Google posts

There was an exchange between James T. Kirk and Spock regarding a proposed bailout of the beleaguered Klingon Empire. Kirk: Don’t believe them. Don’t trust them. Spock: They are dying. Kirk: Let them die. Today, the Klingons in question do not have boney ridges on their foreheads. They have no cloaking devices or batleths in their arsenal. The only real similarity between Research In Motion (RIM) and the Klingon Empire is the thought that, “perhaps today is a good day to die.” For the 5th consecutive quarter, RIM missed their earnings estimate. This prompted chopping at the top with former co-CEO…

Steve Mahan is just like everyone else with a car. He likes to hop in the driver’s seat on a sunny California day and hit the drive-thru for a taco on his way to the dry cleaners. Unlike most drivers, Steve Mahan has lost 95% of his vision and is legally blind, but thanks to Google he is on his way to not being restricted the way he has been for much of his life. Using a carefully pre-programmed route and with the help of a large technical team, Steve and the Google team performed the routine driving that many people take for granted. They grabbed their tacos. They picked up Steve’s dry cleaning. They did it in…

Names. If you tell someone you’re running to the store to pick up a “Touch”, a “Wildfire”, or a “Vitality”, you could be talking about either a condom or an Android phone. You see, the folks over at Intercom were able to find several words that are common to Google smartphones and condom brands and styles. Is it an odd coincidence, or is there something to the concept of trying to make the Android brand as “sexy” as the iPhone brand?  …

At SXSW, Matt Cutts discussed many topics in his panel with Danny Sullivan. The most interesting portion was the answer to a question about how large companies were able to muscle out “ma and pa websites” with aggressive optimization techniques. Cutts replied by saying this: “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over…

A few months back, website owners got extremely upset because Google Analytics stopped telling companies many of the keywords that people used to get to their website; specifically, they started marking all keywords used by people logged into Google accounts to be marked as (not provided), which is certainly frustrating.  Officially they swear this is for security, but what possible security breach is it for clients to see how people got to their webpages without any identifying information?  Users cried foul but, of course, Google did nothing to respond. Now, it’s been announced that…

It’s getting to the point where the numbers associated with the world’s addiction to social media can no longer blow our minds, but we’re not there yet. Not quite. On second thought, maybe we are. Does anyone still get amazed by the sheer bulk mass humongous force that social media exudes? Probably not. Still, it’s interesting to see how with all of the amazing things that Facebook and Twitter have done over the years that new players like Google+ and Pinterest still have room to flourish. Even social news sites like soaring Reddit and rebounding Digg are showing impressive numbers. There seems…

Google has had limited success with their Nexus-branded smartphones to date but that isn’t stopping them from moving the brand over to the tablet market. Now, rumors are circulating that they’re going to throw their name in the hat with prices starting at $149, joining the trend of reduced tablet pricing that even Apple is doing (even though only with their older iPad 2 as the New iPad rolls out). Amazon’s success with the properly-priced Kindle Fire over the holiday season and beyond has sparked more tablet makers to shoot for affordable rather than feature-rich. Ironically, this trend really…

It can be argued that the Google search algorithm is the most used form of mathematical engineering in history. With billions of searches performed daily, it’s easy to argue that it is used at the scale of many of the naturally-occurring algorithms that govern the world around us. Last year, the search giant gave us the revelation that Google makes changes to the algorithm an average of once every 17.5 hours, but the vast majority of these changes go unnoticed by even the most scrutinizing observer. Some changes are major, and those are the ones that are detailed below in this infographic. Click…

Chances are if you’re reading this article that you and most of the people you know have a smartphone. If you put them all in a room and asked them to put their smartphones on a table, you’ll likely see various Android devices mixed in with (depending on who you have as friends and family) approximately the same number of iPhones. What you probably won’t see are many (any?) Windows Phones. When it comes to speed, performance, and UI, many would agree that the Windows Phone is equal to or greater than its competitors. Microsoft put their money where their mouth was recently at their various stores and…

There are so many threats to online security and privacy that many have simply given up on the notion of being protected. Their best defense is simply not putting anything online that they wouldn’t want to share with the rest of the world and the nefarious types in particular. For example, signing up for one of NBCs websites means that your username is shared with 7 other companies. For Home Depot signups, that number grows to 13 and includes your email address. We’ve all heard of how Google, Facebook, and other major companies are watching us when we aren’t aware. The list of security and privacy infractions…