Well here’s a juicy little accusation to spice up your Tuesday evening. Google have this afternoon claimed that search rival Bing have been tracking users interactions with their service through the Bing Toolbar, and stealing the search results for themselves.
While the general populous have been salivating over the stupidly-named Motorola Xoom, those faithful hackers over at XDA Developers have taken the SDK image of Honeycomb – the tablet-centric flavour of Android – and ported it to the hackers best friend, the Nook Color. Or, as we call it in the UK, the Nook Colour.
In case you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, the proverbial excrement is hitting the fan in Egypt at the moment. Spurred on by similar protests across Tunisia, Egyptians have taken to the streets in ever-increasing numbers to demand the resignation of despot-in-chief Hosni Mubarak.
Just as Intel’s latest and greatest chips, the so-called “Sandy Bridge” lineup has only just starting finding its way into new machines, and today Intel has released an advisory that a problem with the chip’s SATA controller could degrade transfer speeds over time.
We all knew this moment was going to come sooner or later. Symbian, Nokia’s floundering mobile OS, has ruled the roost essentially forever in terms of sales (although it has been fairly absent in the mindshare stakes as of late), but that lead has been slowly crumbling as the twin forces of iOS and Android snapped at its heels. The question wasn’t if, but when, one of them would overtake it.
The European Union today announced that they will be launching a preliminary anti-trust investigation into alleged down-ranking of competitors on Google Inc. search results – as well as deliberate preferential treatment for Google products.
In what could see the coming together of two of the scariest media empires in the world, rumours reach us that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Apple have been secretly collaborating on a tablet-based newspaper called The Daily, and it’s set to launch early next year.
After months of rumours and speculation Facebook finally got round to unveiling their “Project Titan” messaging product yesterday. The new system centres around a unified inbox that deals with your IMs, SMS, email and Facebook messages, so in theory you’ll only have one conversation thread for each of your contacts.
Nice move Apple, very nice. With the uploading of one simple image Apple have stolen most of Facebook’s thunder just an hour before the social giant’s much-anticipated press conference.
On the eve of their big press conference where they are expected to announce their “Gmail killer”, Facebook has overtaken eBay in value to become the third most valuable web-based company in the US.
The talent shortage in Silicon Valley only seems to be getting worse. Following a series of high-profile departures from Google (mostly in the direction of Facebook), and talks of some big-money deals going on in an effort to retain staff. There was a story going round (completely unconfirmed, of course) that Google gave a senior engineer $3.5million in stock to stop them leaving for Facebook.
Another day, another swirling internet rumour vortex. Well, we needed something to fill the void now all that Nexus Two business is sorted out, didn’t we? A few months ago we got wind of an internal Facebook product codenamed “Project Titan”, which Facebook apparently refer to as their “GMail killer”.
We saw Google’s quarterly financial results not too long ago, and while The Big G wasn’t quite on par with Apple’s earning power, they still fared pretty damn well. So well, in fact, that the powers that be in Mountain View have reached into their deep pockets and are throwing a thousand greenbacks at each employee as a Christmas present.
Sure, Silicon Valley has a remarkable pedigree and history of producing world-beating technology companies, as well as an established technology presence, networking scene and excellent weather, but you know what us Brits have? Words.
Lars Rasmussen, the engineer behind Google Maps and later Google Wave, has left Google for pastures new. Like a great number of ex-Googlers these days, those new pastures are Facebook.
You could argue that eBay has always been one of the greener websites out there – the whole point of the online auction house is to sell your unwanted belongings onto others who will find a use for them – and what’s greener than recycling?
It’s a strange tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. As each delicious Android release has come and gone, Google has taken delivery of an oversized statue of that release’s namesake for proud display on the lawn of the firm’s Mountain View Googleplex.
