Google - page 58

The iPhone isn’t likely to get NFC-capabilities allowing it to function as a credit card until 2012, according to most reports, but Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone arena has no intention of waiting so long: Google is preparing to unveil their own mobile payment system on May 26th.

It ain’t over until it’s over, Yogi Berra once said. The sports legend could have been talking about Apple’s attempt to lure the music industry onto the cloud. Just as an agreement to make your music accessible everywhere seemed at hand, publishers want more cash.

A native Google Maps application comes built-in to our iOS devices, and while it’s great for accessing maps and getting directions while we’re on the go, it is lacking a few important features. Thankfully, however, Google has just launched an updated Google Maps web app which offers a little extra.

Apple’s plans to bring music streaming to the upcoming iCloud service are coming together swiftly this week as the company signs up a third major record label.

As this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference approaches, it seems Apple’s plan to bring us a magical cloud filled with a never-ending collection of music called ‘iCloud’ is getting its final touches. Sources say a licensing deal with music label EMI is now in place, but what about the other labels?

iOS applications that alert drivers to DUI checkpoints and speed traps could soon be pulled from the App Store following a review by Apple that will determine whether or not these applications are illegal.

Guy Tribble, Apple’s Vice President of Software Technology, told senators during a U.S. Senate subcommittee yesterday that the company is currently looking into the legality of these applications, and will pull them if they are breaking the law.

Apple has infamously railed on Google for being fragmented on multiple occasions, lambasting the Android-maker for allowing carriers and handset manufacturers to dictate the terms of updating the Android software.

Cupertino was right to criticize: the vast majority of Android smartphone users couldn’t even be reasonably sure before now that they’d even be able to update their operating system in the future. But Google’s made a big step today towards addressing Android fragmentation: they’ve announced a partnership with carriers and handset manufacturers that guarantees that new smartphones will receive Android platform updates for a minimum of eighteen months.

Ably beating Apple for a change, Google has just joined Amazon in unveiling their cloud-based music service at this year’s Google I/O conference… but it’s still hard to believe that Cupertino won’t be able to clobber Google Music once iTunes joins the cloud, especially given the new service’s reliance upon Adobe Flash.

Everyone who owns an Apple TV loves AirPlay – it’s a fantastic way of streaming your moves and music straight to your TV that was previously a luxury only iOS and iTunes users could enjoy. However, thanks to the doubleTwist software, users can now send content to the Apple TV from their Android smartphones.

The doubleTwist software for Mac & PC advertises itself as “the iTunes for Android” and allows you to wirelessly sync your iTunes playlists, photos and videos to your Android phone with the accompanying Android application. Its most recent update introduced the ability to stream all of this content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.

Steven Levy‘s new book about Google In The Plex revealed a few juicy nuggets about the relationship between Apple and Google.

At first, Larry and Sergey wanted Steve Jobs as their CEO. Then the two companies had a long honeymoon, sharing board members and collaborating on groundbreaking software. But then it all soured when Google released Android, and Steve Jobs hid the iPad from Eric Schmidt, even though he was sitting on Apple’s board.

We had a chance to ask Levy for more detail and insight into the relationship between Apple and Google. Here is our exclusive Q&A:

This is all over Twitter today.

Grab your iThing, open Safari, and use the Google search box to search for “tilt”.

Your search results are… tilted.

Is this an easter egg? An April Fools gag that someone forgot to switch off?

Back in 2000, when Google was just getting started, its venture capital backers insisted the fledling company find an experieced CEO to provide ‘adult supervision.’

Venture capitalist John Doerr arranged for Google’s young co-founders to meet with half-a-dozen Silicon Valley CEOs in an attempt to get the process started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met with Intel’s Andy Grove, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and several others.

At the end of the tour, they were ready to hire a CEO but there was a problem, according to Wired senior writer Steven Levy:

… they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs.

Jobs was busy running Apple, of course, which was just about to introduce the first iPod, the product that would transform the company. Doerr persuaded them to widen their net and introduced them to Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Novell. Schmidt became Google’s CEO in 2001.

