Google announced mobile support for its Google Wallet checkout service, which expanded to include micropayments for web content earlier this month. At that time, Google said it would allow online shoppers to purchase premium digital content, ideally priced under $1.00, which also included a 30-minute money-back refund. Google is expanding its service yet again to an area that makes even more sense: mobile shopping.
Google Earth 7 for the desktop landed yesterday with features familiar to anyone who has used the mobile version recently, including new 3D imagery and a virtual tour guide designed to highlight interesting places around the world. Virtual tours are available for more than 11,000 sites around the world, including popular attractions like the Grand Canyon, Eiffel Tower, and St. Peter's Basilica.
The search giant is set to debut the latest version of its Android operating system, known as Android 4.2, at an event scheduled for October 29 in New York. Rather than the rumored Key Lime Pie, it will be known as Android 4.2+, or an updated version of Jelly Bean, according to a person familiar with the announcement. Google will also be showing off the first devices to run on Android 4.2, including a high-end tablet, the Nexus 10, from Samsung Electronics, and LG Electronics's first Nexus phone, the Nexus 4. Also shown off will be an updated version of the Nexus 7 tablet which debuted in July.
Google has added another layer of detail to its maps for desktop and mobile. Now, besides, streets, parks, and bodies of water, users can also see even more building footprints in major cities across the U.S. The Web giant debuted this new addition yesterday by adding 25 million new building footprints to its map platform. Cities include Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Google just sent out invites for an October 29th Android event in NYC. The festivities start at 10:00 EDT and the event will also be live streamed on YouTube, seemingly indicating this is a big announcement. The invite sheds little light on the subject matter, but that’s the date long-rumored for the launch of LG Nexus smartphone.
As part of its "make the Web fast" effort, Google has released version 1.0 of a module designed to improve the very widely used Apache software that's very widely used to host Web sites. The Apache Software Foundation's flagship project is Web server software that delivers Web pages to people's browsers when they request it. It can be extended, and Google believes its mod_pagespeed extension for Apache is ready for use.
Surprise, surprise, Google is still the king of search in the U.S. In fact, any other search engine pales in user numbers comparison. According to new data released by digital analytics company ComScore yesterday, 66.7 percent of users core searches in September were on Google, which is 0.3 percent higher than August. Trailing behind were Microsoft's search engines, which got 15.9 percent of the market share, and Yahoo came in third with 12.2 percent - which is down 0.6 percent from August.
Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit, but there can be little doubt that the average quality of Android tablet apps still ranks behind iOS. Google is clearly aware of this and yesterday, the company is making a new push to get developers to ensure that their apps run well on tablets. To do this, Google just launched a Tablet App Quality Checklist that walks developers through the process of getting their apps tablet-ready.
When small businesses need to make investments in IT or other operations, it’s often the companies selling them the goods that help with financing solutions. Now it looks like Google is using that model to help drive more dollars to AdWords search advertising. Google is launching a new service in the UK, AdWords Business Credit, which offers credit to companies specifically in the SMB sector to boost their online ad spend with the company.
Micropayments, a long-discussed way of supporting content on the Web that has yet to catch fire with users, is about to get a big boost from Google. The company confirmed that users will soon be able to pay for Web content using Google Wallet, buying individual articles for an average of $0.25 to $0.99 each. Once users buy the page, they will own it forever.