Google posts

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Pac-Man today, Google has converted its company logo over the search bar into a fully playable version of the game allowing players to weave around the corridors made by the company name. Google’s logo changes have been nothing new over the past 10 years, with the company changing it’s doodles for holidays and special occasions regularly. Up until now the only interactive logo was posted last Halloween allowing users to click to see more candy, but with this new Pac-Man doodle they have taken their interactivity to a new level. When the team found out that…

Surely by now you’ve heard of that Google Street View debacle, wherein those crazy cameramobiles were ‘unintentionally’ grabbing data from unprotected wi-fi hotspots? Sure you have. Anyway, unintentionally or not, several owners of said unprotected hotspots are now banding together to slam Google with a class action lawsuit to the tune of ten thousand dollars per offending instance. Ow. The lawsuit detailed that “when Google created its data collection systems on its Google Street View vehicles, it included wireless packet sniffers that, in addition to collecting the user’s unique or…

With the goal of complete and total domination in mind, internet Goliath Google has set its sights on nearly every form of interactive media imaginable. What started as a research project by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in ’96 later became the most widely used search engine in the world, and went on to expand into countless online markets. Let’s face it: Google does, well, everything. From e-mail to social networking, Google will stop at nothing to control each industry that they enter. Funded almost entirely by advertisers, the farther their reach, the more cash in the bank. Google, however, is…

The hits just keep coming from Google I/O in San Francisco today – Google TV, Android 2.2, an iTunes competitor – it’s been an impressive day thus far. And while moments ago, I was content to sit on my ass here at home and do little more than muse and smile, I suddenly find myself cranky I hadn’t bothered to check out the event in person. Why? Google just gave everyone at I/O a free EVO 4G. It’s alright, don’t tear up. I feel the same: a crushing weight of sadness, as I sit here looking at my LG 8100 with no 6 key and a slightly broken screen. And MiniSD? Who the hell uses that? In any case, ‘don’t be evil’ truly seems…

Google has released 18 free fonts for the web in an attempt to leave the boring old fonts behind and move into the future of downloadable text-styles. In a Google I/O conference on Wednesday, the company released 18 freely usable fonts and an open-source tool, Google Font API, designed to smooth over browser issues in displaying these downloaded fonts. “With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers,” said Ralph Levien and David Kuettel of the Google Font API team in a blog…

Google just dropped the bomb we were all expecting: Google TV is about to lay some pipe right into our eyes by apparently revolutionizing television. Google TV is that set-top dealie you’ve been hearing about with Intel and Sony, a platform to “to bring the entire Web to the television set … to take the best of what TV offers these days and the best of what the Web offers and combine them.” While previous attempts at combining the internet with television have been like trying to mate pandas, it looks like Google TV might just be a winner – and I emphasize ‘might’ only because you have to agree, the…

Google has had a fantastic week for it’s I/O Conference. Google Wave went live, WebM open source video was announced and Google Online Storage was released to the world, amongst many other exciting updates. The latest news from I/O is that Android 3.0 is in the works for the fourth quarter of 2010. Codenamed “Gingerbread”, the next big update to Google’s mobile OS is expected to include support for WebM and VP8, Google’s latest video codecs. Updates to the mobile OS have followed an alphabetical theme, inspired by delicious treats; Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo and now Gingerbread. Right now…

Gist, a social networking tool that works through email, today announced a Google Apps Gadget for Gmail. Email, the very first form of internet communication is ironically the last bastion of privacy in a time when everything you send out into the world wide web suddenly belongs to someone else, but Gist has been working hard to change that. Gist works through an add-on for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes or through an iPhone app. Gist hopes to reach a much wider audience by adding Gmail support. As the video shows, you can click on people’s names in the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ field in an email and using Gist’s…

When Google announces a new product, you have to get a little excited. Their newest, announced today, is the Chrome Web Store, which will make it easy for anyone to pay for and download applications over the internet or to mobile phones. According to Google Vice President Sundar Pichai, Google wants to make it easy to create and sell a premium web application, and the new Web Store is the delivery vehicle for those applications. The store will only be available through Google’s Chrome web browser, which may boost its numbers from 70 million users. The store will use the same basic model as Apple’s…

Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone are rapidly snatching smartphone share as the race to ascendancy sees the competition sent to casualty. The latest Gartner figures today tell us Android and iPhones are gobbling up the space. Between them they now account for 25 percent of the smartphone market (in Q1), up from 12 percent last year. The iPhone took 15.4 percent of the whole thing (up 5 points). Android is up 8 points to 9.6 per cent. What’s critical here is that all other smartphones lost relative share, though unit sales climbed. Android is now the fourth largest operating system, displacing…