Google have started a new initiative to help them maintain their position at the top of the technology tree. It’s called Google Ventures and its remit is to make initial investments in ‘exceptional start-ups’. The areas covered will include software, clean tech, consumer Internet, bio tech and health-care, though Google does not want to be limited to these areas only, the whole point of the programme being to exploit the new areas that may not even have names yet.
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YouTube is moving further and further away from its homemade roots with the news that the Disney corporation will be providing the site with ‘short-form’ content from two of its major networks, ESPN and ABC. In ESPN’s case, ‘short form’ content will essentially mean sports highlights, in ABC’s case it will mainly but not exclusively consist of news bulletins.
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Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the race to perfect proper semantic searching spearheaded by, newcomer, Wolfram Alpha amongst others. Well, the competition has just become a lot fiercer with the announcement that Google will be joining the race. For the uninitiated, semantic search is the ability find websites based on the meaning behind the words you type, rather than simply the keywords within the search query.
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Even if not quite an overnight sensation, Twitter has certainly skyrocketed in popularity over the last few months. Inevitably, a site with this many new members suddenly signing on is going to attract the attention of people looking to publicise themselves and/or their companies. This is not something that Twitter is discouraging; in fact, they’re even adjusting the site to accommodate this type of user.
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Despite mounting economic hardship, Google directors (and founders), Larry Page and Sergey Brin stuck to their customary $1 dollar a year salary last year. In an era of perceived corporate greed Page and Brin evidently decided that it was worth marking themselves and their company out as an exception to the rule. The pair also decided to forgo bonuses this year despite the fact that Google has been performing well and expanding in spite of the credit crunch.
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The Centre for democracy and Technology, an advocacy group promoting constitutional liberties in the modern age has criticised China’s decision to block its citizens from viewing YouTube claiming that the country’s actions ‘fail to live up to international norms.’
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The government could be about to gain access to your Facebook account, that’s if new plans announced today are approved. The home office is proposing forcing some social networks to hold data on the movements of their members in an effort to disrupt the activities of criminals.
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Google’s PR machine has gone into overdrive to try and to pull the rug out from underneath the already shaky claims of the Street View naysayers. The search engine giant is making a big deal about its willingness to remove anyone from the online photographic map that wants to be. Apparently Google have so far cheerfully removed a man throwing up on the street outside a pub, a woman flashing her knickers as she gets out of a car and a gentleman entering a sex shop as well as several other images of people who simply didn’t want to be on camera.
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Thousands of South Wales residents will be amongst the first customers to reap the benefits of BT’s new ‘super-fast’ broadband trial. The Internet users of Cardiff and Taffs will find themselves exploring the Internet and downloading files at unprecedented speeds early on in 2010 after BT have installed the fibrotic broadband.
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For a group of people who are supposed to be right at the vanguard of modernity, Facebook users aren’t half stuck in their ways. Every time the webmasters change so much as a hair on their beloved Facebook’s head they go into hysterics, suddenly ‘I hate Facebook’ groups are set up left, right and centre, by people apparently unaware of the irony of setting up Facebook groups to denounce Facebook and there’s a bit of a furore for a few weeks or so. Then, they promptly get over it.
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Federal regulators met in Washington yesterday to discuss security concerns surrounding cloud computing, the technology that would allow personal files and folders to be stored on remote servers as opposed to individual hard drives.
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Facebook has granted users power over their own privacy, with a range of new options to control exactly how public/private you want your profile to be. The measures are being widely viewed as a response to the outrage that Facebook caused amongst its users last month when it changed major sections of its user agreement without properly consulting its members.
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The build quality of the iPod touch has been called into question once again. A disgruntled consumer has started legal proceedings against the company after his touch ‘blew up.’ The claimant is contending that he sustained serious burns after a flaw in a ‘negligently built’ Touch caused the device to catch fire.
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Google Earth, one of Google’s more exciting side projects has received yet another upgrade. The application has already seen one add on this year when Google Ocean allowed users to look at the sea bed as well as the landmasses of earth. Now, however, it appears that Google have shaken off terrestrial bonds, adding a function that allows users to view the surface of Mars in the same way that they do Earth.
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