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Saturday, February 13, 2010 WASHINGTON: Internet giant Google has bought Aardvark, a "social search" service that relies on a user's contacts to provide answers to questions. "I can confirm that we have signed an agreement with Google," Aardvark co-founder and chief technology officer Damon Horowitz said in reply to an email from a French news agency. "We can't comment further at this time." Technology blog TechCrunch put the purchase price at around 50 million dollars. San Francisco-based Aardvark was founded in 2007. Its co-founders include former members of Google. Aardvark uses the contacts in a person's network to provide answers to questions via the Web at Vark.com, instant messaging, email or Twitter. In a recent blog post, Aardvark said it had more than 90,000 users in October 2009 and 87.7 percent of the questions sent to Aardvark received answers from a friend or a friend of a friend. Aardvark said 75 percent of the user...

Saturday, February 06, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO: Google has gone techno-chic, debuting fashion designs inspired by the Internet giant. An "old-fashioned magnifying glass pendant" priced at 200 dollars was for sale online at google store website along with a 300-dollar knit scarf in the firm's trademark colors and "peace" T-shirts for 85 dollars each. The pieces were the work of emerging designers who last year were asked to come up with "one-of-a-kind" items inspired in some way by Google, whether it be the firm's colors, technology or mission. The designs resulted from an annual fund-raising event by fashion magazine Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). "Last October, we transformed 10 of the finalists' designs into iGoogle Artists themes," Google product marketing manager Michaela Prescott said in a blog post, referring to the iGoogle personalized homepage that users can manipulate or design to their lik...

January 23, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO: Google is courting folks that make games people love to play on smartphones. The Internet giant has teamed with a professional Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place in San Francisco in March to offer free Nexus One and Droid smartphones to those that register early for the event. Sessions at the conference will be devoted to games tailored for mobile devices, "making attendees great potential developers of new content for phones using the Android" operating system, according to GDC organizers. Game applications are top sellers at Apple's wildly popular App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which Google has in its cross-hairs with its freshly launched Nexus One and an online Android Market for mini-programs. Growing numbers of hardware makers are building smartphones, netbooks and tablet computers based on Google's open-source Android software. Smartphones are among the most widespread and widely-used game plat...

Thursday, January 21, 2010 BEIJING: Google's threat to leave China should not be "over interpreted" or linked with Sino-US ties, state media quoted Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei as saying Thursday.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010 MOUNTAIN VIEW: Google Inc took the wraps off the first of its smartphones on Tuesday, a device with speech recognition that it hopes can take on Apple's iPhone over time and help shore up the company's dominance in Internet advertising. Analysts say the phone -- to be sold directly to consumers -- is not expected to dramatically alter the carrier-hardware vendor relationship the industry relies on, nor is it likely to yield a revenue windfall in the short term, though executives said it could be profitable. Google plans to use what it calls a "superphone" -- the first of many types of smartphones that it will make -- to expand its reach from the PC to the mobile world and ensure its online products and ads get prominent placement on a new breed of wireless Internet devices. The highly anticipated Nexus One, which marks the first time the 11-year-old Internet search titan has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device, could ...

Friday, December 11, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Thursday unveiled a tool that lets scientists and defenders of the environment use the Internet to keep an eye on what is left of the Earth's forests."We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests," Rebecca Moore and Amy Luers of the US Internet giant's philanthropic arm Google.org said in a blog post.The technology lets scientists analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract information such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of forest.The system is hosted in the Google "cloud," the technology firm's Internet-linked data centers, and has the potential to reveal in seconds when forests are being chopped down, burned or bulldozed."Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening," Moore and Luers wrote.Emissions...

Saturday, October 31, 2009 NEW YORK: Google and their doodles, we all knew Google would come up with some sort of new doodle for Halloween2009 but who knew they would give us four different doodles to celebrate Halloween?The new Halloween “doodles” are already showing in the Google Australia homepage, New Zealand and some parts of Asia.Are you wondering how they can have four doodles in the one spot?Well, as you come to the homepage you will see one doodle, this first doodle is a simple doodle with a “Halloween pumpkin lolly head” which replaces the letter “e”, by clicking on it the doodle will change to a few delicious looking lollies, click once again and it will give you even more lollies, click again and it will give you only the lolly wrappers, finally you click on it again and it take you to the google search results for halloween 2009.