Google

SOPA: Wikipedia Goes Dark

18 January 2012 4:55 AM

If you need to use Wikipedia for any urgent research, make sure you do it today – come tomorrow, you’ll be clean out of luck (for 24 hours)

The company announced today that in protest over SOPA, it will join Reddit and others on Wednesday for an all-day web “blackout” – which means that participating sites will be effectively off-line and inaccessible. The move comes as the firestorm over a highly controversial internet piracy bill in Washington gathers pace.

Wikimedia Foundation – English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout:
“Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.”

Full Story – Wikimedia Foundation.

UPDATE 05:25 AM GMT;

Isn’t SOPA dead? Wasn’t the bill shelved, and didn’t the White House declare that it won’t sign anything that resembles the current bill?
No, SOPA and PIPA are not dead. On January 17th, SOPA’s sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. The threat of SOPA and PIPA remains, and the English Wikipedia community wants to send a strong message that such attacks on the free and open web are not welcome.

Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way?
The Wikipedia community, as part of their request to the Wikimedia Foundation to carry out this protest, asked us to ensure that we make English Wikipedia accessible in some way during an emergency. The English Wikipedia will be accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. Because the protest message is powered by JavaScript, it’s also possible to view Wikipedia by completely disabling JavaScript in your browser.

Google Offers App Comes to Android

3 November 2011 4:18 PM


Google has released an app for its daily deals site Google Offers, making it more convenient for U.S.-based Android users to discover, purchase, and redeem online coupons.

The app offers the same deals as its Google Offers beta Web site; today’s deal is $15 for $25 worth of REI outdoor gear. You can purchase the deal through the app and flash your phone to redeem it at the merchant. The app also stores all your offers and alerts you when they’re about to expire.

An iOS version will come … eventually. “iPhone users, stay tuned because Offers is coming soon to the App store” Google said.

Download Google Offers version 1.0 at the Android Market. It requires Android 2.1 and 1.4MB of space.

Last week, Google Offers announced cross-promotion deals with 14 other daily deals sites, and will send an email of offers from partners like Gilt City, Dealfind, DoodleDeals, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juice in the City, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, Plum District, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR, and zozi.

Yesterday, Google faced some heat when its highly anticipated native Gmail app for iOS was launched with numerous problems, forcing the company to withdraw the app.

Google+ Social Networking Now Open to Everyone, New Features Added

20 September 2011 11:37 PM

Google opened the gates to its social network, Google+, to everyone today and rolled out more than a dozen new features to the service, many of them aimed at mobile phone users.

For 12 weeks, Google+ has been in “field trials,” Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra explained in a company blog. “We’re nowhere near done,” he wrote, “but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta.” Now anyone can go to the Google+ site and sign up for the service.

With the new "Hangouts on Air" feature, you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join in.

In addition to open enrollment, Google introduced a number of improvements to the hangout feature of Google+. Hangouts allow people to chat face to face through video. With today’s improvements, users of Android phones will be able to use hangouts on their mobiles.

Google is also expanding the online version of hangouts. Now, through “Hangouts on Air,” you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join it. An unlimited number can watch the hangout session.

Hangouts is getting some extras, too. They allow you to share what’s on your computer in a hangout, scribble with friends on an online sketchpad, share Google docs, and create or join public hangouts about a topic, like the collapse of your favorite sports team or raising alpacas.

Searching, Now Made Easy
A welcome improvement for many Google+ users will be the introduction of a search feature into the social network. Now you can type words into a Google+ search box and find content you’re interested in and as well as people to connect to.

Some mobile phone improvements were announced today, too. Better text messaging (SMS) support is now available in the United States and India. Now, from your cell phone, you can post to Google+, receive notifications, and respond to group messages through SMS.

You can also +mention people in posts or comments viewed on your phone. When you do that, the person will be notified that they’re mentioned in the post or comment. And you can +1 comments, too, but only from iOS devices.

You can take care of more housekeeping of Google+ from your phone now, too. You can edit your profile photo and customize the notifications you receive on your cell, since you may not want your phone flooded with notifications while you’re on the go.

If you have an Android phone, you can now move the Google+ app to a SD card to free up the mobile’s internal storage.

Google+ Vocabulary Changes
..read more at www.pcworld.com

BREAKING: Google Buys Motorola for $12.5 Billion

15 August 2011 1:15 PM

Google has purchased Motorola Mobility, a company that makes many of the phones its Android operating system runs on, for $12.5 billion — a 63% premium on its current share price.

The acquisition, Google said in a a statement, “will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem.” The company will continue to be run as a separate business.

Buying a hardware company is an unusual move for Google.

More to come… follow this post for updates via Mashable.

Google+ iPhone App Now Live In The App Store [+PHOTOS]

19 July 2011 6:02 PM

Google+

Google+’s iPhone app is now live in the App Store, and you can download the free app here. (Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. Requires iOS 3.1 or later)

From Google’s description of the app, Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Similar to the web product, Google+ for iPhone includes Circles, your stream of updated from contacts, and Huddle, for group messaging in your circles.

While the Google+ Android app was ready to go on day one, the Google+ iPhone app had remained in review with Apple. Until now, iPhone users have had to access a mobile web version of Google+ in Safari, which wasn’t nearly as feature-filled as the Android app.

It appears that the iPhone app and Android app are fairly similar in functionality except for the instant upload feature that is included in the Android app. Instant Upload automatically uploads videos and photos to your Google+ album in the cloud.

As Larry Page told us last week “Google+ now has has over 10 million users who have created profiles (after two weeks), and these users are sharing and receiving 1 billion items per day.”