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Google Streeview Launches Best Streets Of Britain Contest
Search engine giant Google has invited UK residents for a Google Street View poll, in which the general public will be asked to vote for Britain’s best street in three categories: Best Foodie Street, Best Fashion Street and Britain’s Most Picturesque Street.
According to a post on the Google Official blog, Britain’s Best Foodie Street should be the one which offers a ‘unique’ blend of cultural and regional items available in different prices. The street should comprise of elegant restaurants, cafe and food stalls.
On the other hand, Google describes Britain’s best fashion street as ‘an eclectic mix of boutique and high street, designer and high street for all clothing tastes and ages. The winning street should satisfy both bargain-hunters and label-lovers.’
Britain’s most picturesque street, according to Google, should be ‘uniquely British’ and good to look at. The street can be vibrant in color, architecturally well-designed, diverse and full of character.
The Telegraph has reported that according to the on-going voting trend, New College Lane in Oxford, Main Street, Tobermory in Mull and Royal Crescent in Bath are the top contenders for the title of Britain’s most picturesque street.
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Google Buys DocVerse For $25 Million, Has Microsoft Office In Sight
In an attempt to compete with Microsoft in the online file editing services market, search engine Google has purchased DocVerse, which allows Microsoft Office files to be edited online.
DocVerse, which was founded in 2007 by former Microsoft employees Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, was purchased by Google in a bid to strengthen its footing in online editing and collaboration tool market.
Google will integrate DocVerse technology with its Google Docs service, which allows users to work on Microsoft files.
Commenting on the $25 million acquisition, Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for Google Apps, said in a statement that “With DocVerse, we may experience some of the benefits of working from the Internet using traditional applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.”
However, software giant Microsoft was not far behind in acknowledging the take over, said that the fact that Google was trying acquire solutions that helped users work on Microsoft Office files, proved that the public wanted to use Microsoft Office for creating documents and slides and again reinforces the global acceptance enjoyed by Microsoft’s flagship software.
DocVerse, which raised around $1.5 million in venture capital, apart from offering software that allowed users to edit Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files online, also allowed them to post comments on the document online and let other users see their comments.
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Google Criticises Own SEO In Report Card
Google has issued a comprehensive report that gauges the search engine optimisation (SEO) on a number of distinct properties, and estimated that it was actually falling short on many of them.
Dubbed as “SEO Report Card”, the report has been tailored to bolster up the user experience as well as visibility of some of its properties.
However, on the plus side, the search giant asserted that it will use the report card to significantly spruce up its SEO system, as well as to assist others by sharing the data with them.
The report encompasses 100 products from Google, and the company has said it is already working on a follow-up report that will involve international localisations.
Of the items on the radar, one of the most notable failures for the company lies in its ‘search result presentation’ where it managed to score 33/100 or even lower in three distinct categories, with the category “title tag and format length” being the lowest.
In addition to that, the search giant also said it needs to upgrade its destination sites images of logos led. The report pointed out that most of these logos were directed to pages where they were not supposed to
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Google Lends Support To HTC In Apple Legal Tussle
Search engine giant Google has made it unsurprisingly clear that it will be backing HTC against Apple as the latter has filed an unexpected lawsuit against the former for infringing on 20 of its patents pertaining to the core of HTC’s portfolio, smartphones.
A Google spokesperson told influential tech blog Techcrunch that “We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it”
The growing importance and success of Android-based smartphones have been watched with unease from the Apple headquarters in Cupertino to a point where there were claims that Steve Jobs himself said that Google was looking to kill the iPhone.
A recent report, which showed that Android marketshare in the US grew while that of the iPhone dipped, further cemented the fear that Android will be the biggest threat to the iPhone in 2010.
Google’s growing ambitions has put it squarely in the path of Apple. It launched a web browser, a mobile phone and is preparing for a new operating system, Chrome OS, by the end of the year.
