Born to be Wireless

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told CNET that he expects the company's new Chrome browser to end up on the Android platform in a later version of the yet-to-be-released mobile phone operating system. Brin said Android and Chrome were developed separately but that a "subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack."

Source: www.moconews.com

Labels: android, chrome, google

Labels: google, iphone 3g

Mobilestance has a great article with a couple arguments explaining why 2008 will be the year of QR codes in the United States.

The main idea is:

- Apple: it has created a near perfect platform for a QR reade: its iPhone (two megapixel camera, public SDK, bullet-proof distribution model, and most importantly, a highly-attractive, early-adopting, data-hungry user base).

- Google: Android mobile platform will have a non-proprietary QR Code reader embedded.

Labels: apple, google, qr code

Google has just released its mobile image ads. Take a look at the video below to see an interview with a mobile ads engineer and his demo.



Source: Google Mobile Blog

Labels: google, mobile ads

Google Maps for mobile has recently updated to Version 2.0. On the Mobile Blog they talk about these new features.

Watch the video on YouTube:



It works like a charm in my N93 using TIM network here in Brazil (Recife)

Labels: google, maps

Google has acquired "certain assets and technology" of Zingku, a mobile social network which lets people create and share things via mobile, instant messenger and web browser—it's integrated with a personalized website that lets people move things back and forth between the web and the mobile reports Google Operating System. There are also group messaging services and syndicated feeds. It's currently limited to the US and new accounts are on hold while the Zingku is migrated to Google's (NSDQ: GOOG) servers. Naturally this is being connected with the Google Phone, but Google could find a lot to do with the technology just with the services it currently offers on mobiles.

source: MoCoNews

Labels: acquisition, google

Google has launched a mobile version of Picasa, its photo application. Besides photo management, it allows users to keep track of photo updates from friends and family. Go here for details.

Labels: google, mobile, picasa

T-Mobile, the largest mobile operator in Hungary, will now rely on Google’s search engine technology to power their web’n’walk portal. Previously the domestic Hungarian OK.hu search engine was used for mobile search, but now both T-Online and T-Mobile have made the switch to Google.

T-Online and T-Mobile are also using Google as search engine (05/15/07) [Verizon Press Release]

From: MobileCrunch

Labels: google, search, T-Mobile

MoCoNews has reported: The founder of SMS social networking company Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley, has quit Google complaining that the search giant didn’t put any resources into the network, notes GigaOM… Alex Rainert, “employee #2 for DodgeBall”, has also quit. This is surprising, since Dodgeball was big when Google bought it, and it was well-placed to ride the mobile growth wave. In a fairly novel announcement, on his Flickr site of Crowley he wrote “Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space”. Using Yahoo to announce his resignation from Google… Crowley is joining big game developer area/code while Rainert has joined IconNicholson as a Creative Strategist focusing on mobile and emerging technologies.

Labels: dodgeball, google

Excellent. Just call 1-800-466-4411 (800-GOOG-411) and you can test out Google local voice search. They'll even connect you afterward for no fee. Voice search is the one of the key areas we'll see lots of investment in (remember that recent Microsoft purchase) in 07. Watch this space carefully. Much better to use this in the car than trying to fumble and read your cellphone screen.

How many time do we have to wait until this cool service be availiable in Brazil? Maybe forever...

Labels: google, search, voice

Great tool to compare mobile search. Go and check it.

Labels: google, mobile, search, Yahoo

It looks like Google has come up with an answer to Yahoo's oneSearch (review). When you visit mobile Google search (google.com/m), there's a new link at the top of the page heralding "New Try our new mobile search" Follow that link and you'll see a page that works a whole lot like oneSearch. Gone are the options to search Web, Images, Local Listings and Mobile Web. In their place is a single search box. Searches now return a mixture of results from the web, mobile web, news and images - much like with oneSearch. Again, like oneSearch, a field appears on most results pages, where you can specify a location to obtain local shopping and events results related to your query. Like oneSearch, Google lists the latest scores as the first result for queries consisting of the name of a sports team - although if you look at the image 0n the right Google doesn't list tonight's currently in progress game! Bug?