The nugget about Steve Jobs is from the latest Wired magazine, in a story about Larry Page retaking the reins as Google’s CEO. It is not yet online. The story is an excerpt from Levy’s upcoming book, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives,” which is available for pre-order on Amazon.

I’ve been blown away recently with Google Translate, on both the web and on my iPhone – just superb speech recognition and translation abilities. But the speech synthesis capabilities of this versatile debabelizer are also quite impressive.

Deciding to run a spontaneous real world test, two young women called a local Indian restaurant and placed their entire order in Hindi – via Google Translate running in Chrome on a MacBook Pro. The software proved up to the challenge – the order was delivered correctly, the expressions are priceless, and a good time was had by all!

[via Solid Blogger]

That was quick. Google appears to have already upgraded CultofMac.com in its search results, just a few days after downgrading us.

As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.

But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.

Why we’ve been upgraded, I have no idea. Google’s head of spam, Matt Cutts, tweeted me yesterday, saying Google had likely seen my post and would get it resolved. And Wired.com published a story about us today after speaking to a Google Fellow Amit Singhal. But the changes were already in place early this morning, which makes me think Google is slowly tweaking its algorithm to get better results. I’ve asked Cutts for an explanation, and will post up if/when I get a reply.

I’d like to thank readers for your awesome support. We got some very nice notes in the comments to the last post. Made my day. Thanks guys.

It’s a beautiful morning here in San Francisco to wake up and find your website has been effectively disappeared off the web by Google.

Cult of Mac has been downgraded by the changes Google has made to its algorithm to rerank content farms like Demand Media.

We’ve become a civilian casualty in the war against content farms.

You can read more about here in The Guardian, which highlighted us in a story about legit sites hit by the changes.

We’re not alone. Also affected is the British Medical Journal, PR Newswire, and one of the earliest online communities, The Well. According to an analysis by Sistrix, an independent search-engine analyst firm, hundreds of other legitimate, hardworking sites have also been hit.

Why us? We have no idea. The changes Google has made to its system are secret. What makes it worse is that Google’s tinkering seems to have actually improved Demand Media’s page rank, while killing ours.

We’re a blog, so we aggregate news stories like everyone else. But our posts are 100% original and we do a ton of original reporting, as The Guardian noted this morning.

Perhaps it was because we’re constantly ripped off by shitty clone blogs?

Or maybe because we ranked so highly for popular keywords like “Apple” and “iPhone.” In fact, we used to get a lot of love from Google, placing highly on Google News and Google’s general search pages. A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.

I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.

We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of uncertainty, the site finally looks like it will be able to stand on its two feet.

But this is a major setback. Anyone got Larry’s cell number?

Microsoft’s recently-announced partnership with Nokia will significantly increase the chances of both Apple and Nokia settling their bitter patent infringement lawsuits against each other, says a long-time intellectual property activist who keeps a close eye on the patent strategies of the tech world’s largest firms.

If iPhoto leaves you cold, or perhaps doesn’t run so well on your older Mac, there aren’t many options for a similar application that combines photo editing and photo library management. Not many, except for Picasa.

Google’s free photo app is a great alternative to iPhoto, generously packed with features and a good choice for people who want to quickly upload photos to the web.

In most respects, it compares very well to iPhoto, including features like face recognition and geolocation data. It comes with a selection of quick edit presets, and easy (but basic) slider controls for detailed editing.

What’s particularly nice about Picasa, though, is its speed. It roars through photo libraries that leave rival photo managers struggling to catch up. On first run, it will zip through your iPhoto library – not copying any files (so don’t worry about disk space) – but indexing all your data there and building up its own copy of the iPhoto library.

Picasa is one of those things it makes sense to have around. It’s free, it’s packed with useful stuff, and even if you don’t put it to immediate use, there might yet come a day when you’ll be glad you have it to hand.

(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

One of our favorite applications to make it in to the App Store this week is Google’s latest iPhone app, Google Shopper. By recognizing products by barcode, voice and text search, and even cover art, Google Shopper helps you find the information you need on millions of products, including online prices, reviews, specifications, and more.