Apple has responded by buying a mobile advertising specialist, Quattro Wireless, and could, if it wanted to enter the search business, by acquiring what remains of Yahoo or entering a strategic alliance with Microsoft, something that would seriously p*ss Google.
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US Town To Rename Itself To Google For One Month
Topeka, a town in the State of Kansas, US, has unofficially changed its name to Google for the month of March in an attempt to secure a position in Google’s ‘Fibre for Communities’ program in which the search engine giant will roll out its fibre optic broadband connection to short listed cities at competitive prices.
In a recent post on the official Google blog, the company had announced that it plans to choose one city in order to test a new generation of broadband internet services, which according to sources, will allow users to access the internet at speeds 100 times faster then their present connections and enable data transfers at a speed of 1Gbps.
Commenting on the promotional gimmick, Topeka Mayor William W. Bunten, said in a statement that “I thought it was fun and would be interesting and would make us a little different from some of the other cities, Hopefully, the people at Google have a sense of humour.”
Google had asked US cities to file their requests before March 26th if they are interested in participating in the program and it seems that Topeka has some serious competition from cities like San Jose and Austin, Texas.
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Google Buys Picnik To Offer Web-based Picasa
Google has announced the acquisition of the award winning online photo editing service Picnik as the internet giant ups the pace at which it snaps up promising startups.
The deal is Google’s eighth in seven month and bring Picnik’s CEO, Jonathan Sposato, back to the search giant. Sposato will overview the integration of the service with Google’s own photo service, Picasa.
The Seattle-based five-year old company alongside its 20 employees will be incorporated in Google’s Picasa department and is likely to become an even bigger threat to other online photo services like Photoshop.com.
Brian Axe, who is Google’s product management director, said in a company blog post that “Until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer” before adding that Google had acquired “one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud”.
Amongst the recent purchases made by Google are social search service Aardvark, email startup reMail and mobile ad network Admob.
Google’s CEO confirmed earlier this year that it will be buying one small company per month and make one big acquisition every year or so.
As with previous acquisitions, Google has pledged continued support for existing individual customers as well as corporate ones, some of which includes Google’s direct competitors like Facebook or Flickr.
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Google Updates Buzz Again To Tackle Privacy Concerns
Google has responded promptly over the weekend to settle down the flow of criticisms surrounding its new social network Buzz, extending apologies for some of its features that were extensively deemed threatening to the privacy of its users.
In an effort to mollify the annoyed users, the search engine giant has announced on a blog post that it would be making significant alterations in Buzz settings to ramp up its privacy attributes.
At the centre of the criticism was the Buzz’s capability to set up social network for the users automatically on the basis of their email exchange with other s and chat contacts.
This feature inadvertently made public the user’s social network list, thereby exposing his/her private email contacts publicly under the name of being “friends” list.
Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, asserted that instead of connecting the users automatically, the social networking service would now suggest a list of the people to its new users they might like to follow.
Additionally, he further extended apologies for the annoyance caused by the service so far and vowed to improve it for good.
Along the same line, he wrote: “We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so.”
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Google Slashing Nexus One Upgrade Costs By $100
It might be too early for Google to feel the heat but somehow, the search engine giant and T-Mobile have decided to cut the price of the Nexus One by $100 and refunding that amount to existing customers who upgraded early.
From now on, those looking for upgrade will be charged only $279 after a number of so-called early adopters complained about the relatively high price of the handset. $100 rebate cheques will be sent to those who ordered the phones.
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Google-Backed VigLink To Launch Affiliate Links Scheme
VigLink has announced that it had received significant financial backing from a couple of renowned venture capitalists, including Google Ventures, First Round Capital, as well as from some other eminent technology entrepreneurs.
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Mulling About The Google Nexus Two Smartphone
The Nexus One has only been launched a few days ago in the US (not yet in the rest of the world) but we are already looking ahead for the Nexus Two – assuming that Google will stick to the Nexus moniker after the Dick family is going after them.
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