interfaces have a lot in common.
As part of its promotional campaign for the new Chrome operating system, Google has quietly opened up its first retail store in London, called the “Chrome Zone”. The store is Google’s first venture in realspace retail, using the location to sell its Chromebook computer line.
I’m not clear on why we would still need travel agents or anything, but if we do, Google Flights, launching today, is up to the task. Initially only available in a couple of US cities, Google Flights is the first result we’ve seen of Google’s acquisition of travel software company ITA back in April.
Hello, internet people. Google Takeout has been launched for you – a “data liberation platform” that lets users export their data from a number of Google products. It’s an importance service! If all your information is on Google without a backup, then you don’t have much control over it. Click through and learn things.
‘Nett Warrior,’ the military program that aims to give soldiers the tools for communications and mapping with each has been put on ice. It seems the US army have decided to cut a couple of kilograms in the solider’s kit and go with civilian technology. And they’re going Google.
Do you know what day today is? Google knows what day today is – which is why their latest animated doodle pays tribute to the legendary Freddie Mercury, who would have turned 65 today, had he not made an early exit. Click through to take a look. Please insert your favourite Queen song title here.
Despite topping the user charts with over 750 million users, social networking monolith, Facebook, is rolling out a range of new services to keep its users happily posting, perving and otherwise wasting valuable hours of productivity.
And for the first time in years I actually have a reason to want a Motorola. Google today agreed to acquire the handset division of Motorola, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion (around 90 billion ZAR). It’s always nice to have money lying around for these little impulse buys.
At least that’s what Mike and Jim at Research In Motion would have the industry believe. RIM is expected to launch several new BlackBerry devices today in a desperate effort to win back its market share, particularly in North America.
Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, not to be confused with the co-founder of Microsoft, has said on his Google+ page that the new social network may surpass ten million users within the next 24 hours. Zounds!
Google announced on Tuesday that they’d been they target of a phishing scam originating in Jinan, China, aimed at the accounts of Chinese activists and senior officials in the U.S. Victims were sent fake emails with links to a fake Gmail site, which harvested the usernames and passwords of anyone trying to log in.