I have very mixed feelings about this new Google Search interface. On the one hand, like oneSearch, it does typically require less keying to find what you are looking for. But, and this is huge, Google seems to have largely abandoned the mobile web as a source of results for queries. The old Google mobile search offers a choice of searching the full web or the mobile web. The new version mixes mobile and web results together - although you will be hard pressed to find the mobile ones. There are many more web than mobile results and the mobile ones don't receive any priority, in fact they tend to be buried, often not appearing in the first screen of results at all. Google seems to think that users prefer transcoded copies of full web pages over pages designed for mobile. I don't agree. Google's transcoder is one of the best - but transcoded pages remain harder to navigate and less attractive than good mobile specific ones. This change is bad for the future of the mobile web too, Google's mobile search drives the majority of traffic to mobile sites. This de-emphasis of mobile results will cause that traffic to drop drastically I fear. oneSearch is much better in this regard with a separate category for mobile sites on the first screen of results and a More mobile web.. link that leads to pages of nothing but mobile web results.

There are some other differences between the two services. Three I noticed are:

• Google shows fewer results per page. Yahoo typically offers at least twenty or more links in five categories, Google limits itself to 10 links in three categories. Yahoo also tends to show more images. GAP recommends a maximum of ten links per page and I notice that Yahoo's results pages load much slower than Google's in the built-in Openwave browser on my Motorola i855. Much of the slowness does not seem to be the network - it just takes the browser a long time to render all those links and images. With Opera Mini on the same phone both Google and oneSearch load equally quickly. I do prefer the richer oneSearch experience if I'm using Opera but if I had to use the more limited Openwave browser I'd only use Google, oneSearch is just too slow.
• Customization: oneSearch does not seem to be customizable in any way, other than being able to toggle "safe" search. There doesn't seem to be any adaptation for browsers either. Google varies the number of links and the size and number of images depending on browser capabilities. A local search for "sushi" gives ten links and one image with the Openwave browser but 15 links and three images with Opera Mini. Google also lets the user customize a number of features of the search. Clicking a Settings link at the bottom of any page reveals the following options:
  1. You can toggle whether Google will save locations you have entered. This option not only makes locations persistent but also adds a drop down of recent locations to the search pages.
  2. Another option lets you toggle a drop down where you can restrict search to just images or local listings. There should be a option to restrict results to the mobile web here too but there isn't!
  3. My favorite option is the one that lets you tell Google not to transcode non-mobile pages. This is great for Opera Mini users. The Google transcoder does a good job of resizing images and reformatting pages to reduce load times and data costs and enhance mobile usability. But Opera Mini uses a web proxy that does the same thing - having them both manipulate the page is a redundant waste of time and yields worse results than either one by itself. I'd love to see Google add this option to the mobile edition of Google Reader where I'm constantly fighting with the transcoder.
  4. Finally, you can add content to Google search's front page, turning it into a mini home page. You can choose up to six content 'modules' from a list of 15 including stock quotes, local movie listings and weather - plus news feeds from the BBC, CNN, ESPN, Rolling Stone, E!, Slashdot and others. The news module's links lead to transcoded rather than true mobile pages. The mobile version of Google News does link mainly to mobile pages, why not do the same here? Unlike the Google Personal Mobile Homepage (google.com/ig/mobile) it isn't possible to add arbitrary feeds - on the other hand you can customize the new search page right from your phone. Setting up a mobile Personal Home Page requires a PC.

A word of warning, if you try out the new Google search interface you will be stuck with it even if you go back to the old URLs, google.com/m or google.com/xhtml. There is a way to get the old search back, go to the new Search Settings page, at the bottom of the screen you will see "You're using the new Google Mobile. (Stop)" Click on Stop to switch back.

Content: Usability:

source: Dennis from WapReview.com

Labels: google, onesearch, search

LG Electronics has signed a deal with Google to preinstall Google apps on at least 10 new handsets that will ship throughout North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007. More than just have its software pre-installed on the handsets Google will help LG market the LG-Google handsets, which should give them a boost in sales. The two companies plan to extend their collaboration to develop a digitized home, indicating a fairly strong relationship.
The handsets will have one-click access to Google search via an icon in the application menu, Google Maps for Mobile, Gmail for Mobile and Blogger Mobile.

source: MoCoNews

Labels: google, lg

Mobile search is one of the most focusing targets for Google. Base on users' feedbacks, they have improved their old mobile search (released in 2001) to the newer one which increase the power of their famous search engine.

According to the Official Google Blog, their new mobile search will enable users to:

• Get the information they care about, right from their homepage.
• Get the answer they want with an absolute minimum of clicks.
• Get to the results that best fit what they're looking for.

Labels: google, mobile, search

Isabel Aguilera, the head of Google’s Spanish and Portuguese operations, has said that engineers in the company are working on a mobile phone to “extend the information society in developing economies”, notes Phonescoop pointing to Noticias. This appears separate from the rumors of a Google phone, with the engineers working on the program in the 20 percent time Google gives them to work on their own projects.

Source: MoCoNews

Labels: google, phone