Google - page 30

I went outside for the first time today. Working at home is an easy way to get a bad case of couchlock, so I like to try and get out for little 15 minute breaks when I can.

Today was a bit different. I downloaded and installed a game some buddies of mine are raving about on Facebook: Ingress.

I launched the app, followed the instructions, and was hooked. What started as a 15 minute walk to try out a new mobile game became a 45-minute obsession as I roamed my neighborhood, looking for portals to hack, collecting XMP particles to power my technological takeover, and finding a little feature of my ‘hood I’d never known about before.

Want to get obsessed about a new game? Want to maybe get in a little better shape? Be sure to download Ingress and see what everyone’s talking about.

The phenomenal success of the iPhone 6 has catapulted Apple back to the spot of “world’s most valuable brand” in the 2015 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list, after it temporarily lost the title to Google last year.

According to organizers Millward Brown, Apple increased its brand value by a whopping 67 percent to $247 billion in the last year, compared to 2014’s winner Google, which achieved “only” a 9 percent value increase during that same time.

Apple has put its name to a letter which will be sent today, appealing to the White House to protect individual privacy rights in the face of suggestions that law enforcement should be able to access encrypted smartphone data via a backdoor.

“Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security,” argues the letter, which is signed by more than 140 tech companies, technologists, and civil society groups.

If you live in Mountain View, CA, get ready for a new sight this summer. That’s because, several years after starting its self-driving car program, a handful of Google’s autonomous vehicles will finally be leaving the test track and hitting public roads in the area.

With human safety drivers on board, of course.

If you’re looking to plan a heist, you’d probably best stay clear of Hangouts: Google has inadvertently confirmed that its chat platform is susceptible to police and government monitoring.

While the tech giant usually keeps quiet about Hangouts’ security features, the revelation (of sorts) came out of an “Ask Me Anything” session Friday on Reddit that included members of Google’s public policy department and legal team. Its proposed topic was “the current status of U.S. government surveillance law reform and how Google thinks about these issues,” but the questions were less about laws or reform and more about Google’s practices.

Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto are the two hottest options right now for car infotainment systems, but if you’re hoping that Ford will give you a pure CarPlay experience in one of their upcoming vehicles, you might as well keep on waiting for the mythical Apple Car.

Ford currently supports both CarPlay and Android in a limited capacity, but for now its CEO says the company will only allow the two systems to serve as secondary interfaces to its primary navigation system, SYNC.

After years of examining the Android operating system, the European Commission has launched a formal antitrust investigation into claims that Google unfairly forces competitors into bundling its own apps on their devices.

There’s no question that Google Chrome is one of the best web browsers you can get, but it’s long been a resource hog under OS X. By simply avoiding it on the new MacBook, your battery could last more than three hours longer in between charges.

Now that we know more about the long-awaited Apple Watch, it’s time to find out how it stacks up against Google’s Android Wear platform and the growing number of wearables that support it.

There are lots of similarities between the two, but there also some big differences in software, hardware, and price that will likely help you decide which one is right for you.

Google’s efforts to counter the threat of the Apple Watch will begin with bringing Android Wear support to iPhone. Sources claim the search giant is now “preparing” an Android Wear app for iOS, and it could be announced at Google I/O in May.

The Nasdaq has been flirting with busting past the 5000 mark for days now, but investors are blaming one stock on holding it back: AAPL.

Apple shares have ballooned to their highest value ever over the past month. After weeks of growth, the stock’s performance has been flattish the last few days, which is a big problem for Wall Street because Apple now accounts for 10% of the Nasdaq’s index value.

BlackBerry’s smartphone business is imploding in a big way in the U.K., where the company is currently losing around 56,000 users every month to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, new research shows.

Just two years ago, the Canadian company had around 8 million non-business users in the U.K., but that figure is expected to fall below 1 million by the end of this year.

It was only a matter of time before Sparrow flew off into the sunset. The beloved email app’s days were numbered the moment Google bought it in 2012.

Now Sparrow is nowhere to be found in the App Store on both iOS and OS X. What was once an incredibly popular email client among Apple fans is no more.

Google-owned robotics firm Boston Dynamics is no stranger to creating robotic beasts that can do freakish feats, but their latest robotic quadruped — a 160-pound doglike machine named Spot — takes the crazy factor to an all new level with a smaller, nimbler, more-kickable form factor.

