Google has announced that it is to end support for its cross-platform communication tool Wave, BBC News has reported.Wave, a real time collaboration and communication tool launched only last year, has been axed due to a lack of user take-up. It was developed by brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the developers behinds Google’s popular maps feature.“Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked.

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects,” stated Urs Holzle, a representative of Google in the company blog.

While addressing a tech conference in Lake Tahoe, California, Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged that Wave was a failure, but stated that Google is always ready to innovate and experiment without fear of failure.He said that the company believes in celebrating its successes as well as its failures.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine behemoth Google has announced the revamped version of its popular online document editing and creating tool, Google Docs, which will now come with enhanced online collaboration features that will allow 50 people to work together on the same document.

In a post on the official Google Docs Blog, written by Google Docs Product Manager, Jonathan Rochelle, Google previewed a newly revamped Google Docs, which will come with an improved spreadsheet editor and collaborative drawing editor.

The company, which supports all things open source, also warned that the new and improved editors do not support the Gears technology, which allows offline editing of the documents. But the company also reassured that offline editing will be soon enabled by the means of HTML 5 web technology.

Commenting on the enhanced features of Google Docs, which has been targeting other enterprise software competitors, Rochelle wrote that “you can now see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits. We also added another popular feature from spreadsheets: sidebar chat, so you can discuss documents as you work on them with colleague.”

For now, the new Google Docs features will be available in preview versions over the next few weeks with no clear details about the actual launch date of the functions.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

The New York Times has claimed that internet search and advertising company Google, is planning to take on Apple’s iPad tablet device by launching its own Android based tablet device, which, according to ‘reliable sources’ will a ‘reader with computing capabilities.’

According to the NYT article, which highlighted Apple’s potential competitors in the tablet device market, Google’s Chief Executive Officer Eric Schimdt, who had once openly praised Steve Jobs for his genius, confided the company’s plans to some friends in an L.A party. Sources reported that Schimdt let it slip that the company is working on its own version of the iPad, which will run on its popular Android operating system.

Meanwhile, the paper also reported that sources working in the top secret project claimed that Google was operating in ‘Stealth Mode’ in order to make deals with several publishers and media houses to provide content for the device.

This would not be first time Google tries to enter Apple’s domain. One time partners, Apple and Google, had a falling out when the latter introduced its Android operating system which directly challenged Apple’s iPhone smartphone device.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google, the California based company behind the popular Android OS, has acquired mobile visual search technology maker Plink, making it its first UK takeover ever. The acquisition is a part of Google’s plan to acquire at least one company every month.

Plink, which was founded by Mark Cummins and James Philbin, is the creator of PlinkArt, a visual search app which is designed to analyse and recognise paintings of famous artists and allows users to share the photo with their friends and even buy a poster version of the art work.

With the acquisition of Plink, Google will look to expand is Google Goggles visual service, which allows users to search via clicking pictures from their Android smartphones.

Interestingly, according to the developers of the app, PlinkArt had seen 50,000 downloads within 6 weeks of being launched .The company was also said to be in talks with several major art galleries and museums for a possible partnership.

Commenting on the acquisition by Google, the developers of the app, who will be working with the Google Goggles team, wrote on the official PlinkArt blog that “Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google is set to use site speed more prominently in its overall assessment of how websites will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) according to a blog post published on Friday.

Its authors, Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google Search Quality Team, say that Google will include site speed as a new signal in their search engine algorithms.

Improving site speed creates a virtuous circle; faster speed improves user stickiness, which in turn causes them to spend more time on the website as they hop from one link to another.

This not only drives traffic significantly up but also, according to Oreilly, reduces operating costs and the chance of them going elsewhere to get either services or news.

Currently Speed will only count towards a small percentage of search results. Both Google execs reckon that less than 1 percent at this stage and it will only apply to visitors searching in English from Google.com.

There are already questions however over the use of speed to determine whether or not a site should rank higher than another. Google is quick to point out that speed will never rank higher than the relevance of a page which forms the cornerstone of Google’s Pagerank.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Despite numerous attempts by Google to control the damage caused by its controversial privacy settings in its newly launched social networking tool Buzz, it has again been targeted by a lawsuit yet again.

This time from one Barry Feldman of New York, whose team of lawyers has accused Google off violating Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Federal Wiretap Act and Federal Stored Communications Act.

