Google posts

Google’s war against torrents is being kept quiet. No announcements. No press releases. You will only find the story in blogs that are carefully watching. In essence, Google is removing keywords from their Suggest and Instant results so that they are no longer recommended when people start typing them. If you continue all the way through on a term such as “BitTorrent,” Google will offer the results. Reluctantly. They won’t help you out at all, even if you type all the way to the “n.” Try typing in “BitTorren” without the last “t” into Google. Apparently, they have no idea what you’re talking about….

When is the best time to change CEOs if you’re a major company? How about shortly after announcing fourth-quarter earnings of $8.75 a share on revenue of $6.37 billion, numbers that shattered analysts’ expectations. Today, Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt would be going into a new role and co-founder Larry Page would be ascending to the top position that he held in the beginning of the company a decade ago. Schmidt wrote about it in a blog post. “As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey, and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify…

Long long ago, in that distant, ancient era of the 2000′s, we heard unending chatter about this thing called ‘the semantic web’. The semantic web was supposed to be like the holy grail of technology. At its heart, it was meant to do two things: to make all that impersonal data online accessible in regular, everyday language; and to make connections between that data in ways that aren’t always readily apparent. There were a bunch of promising apps. Two of the biggest were Twine – which has since become evri – and Glue, which is now Getglue. But now, those two semantic apps are social apps. And in 2011,…

It has become common wisdom that retail stores that carry physical media – CDs, books, movies in particular – are, to use the scientific term, “toast”. And indeed, whatever is being said, physical media stores are going through an upheaval: in the U.S. Borders seems barely solvent; in the U.K, Waterstones and HMV are shutting stores. It’s a pattern being repeated everywhere. Around the wealthy parts of the world, retailers who trade in old media are struggling. But they aren’t dead. Or, at the very least, they don’t have to die. There are steps that can be taken so they can save themselves. It won’t…

IBM might have the market cornered on beating chess champions, but Google Goggles on Android and iPhone has Sudoku mastered. As is customary for Google, their latest release of features includes a couple of very useful ones and one that is all fun n’ games (which may be very useful for some). First, their barcode reader on Android is upgraded to run much faster (usually under 1 second) and to work without have to push a “scan” button. Once the results are returned, the user must click on the link to see the details of the deal. All versions were updated to recognize print ads in major publications that…

Android is not ‘cool’. There, I said it. Sure, this year it’s almost certain that Android will overtake iOS in terms of market share. And, the Consumer Electronics Show may as well be called the “Half This Stuff is Android Electronics show”. But, rather than simply being a question of what gets the tech world drooling, the ineffable nature of ‘cool’ has real consequences for ecosystems, economics and cultural cachet – and right now, for a variety of reasons, Android just doesn’t have it. Apple’s Cool Factor = Mindshare Here’s something about iOS’s success that people have never been very good at…

The scene was one familiar to many tech geeks. It was after the launch of Netflix’s PS3 app, and I, breathlessly, excitedly, couldn’t wait to show my parents, who had a PS3 under their TV too. “Look!”, I said “you can watch an unlimited number of movies! There are new ones and classics and documentaries… trust me, you’ll love this.” My father’s brown furrowed a little. “Okay,” he said skeptically. “What do I have to do?” “Oh, it’s easy, I said. First, switch the input on the TV. Then pick up this remote and – well, you see that button with ‘P’ on it, press that. Okay, then see that circle pad? Use that to…

According to the security gurus Trend Micro, the most dangerous site on the net in 2010 was none other than google.com. Of course, no one would believe this out of hand – Google’s had its problems in the last year, what with user privacy snafus and other ballyhoo, but when you consider Google’s immense popularity, it becomes a different story. Factoring Google’s reputation as the (second-)most visited site on the net (Facebook passed it this past year), it is a prime target for blackhat SEO schemes, leading to all manner of malware and other threats. Naturally, it takes two to tango, and the user…

The reviews of Google’s Chrome OS have thus far been lukewarm at best, and tepid at worst – suffice it to say, no one really has strong feelings one way or the other. It’s doubtlessly cool, but most seem to agree that the majority of the public just isn’t ready to switch to computing on a cloud just yet. So now you’re sitting there with your CR-48, unsure of what to do. Why not install another operating system? Users at the Something Awful forums have figured it out, installing Windows 7 and OS X with little ease – assuming of course that you file removing the CR-48′s finicky bottom panel in order to properly…

The past year in technology was among the more surprising ones we’ve had. Even the most astute, insightful tech observers would have had trouble predicting some of the things that happened this year. The iPad and Kinect have become the fastest selling electronic devices in history. Android exploded at a rate few could have seen coming. Facebook and Twitter kept up their blistering expansion rates, while Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7… is actually good. But what about this coming year? What events and happenings will not only define 2011, but also cause tech-heads to look back in a year from now…