To be perfectly honest, Spot scares the hell out of me. When Elon Musk warned about the possibility of humans becoming slaves to AI, this is what I imagined — legions of weird-looking robots that can go anywhere to hunt you down and put you in your place. Spot doesn’t feature any futuristic weapons to punish his human masters, but the cybernetic canine has some serious skills when it comes to exploring difficult terrain and balancing.

If you don’t think the robot threat is real, here are six GIFs of Spot in action that might change your mind:

As many of us use Google calendar to manage our daily lives, it’s an important thing to get this wondrous scheduling solution on our iPhones and iPads to better able to access it on the go.

Several third-party calendars, like the ever-useful and visually stunning Fantastical 2, use the iOS system for connecting to and synchronizing your calendars from Google to your mobile device.

Usually this works without a hitch, especially with newer iOS versions; you simply add an account and the calendar events you input on the web will show up on your iPhone, and vice versa.

When that doesn’t work, however, the settings you need to tweak can be a bit unintuitive. Here’s what they should look like for the best two-way Google to iOS sync.

Thanks to contractual obligations that are purportedly ending this year, Google’s days as Safari’s search provider could be numbered. And Yahoo wants to take its spot.

During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, Marissa Mayer reiterated her interest in being Safari’s main search engine. “The Safari platform is basically one of the premier search deals in the world if not the premier search deal in the world,” she said in response to a question about Yahoo’s plans for search.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is the anti-Apple. He’s square where Apple is cool, he’s a sputtering doofus where Apple is collected, and he’s prone to hyperbole whereas Apple tends to undersell its products. For example, Schmidt said in 2013 that Android was more secure than the iPhone (LOL).

Given all that, who do you think Schmidt’s personal hero is? Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Shocker! Wrong. It’s Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, naturally. Not that many of those lessons have rubbed off on him, mind you.

Thermonuclear war may be over between Google and Apple, but that doesn’t mean that the two aren’t willing to score points against one another.

A few months after Tim Cook critiqued Google’s entire business model during his interview with Charlie Rose, and Google’s Eric Schmidt dismissed the bestselling iPhone 6 as a Samsung clone, Google has struck again with its latest act of aggression: a double billboard for Google Play positioned right next to a leading Apple Store.

Pretty soon you’ll be able to buy a Nexus smartphone that works with Google’s own wireless network. The company is close to offering its own mobile phone plans directly to customers, a move that would allow Google to control the entire phone experience from top to bottom.

Google’s Material Design makeover isn’t just for those running the latest version of Android; the search giant is also bringing it to its slew of popular iOS apps as well. Chrome is the latest to get the fancy redesign, and it comes with Handoff support and further improvements for iOS 8.

Who says iOS has all the apps? According to new data, Google isn’t just kicking butt when it comes to market share, but also mobile apps as well. The search giant’s Play Store now offers a great selection of titles than the App Store, but Apple fans will argue that quality is more important than quantity.

If you’ve always wanted a way to control your desktop from your iPhone or iPad, but didn’t want to lay out, good news: Google’s now got you covered for free.

LAS VEGAS — Nobody wants to get hacked like Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account. Everyone, including Apple, is pushing two-factor authentication in the wake of the high-profile hack that exposed dozens of celebrities nude selfies, but verifying an account login with a code sent to your phone is a total pain.

In the not-so-distant future, we might all be storing two-factor authentication on our keychains.

Yubico is already providing eight out of 10 Silicon Valley companies with a tiny USB dongle called YubiKey that securely verifies an employee’s online identity. You just plug it into a computer and tap it when it’s time to log in. Now that Gmail has started supporting YubiKey on the front end, anyone can use it as the second verification step for getting into their inbox.

Google today announced a new Apple AirPlay competitor called Google Cast, which lets you stream audio from a whole bunch of popular apps to Cast-compatible speakers. The search giant has teamed up with a number of popular services for its launch, including Pandora, Rdio, and NPR One.

Apple’s splash into home automation with addition of HomeKit to iOS 8 is expected to have a huge impact on sales of smart home devices in 2015 according to a Park Associates report that found 37% of U.S. households plan to purchase one or more devices next year.

The rising popularity in smart home device sales has been aided by both Apple and Google introducing new solutions in 2014. The research firm discovered retailers are getting ready for smart home devices to hit the mainstream by expanding shelf space for items like Nest thermometers, Philips Hue bulbs, smart door locks and other items.