Time-tested wisdom says the sky’s the limit. However, a group of billionaires are looking to change that as they launch the first ever venture to mine asteroids, in space. For real. Click through for the details.
Are you a really good illustrator? Does your mind overflow with creativity? Not afraid to have your work judged by literally millions of people? Your dream job is waiting at Google, click through for details.
Google’s long-anticipated cloud storage service, Google Drive, is set to launch some time next week – in yet another attempt to move in on a service that other companies have been occupying for years. What’s interesting here is that Google is planning on starting everyone with 5GB of free storage, easily trumping Dropbox’s 2GB base quota.
Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder everybody keeps forgetting about except when he talks about stuff like this, has pointed to a handful of “threats to internet freedom” – Facebook, Apple, the entertainment industry, and governments that censor their citizens. By which I guess he means threats to Google.
April Fool pranks played by people tend to be either cruel or embarrassing. April Fool pranks played by tech companies, however, are charming and endearing attempts at being funny for one day every year – and this year’s haul of PR stunts is actually pretty good. Check them out after the jump.
Last month we told you about Nevada legalising self-driving cars. But how do they work exactly? Check out this video of Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius being “driven” by a guy that is 95% blind.
Last year, Google announced that it was sending its Street View team to the Amazon basin – and images from that trip are are now being made available on Google Maps. You probably won’t end up using it for directions, but there are some awesome panoramic images on display.
Another alternative to Apple’s iCloud popped up this week, with Google has announcing that it will be combining the Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore into a new cloud-based service called Google Play, allowing users to access all of their media across all of their Android devices.
Google’s new privacy policy – the one allowing the company to combine data from all of its sites into a single profile – officially takes effect today. The new policy collapses 70 separate policy documents from various Google services into a single unit – which also happens to make it easier for Google to know things about you.
The internet’s under attack again! This time by a United Nations treaty aimed at online regulation. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned strongly against the suggested measures: “Do not give that up easily. You will regret it. You will hate it, because all that freedom, all that flexibility, you’ll find it shipped away.”
Google’s new unified privacy policy takes effect on March 1st, allowing Google to share users’ data among all of its products. This means that your entire Google Web History – everything you’ve searched for on Google, and every site you’ve visited while signed in to a Google account – will be pooled together.
Those of you who have been wanting Terminator-vision since the films first came out won’t have long to wait. The New York Times reports that Google is not only working on, but will be releasing “smart glasses” fitted with Android-based augmented reality software by the year’s end.
What’s up with today’s Google doodle? We’re used to sometimes crazy, always creative doodles from the company, celebrating some or other important day or person, but this one seems particularly abstract.
Hello, future! Nevada has become the first state to legalize self-driving cars, which are apparently pretty easy to get hold of in Nevada. Granted, the cars must have two humans inside, and be insured for around $1 million, but let’s focus on the part where people are allowed to have self-driving cars now.
Internet giant, Google offered a brief look into their California headquarters yesterday. Photos taken inside the 500 000 square foot complex, along with this message were posted on the search engine’s blog: “You asked for it, you got it: here are behind-the-scenes pictures of the Googleplex.” Have a look at the full gallery – after the jump – to see how your office compares to that of Google.
See, it turns out that Google doesn’t actually know everything about your online browsing habits. But boy, they’d sure like to! Which is why they’re rolling out two services that records users’ online activities in full, in return for Amazon gift cards or – in the sightly more intense version – hard cash.
Google has been saving up a tonne of creepy private information about you lately, which is unfortunate, but the company’s philanthropic arm just launched a new crisis response project to win back our hearts and personal data: emergency alerts on Google Maps.
Whoops. Looks like somewhere between Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Google forgot their ‘don’t be evil’ rule and turned into the creepy uncle of the internet. Well, the other creepy uncle of the internet. It now follows users’ activities across YouTube, Gmail, Google Plus and Google Search, among others. Everybody, clear your history.
Google has joined Wikipedia, BoingBoing and a number of other popular websites in the SOPA protest – not just by ‘blacking out’ their logo, which is cute but largely ineffective, but by putting together a comprehensive and informative infographic on the SOPA bill and piracy, along with access lines for voters to contact members of Congress through.
This year Facebook will go public and start to sell shares on the stock exchange. Thanks to all of us, the social network is now worth $100 billion – more than giants such as Google, Disney, Amazon, and McDonald’s. But who is going to pocket all this money? Check out this infographic, detailing which Facebook friends will be getting pieces of the pie, as well as some other interesting facts:
Earlier this week it was revealed that there are literally hundreds of bloggers who were bribed to promote Google Chrome and to claim that their blog’s were “sponsored by Google”. Google’s response has been to point the finger at ad agencies.
It’s that time when all the companies that collect your data start parceling it out to tell you what the year’s really been like – we’ve already had offerings from Facebook and Twitter. What makes Google’s version – Zeitgeist – a little different is that they offer pretty particular data about South African search trends.
True to the pledge it made back in July to digitally archive images of the parts of Japan affected by the March earthquake and tsunami, Google has uploaded imagery of post-earthquake Fukushima to Street View. They’ve also set up a ‘Build the Memory’ website which compares before-and-after shots of the affected towns.
The world’s largest search engine is busy rolling out technology that can track your face. Facebook has been doing this for a while, so this sounds like Google playing catch-up, but there is a neat difference: unlike on Facebook, Google+ users get to opt-in to the facial recognition feature, instead of being automatically dragged into it.
YouTube is launching what they’re calling their biggest redesign in history today – and, granted, every time a website changes they tend to say that, but the differences here are pretty striking, with sweeping changes to the homepage and channel pages, strongly emphasising social media integration.
In a worrying move for people who like their internet uncensored, a federal judge in Nevada has ruled that Chanel has the right seize 700 domain names that have been peddling fake Chanel products – and that search engines and social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and Google, are to “de-index” the domains.
Last month, Google Maps’ Street View functionality started displaying photos of retail spaces’ interiors; now Google Maps itself is headed indoors, too, with a proposed Google Maps Floor Plans feature. This would mean Google maps of airports, shopping malls, and other buildings that you might somehow be able to get lost in.
Google seems to be dabbling in the censorship game too, these days. They’ve added sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and 4Shared to their “blacklist”, which doesn’t prevent the pages from showing up if searched for, but does prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete services.
As part of it’s “off-season spring cleaning,” Google today announced the end of a handful of services, including Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google Knol. The thinking behind the initiative is to free up resources for Google+ and other higher-priority projects. While some of the shut-downs make sense, others are a little more unexpected.
It looks like Google is getting ready to reveal a new, more polished interface for Gmail, if only to distract us from the embarrassing quietness we’re seeing on Google+; it remains to be seen whether the overhaul is part of their wider Google+ initiative or not, but visually the interfaces have a lot in common.