Explore the News

Google

Google Street View Goes Underwater

After having already surveyed ancient ruins and Arctic villages, Google's Street View team has now expanded their reach to the world's oceans. This week, the company added its first underwater panoramic images to Google Maps, giving users an intimate glimpse at coral reefs along the coasts of Australia, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Google gathered its underwater imagery as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, a research initiative devoted to studying the world's coral reefs.

Read More
Google

Google Glass Moves Beyond Photography

Dante D'Orazio has seen Google Glass trotted around more than a few times now on the faces of plenty of Google employees and even on a handful of models, but information on how the device functions and what its capabilities are beyond photography have been extremely difficult to come by. Yesterday he got precious few more details about voice commands and other functionality courtesy of The Wall Street Journal's Spencer Ante, who recently got a moment with a pair of the glasses and Sergey Brin.

Read More
Google

Google Wallet to Discontinue Prepaid Cards

After seemingly overcoming a series of security issues, Google is cashing out of the prepaid payment card market next month. The Web giant began telling users yesterday to get busy spending whatever balances that remain on their cards because they will be discontinued on October 17. The prepaid card was made obsolete with the introduction of the ability to use any debit and credit cards with Google Wallet.

Read More
Google

Chrome OS Gets Updated With Smaller Apps List

Chromebook and Chromebox users (and anyone else using Chrome OS) have an update waiting for them that offers several usability improvements. Before you go check for the update, however, take note of what's changed: most notably, the updated OS features a smaller apps list that pops up from the taskbar. Whereas the old apps list introduced in the Aura update reminded us of OS X's Launchpad, the update turns the apps list into a Stacks-like window.

Read More
Google

Chrome Hacking Contest Award Fund Jumps to $2M

Google announced that it will pay up to $2 million for major vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser at a second Pwnium hacking contest this fall. Pwn2Own, a rival contest sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, will award as much as $200,000 in a mobile-specific challenge slated to run several weeks earlier. Google's Pwnium 2 will take place at the Hack In The Box security conference on Oct. 10 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Read More
Google

Google Fiber Launches in Kansas City

Google Fiber has finally arrived in Kansas City, offering crazy-fast broadband speeds and a new television service on both sides of the Kansas / Missouri state line. Google is touting 1,000 Mbps download and upload speeds, positioning its service as 100 times faster than traditional broadband. Google compared the growth in processing power and storage to internet speed, pointing out that the latter hasn't kept up with the former. Google believes that its fiber will put data access speeds on the same exponential growth curve, saying that a Gigabit is only the beginning of its plans. Google also pointed out that the US is well behind other countries in terms of both speed and pricing.

Read More
Google

Google Discontinues Old Version of Analytics

In a largely expected move, Google has announced that today it will discontinue the old version of Google Analytics, which it has continued to support for much of the past year after introducing a new version. Google released a new version of the Web visitor statistic service last September that focused on real-time results but kept a link to the old version at the bottom of the page. That link will be retired today, Google announced.

Read More
Google

Sony's Google TV Box will Support OnLive

Google TV needs all the help it can get. That's why Sean Hollister was happy to see Sony explicitly mention that the box will support OnLive's streaming game service. Now, though, it appears there's some confusion about whether that's actually true. Sony told VentureBeat that the media player will no longer support the OnLive controller, and seemingly the OnLive service along with it. Logically, that makes a lot of sense, since Sony just bought OnLive rival Gaikai in a $380 million deal, and obviously Sony would prefer not to directly promote a competitor.

Read More
Google

Google Shutting Down a Bunch of Projects

Google is continuing to shut down services which aren’t core to its business – something it has been actively doing ever since Google co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO. Yesterday, the tradition continues as Google is announcing the shuttering of five more services, the most notable of which are Google Video and iGoogle, its personalized homepage offering. Clearly iGoogle has outlived its usefulness. The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people’s entry points to the Internet.

Read More
Google

Google announces Compute Engine

Google launched Compute Engine Infrastructure as a Service in a bid to offer cloud infrastructure much like Amazon Web Services. However, the effort, which is in a “limited preview,” lacks the depth and options provided by Amazon. In a nutshell, Google is allowing users to spin up virtual machines. Coupled with Google’s App Engine, Google Apps and Drive the company is building out its cloud stack.

Read More
Newer articles Older articles