Growing Family: Even though today’s Android event was cancelled, Google went forward with product announcements for the LG Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 tablet via the company’s blog this afternoon. The company also revealed an upated 32GB Nexus 7, the 32GB Nexus 7 with mobile data, and Android 4.2 in the post. source
Google hits the Grand Canyon: Google’s Street View is hitting the trails of the Grand Canyon. A car can’t fit down those tiny trails, though, so Google came up with backpack-mounted cameras. ”Any of these sort of iconic, cultural, historical locations that are not accessible by road is where we want to go,” said Ryan Falor, product manager at Google. source
Oops! Google hit “send” a little too early yesterday, causing a massive market blunder.
In a matter of minutes, the search-engine giant shed almost $20 billion in market value when R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the company in charge of its financial filing, published Google’s disappointing earnings report hours ahead of schedule.
The announcement would have weighed on the stock anyway, but releasing the news when markets were open spurred a frenzy of bearish trading. Stock market operators have built-in circuit breakers for shares that swing wildly, but Google reportedly requested that Nasdaq freeze its shares, which the platform did briefly.
“(Google) doing a Felix Baumgartner,” tweeted Joe Donohue, a professional investor using the handle @UpsideTrader.
The precision and care that must go into protecting a publicly traded company’s market value is nothing short of amazing, and not just because of the competition — as some poor folks at Google are now reflecting on, one mistake can cause a big hurt.
According to a very trusted source, Apple Store employees who have been tasked with improving Apple’s new mapping service are using Bing Maps to correct reported address errors in Apple Maps. According to my source:
When someone has reported an [address-related] problem, they look up the real address on Bing (via an embedded map on the page) and then correct the location.
Using a different service to fix the problem is not surprising, but skipping over Google, the clear industry leader in mapping, due to their disdain for the company, is the same issue that got them into this mess in the first place. Remember, Apple had a year left on its Google Maps/iOS contract.
In which Apple relies on third-hand mapping information.
Little Nemo in Google-Land: Stop what you’re doing and going to the Google Japan site now. This doodle is multi-paneled, guys.
Next up: “have you been injured in an Internet comment fight? Leave a message on our Google Lawyers message board and maybe we’ll help you get cash fast!”
Like payday loans, except with search keywords.
There is, on the one hand, an incredibly simple explanation for the shift in news organizations’ attitude toward Google: clicks. Google News was founded 10 years ago — September 22, 2002 — and has since functioned not merely as an aggregator of news, but also as a source of traffic to news sites. Google News, its executives tell me, now “algorithmically harvests” articles from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And Google News-powered results, Google says, are viewed by about 1 billion unique users a week. (Yep, that’s billion with a b.) Which translates, for news outlets overall, to more than 4 billion clicks each month: 1 billion from Google News itself and an additional 3 billion from web search.
As a Google representative put it, “That’s about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute.”
This is good! But at the same time, Google News should do more to help smaller publications out, too. Being Google and not having a dedicated support staff you can call using a phone, it is notoriously difficult to get your site listed on Google News.
Ocean Exploration: Google has released a new collection of panoramic underwater images, powered by Street View, created with high quality photos provided by The Catlin Seaview Survey. Only a few locations have been added at this time, though Google says they’ll continue to update the Ocean collection with new underwater panoramas on a regular basis. So, what do you think? (Photo via Google Maps) source
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Congratulations to the team at Nik Software on their recent acquisition by Google. We’re curious to see how this will affect development of Snapseed, as well as the rest of Nik’s software catalog, and whether or not this might bring an end to some of iOS’ most popular photography apps. source
These photos might look staged, but they’re actual images captured by the Google Street View cameras.
There’s an album cover in here somewhere. The one with the masks could be a Mars Volta cover.
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