GOOGLE DREAMZ

Vodafone is accepting pre-orders for the HTC Magic, the first full touch-screen phone to run Google's Android operating system.
The latest “Google phone” is available for pre-order ahead of its release next month.
The HTC Magic will be available exclusively on the Vodafone network and runs Android, an operating system for mobile phones designed by Google and a host of partners to make it easier to surf the web and carry out complex computing tasks on mobile devices.

Butler brought back in a bid for more search market share !
Web search engine Ask.com is bringing back its butler Jeeves in a bid to challenge Google in the search engine stakes. It was back in 2006 when askjeeves.com changed to the simpler moniker ask.com. Since then, the search market has seen near dominance by Google, who has around 90 per cent of the market, with others like Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask scrapping for the other 10 per cent.

Google's dominance in Web search is growing and may grow even more thanks to a change in underlying technology it uses to present search results. So much for Steve Ballmer's ambitions for Microsoft.
Google had a 63.7 percent share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, up 0.4 percentage points from February, and above the 63.5 percent level that was its previous high. Meanwhile, Yahoo saw its U.S. search share inch downward in March to 20.5 percent, from 20.6 percent in February. I suppose we need to mention that Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market increased by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 8.3 percent in March.

Clouds, clouds, clouds. Everyone talks about Google-style cloud computing — software as services off in the Internet “cloud” — as the future.
But while cloud computing is a marketing triumph, new research from asserts that trying to adopt the cloud model would be a money-losing mistake for most large corporations. The research is being presented at a symposium on Wednesday afternoon, sponsored by the McKinsey & CompanyUptime Institute, a research and advisory organization that focuses on improving the efficiency of data centers.

In a positive sign for the Google-backed operating system, Android will soon find its way to a set-top box made by Motorola.
The device, which is called "au Box," is being made for the Japanese Internet service provider KDDI, and it will be capable of playing DVDs and CDs, transfer music and video to a mobile device, and rip and store files. The box will likely be able to surf the Web with Android's Chome-like browser. The au Box doesn't have a definite release date, and it's unclear if it will be released in other markets.

They say the Internet is vast; and it truly is. With seemingly limitless enthusiasm, humanity marches forever onwards (and hopefully upwards as well, though unfortunately not in many cases) in its quest and thirst for knowledge and information. A well known saying is that knowledge is power and today knowledge can be found quicker and easier than ever before, through the use of the Internet. This empowerment of the people is a good and positive thing in most cases, though it can also be a sad testament to the state of some minds when this bright tool is used for more shadowy reasons. But because the Internet is so large and all-encompassing in its subject matter, there can often be a where do I start moment that holds us up. It allows us to momentarily consider that all the information in the world is of no use at all, if it cannot be sorted for our convenience and accessed for our scrutiny and subsequent use. This is where search engines come in of course, without which the Internet would probably not be used half as much as it is, certainly not by the general populace at least. Of the hundreds of such useful names out there, the biggest, most used and best known is of course, Google.

Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone ... denied widespread rumors that its acquisition by Google Inc. is imminent. The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog site TechCrunch, citing two anonymous sources, reported that the companies were engaged in "late stage negotiations."
It can't be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided ... to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license ... Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.

Google Suggest is a Google Search feature that automatically completes a search query with suggested phrases as you type in the Google search text field. Suggestions are meant to be helpful--but they can sometimes be funny, bizarre, or downright creepy. We initially got lassoed into playing around with this Google feature when we noticed that select search queries were generating inexplicably odd auto-complete suggestions. The phrase “What would Jesus..." generated the suggestion "What would Jesus do for a Klondike bar?" First, though, a bit of background. Google says that its software makes suggestions based on complex popularity algorithms that are designed to predict the queries you are most likely to want to submit. Suggestions appear in a drop-down menu; and next to the suggested search phrases are green numbers approximating how many search results each particular query would return. Google Suggest works with current versions of the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Chrome Web browsers. If you find the service annoying, you can turn it off by visiting your Google Preferences page. We spent way too much time playing with this feature. We were hoping Google Suggest might shed some light on important questions such as “The meaning to life is...” But what we found instead was "The meaning to life is Christopher Walken." Who knew? What follows are funny and sometimes insightful answers to random questions. For more fun with Google services, check out: -- The Strangest Sights in Google Earth -- Strangest Sights in Google Street View -- Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes And as the search results pictured above suggest, when you've had your fill of fun with Google, you can turn your attention to "fun with goats."