Google’s Buzz social networking tool, which has been integrated with its Gmail email service, was greeted with heavy criticism after it was found that social networking tool was in serious violation of every possible privacy law in the country.

Buzz, without bothering to take users’ permission, had automatically created ‘follower’ lists using people’s most frequent and recent email recipients. It went a bit further when it started to display private user information including recently emailed users and other sensitive information.

The latest lawsuit, which was filed by the New Yorker at the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, claims that “Google Buzz made private data belonging to Gmail users publicly available without the users’ knowledge or authorization.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google’s controversial online book project, Google Books, has been slapped with yet another lawsuit, this time from the American Society of Media Photographers.

The entity claims that Google had been scanning and uploading their works without seeking permission or paying any fee.

In the lawsuit, the photographer’s community is seeking compensation for the obvious copyright infringement committed by Google when it scanned their photographic works.

Interestingly, ever since trouble began for Google Books, the photographic community had remained surprisingly quiet as everyone even remotely related to the literary world, went ahead and sued the company.

However, it was a matter of time when the photographic association came out with their own lawsuit, since they were restrained from taking part in the $125 million court settlement between Google and writers.

Expressing his views on the lawsuit filed by the association, Eugene Mopsik, the executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers, said in a statement that “If there is going to be a system developed to manage the compensation for these types of books, we felt visual artists need to be represented. We have been totally excluded. We want a seat at the table.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google has announced that, come April 5th, the company’s Buzz social networking tool will get a new privacy reset function, which will ask the users to confirm or change their current Buzz privacy settings.

Buzz, which was launched by Google as a Gmail social networking tool, did not receive a warm welcome from Gmail users, who were forced to share their private information with strangers before Google corrected the controversial privacy setting.

The scandal caused by Buzz prompted some US Congress to urge privacy regulators to investigate Buzz and put an end to it.

However, Google soon realising its peril, had come forward and apologised for the blunders committed with Buzz and had promised to keep correcting the enumerable faults in Buzz.

Todd Jackson, the product manager for Buzz, commenting on the new privacy setting, wrote on a blog post that “Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realised we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience. Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us.”

Meanwhile, Gmail users who were earlier against the idea of Buzz, have come out and praised Google for making the changes, which will not only help Buzz get the desired user base but also put a stop to any legal action regarding privacy concerns over Buzz.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Internet market research company comScore has released fresh mobile phone usage data which indicates that smartphones based on Google’s Android OS are eating into Apple’s and Microsoft’s smartphone market share in the US.

The market share report released by the research firm disclosed that Android OS had increased the highest out of the all the smartphone OS present in the market and ended up gaining a market share of 9 percent, which comes out to be an increase of 5.2 percent since November 2009.

Meanwhile, Research In Motion, the company behind the highly popular BlackBerry Curve smartphone, managed to clock a 1.3 percent increase in its smartphone share from November 2009 to February 2010, acquiring a US market share of 42.1 percent.

On the other hand, Apple, which just launched its iPad tablet device, was seen nursing the 0.1 percent drop its market share since November 2009 to February 2010, thanks to the rising popularity of Android based software devices.

Technology pundits credit the rise in popularity of Android based devices to the Motorola Droid smartphone, which is by far the most advanced Android based smartphone in the market when it came out although it has since been superseded by others like the HTC Desire.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

The government of Vietnam has refused to acknowledge the ‘groundless’ accusations made by Google’s Neel Mehta and McAfee Chief Technical Officer George Kurtz.

They had both hinted that the government was involved in cyber attacks on blogs and websites belonging to protesters of a controversial mining project in the country.

The blog post made by Neel Mehta, who is a member of Google’s security team, suggested that the Vietnamese government had used a malware, in the form a Vietnamese language keyboard driver, which was then used to hack into the websites and systems of unsuspecting activists.

However, the Vietnamese government broke its silence by declaring that the claims made by Google and McAfee were baseless.

Commenting on the allegation made by the companies, Nguyen Phuong Nga, a government spokesperson said in a statement that “We have on many occasions clearly expounded our view on issues relating to access to and use of information and information technology, including the Internet.”

Interestingly, the Vietnamese cyber attacks were discovered by the two companies during their investigation into last years sophisticated cyber attack on Google which was said to be originated from China. The attack had prompted Google to pack its bags and leave the country for good.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com