Also to feature in this week’s list of must-haves is The Daily, the first digital news publication created exclusively for the iPad. The long-awaited publication boasts original content every single day, covering breaking news, sports, pop culture, entertainment, apps, games, technology, and lots more.

PaperHelper for the iPad also makes our pick of the best apps this week thanks to its innovative design and excellent user interface, which makes writing essays and papers on your device a great deal easier. Its unique split-screen feature enables you to write your document on one half of your iPad’s display while you browse the web for information and reference on the other half.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including IntoNow and Thermo, after the break!

This past week finally saw the unveiling of Google’s long-awaited Chrome OS. Surprising few to none, the big revelation is that Chrome the browser is actually the entire operating system. Using cloud web applications, it will be possible to run a bunch of desktop-ish apps on a Chrome-based netbook at home, then go to work, fire up Chrome on Mac or Windows on your work laptop, and have the same experience there. Pretty snazzy stuff.

It’s yet another take on what cloud-based consumer computing could be (insert “network computing” if you’d like to relive 1996), an heir to the promise of Java and so many others. And it looks to have some legs, even if we’re still quite some ways from seeing commercially available hardware ready to run on it. Many developers will create apps for the platform, and its write-once, read-anywhere (WOMA!) promise is mighty seductive. It would be very easy to imagine a world in which no one develops for traditional desktop operating systems anymore, except for professional applications like video editing and design work. Sounds like bad news for Apple, right?

Chrome started life as a browser, now it’s an OS. Well, sort of an OS. If you’re only running one application, you don’t need much OS.

The Chrome Notebook is Google’s very early foray into the world of hardware – backed, of course, by its extensive existing online software products. Here’s an overview video:

The Chrome Notebook has a full size keyboard, 8 hour battery life, a built-in webcam, and both wifi and 3G connectivity. You log in with your Google Account. The Chrome browser treats webapps the way the iTunes Store treats iOS apps: you can browse them, and “install” them. Each app runs in a separate tab.

Want one? You’ll have to apply like everyone else. Good luck.

Google’s Docs service is meant to make office documents easier, more accessible and more collaborative by bringing them into the cloud. Instead of needing to purchase or download an office software suite, you just go to a URL, load up the web application and you’re good to go.

It’s a fantastic product, but as the desktops and notebooks we used to compute on have gradually been replaced by mobile products like smartphones and tablets, Google Docs has fallen behind.

There’s great news today for users interested in bringing their Google Docs with them on their iPhone, though: Google has just announced that they’ve vastly improved the functionality of Google Docs on iOS, and you can now even edit your documents on your iPhone or iPad.

The secret sauce is Google’s new document editor, which supports editing within Mobile Safari, albeit with a few limitations. They’re in the process of rolling out the new document editor, and it’ll work on iOS 3.0+ devices, as well as Android 2.2 Froyo… now downloads required..

Leaving aside why you would want to run Android when you have access to iOS, we were absolutely amazed when hacker David Wong figured out how to install and dual boot Android alongside iOS on the original iPhone earlier this year. Even so, we were reluctant to try the hack ourselves: the process was convoluted, to say the very least.

It’s amazing, though, how far the instructions have come in a little over half a year, though: you can now install Android 2.1 Froyo on your first generation iPhone or iPhone 3G so simply that you don’t even need to have a computer handy to do it.

That’s right: as long as your iPhone or iPhone 3G is already jailbroken and running at least iOS 3.1.2, you can now install Android on your handset entirely through Cydia.

It seems that Google and Apple might be in another bidding war… this time to acquire BOKU, a payment startup which aims to bring “bank-grade payments technology” to mobile gadgets like the iPhone or iPad.

Over the weekend, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg met for some dinner, and smart money would rest on the bet that they were trying to work out some sort of deal where Facebook and Ping come together at last.

But could Apple’s interest be far more bold than merely ironing out some differences? Peter Kafka over at All Things D certainly thinks so: he speculates that Apple may want to buy Facebook outright with its $51 billion in cash reserves.

Here’s Kafka’s reasoning. Asked by Jobs what Apple intends to do with all of its cash, Jobs responded: “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” As Kafka sees it, Facebook’s a good bet for such an acquisition.