In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.
Microsoft can't be happy, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share. The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.

Despite the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 two weeks ago, Microsoft continues to lose browser market share to Mozilla's Firefox.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, the global market share for all versions of Internet Explorer slipped from 67.44% in February to 66.82% in March.
Firefox's global market share meanwhile rose from 21.77% to 22.05% during the same period.
Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Chrome browser and Apple's Safari browser also showed small gains, the former rising from 1.15% to 1.23% and the latter rising from 8.02% to 8.23% from February through March.

Google's street-level pictures are giving the cash-strapped the chance of a virtual holiday. Martin Hickes reports.
Fifty years ago, many Yorkshire folk thought themselves lucky to have a two-week summer break in Scarborough.
But following the "loadsamoney" 80s spending spree, the dot.com boom and latterly the rise of the low-cost airlines, the average traveller has been able to enjoy slightly more exotic climes at cut-down prices.
But given the worst credit crunch in living memory, those looking for a cheaper alternative are turning to the "virtual holiday".

A 15-year-old programming whiz from Iowa and his father have created the world's first YouTube music player, mining the site's extensive library of music videos free of charge.
David Nelson and his father, Mark, spent a year developing Muziic Player, a free downloadable player that allows users to organise, search, stream and create playlists from YouTube's catalogue of music clips. Since its worldwide launch last month, the player has been downloaded more than a million times, forcing them to add another server to handle the incoming requests for the player.

Google's YouTube will soon show short videos from a major U.S. television group while testing new advertising arrangements in hopes of generating revenue online.
The sports network ESPN will launch a YouTube channel next month, with Disney/ABC Television Group launching several channels in May, including ABC Entertainment, ABC News, ABC Family and a soap opera channel, according to the companies. Content will include short clips of ABC shows such as "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy."

It is probably too late for the established news media, but somewhere in the cloud could be salvation.
If there is a tech buzzword in the blighted economy right now, it has to be “cloud.”
The cloud — a.k.a., cloud computing — is the rapidly growing suite of software applications accessible by the Internet and residing in massive data centers around the country.
The cloud offers the possibility of shifting much if not all of a business’s computing needs — from hardware to software, email to databases — away from bricks and mortar and IT departments onto the shoulders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, IBM, and a dozen other big players.

Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive less important.
Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day. Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was nothing on it I cared about" that wasn't accessible on the Web, he says. Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online.

"Cloud computing" promises myriad benefits -- including cost savings on technology infrastructure and faster software upgrades -- for users ranging from small startups to large corporations. That's an auspicious future considering that not everyone agrees on exactly what cloud computing is or what it can do. Despite the ethereal name, in its broadest terms, the concept of cloud computing is fairly simple.
Rather than running software on its own computers -- "on premises" as the terminology goes -- a company buys access to software on computers operated by a third party. Typically, the software is accessed over the Internet using only a web browser. As long as the software performs properly, it doesn't matter where the systems that run it are located. They are "out there somewhere" -- in "the cloud" of the Internet. Since companies tend to purchase access to this remote software on a subscription basis, cloud computing is also often termed "software as a service."

Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen shares an interesting finding that goes against the wishes of content portals:
Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention..many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed. [source]
He cites couple of reasons for this -
The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment

Google's rumored possible interest in acquiring Twitter has the online world buzzing, and such a deal would have advantages for both companies. One big question, however, is how a Google acquisition of Twitter would affect Google rivals Microsoft and Yahoo as they attempt to gain market share in the search and online advertising arenas.
The online world has been positively abuzz with news of a potential Google acquisition of Twitter. While the blog TechCrunch has quoted sources as saying such a deal is imminent, others, such as BoomTown, say such talk is the purest speculation.