Google Maps just went indoors. Starting with Google Maps 6.0 for Android, users of Google Maps can now navigate inside of mapped locations such as airports, malls and IKEA stores. The program launches with selected partners, and any business owner can apply to have a floor plan included.
This is a key move for Google's mobile business, which up until now could only take you to the front door of the place for which you were searching. Google Maps on the desktop recently got 3D photo tours of small locations, an extension of Street View, but this is a bigger step. When Google Maps goes inside, Google can take you all the way from searching for something to holding it in your hand, advertising and data-gathering all the way.
Google has rescheduled the 2012 Google I/O developers' conference for June 27-29. It was initially announced for April 24-25. The event was immensely popular this year, and the new date allows it to be extended for three days instead of two. It will still take place at Moscone Center West in San Francisco as planned.
The announcement on the Google Code Blog also hints at a new application process for tickets to the conference. Instead of a mad rush for tickets, Google is going to test developers' "coding skills" when its "new application process opens in February." A Google spokesperson says that "the application process will test general programming skills, as opposed to product-specific knowledge. We're designing it so that every developer is given a fair shot at attending Google I/O, but don't expect it to be as involved as last year's Last Call for Google I/O."
Egyptians go to the polls today to vote in the first election since the ouster of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Egypt was a flashpoint in the so-called Arab Spring this year, a string of popular uprisings in which the Web and mobile technology played crucial and unprecedented roles. Google is celebrating this historic event with an election-day doodle on its Egypt's Google homepage.
Google has also launched an extensive Egyptian elections page full of info on candidates, major issues and polling stations. The information is provided by Egypt's Higher Elections Committee, but Google's page enhances the content with Google News, Maps and its other election tools. Google is building tools and programs to improve elections around the world, and this landmark election in Egypt is a storybook example of Web technology as a force for open and accountable government.
The catalog industry is a thriving business that all the big names in retail spend large sums of money on. Partly because my mother was once a lead copywriter for a prominent catalog, the holiday season has always been dominated by large stacks of retailers' reading material. With the digital era, those stacks of catalogs have disappeared but Google is making a concerted effort to aggregate all the prominent catalogs in one place for Android tablets and the iPad.
Google has released this year's version of Google Catalogs as an app for both iOS and Android. As we have seen over the Thanksgiving weekend, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, mobile commerce is exploding. Through partnerships with Google and others, large retailers are making sure they are not left in the dust.
The mobile platform wars are in full swing. Android and Apple dominate the landscape but a new report from VisionMobile says that there will be no clear winner in the battle for supremacy over the mobile market. Android controls the numbers, Apple controls the profits and everybody else is fighting for scraps and third place in the ecosystem.
Developers are the front line soldiers of the platform wars. "iOS and Android are winning not only by virtue of technological sophistication, but primarily by the strength of their application ecosystems," the VisionMobile report states. The "network effect" drives the ecosystem, more sales equals more developers and more applications which in turn drives more developers. We take a close look at the platform wars through VisionMobile's report below.
As the year winds down, Google has released some introspective blog posts about its changing nature. Today, it recapped the evolution of search in six minutes, describing the evolution of Google's core product from its breakout PageRank algorithm to its new real-time, local and social directions. It also published an illuminating timeline of the major changes to Google search.
Last week, Google fellow Amit Singhal, who appears in today's video, published some thoughts on personalization, which has been Google's most publicized and controversial change to its core product. Google's in a thoughtful mood about its recent changes. As Vic Gundotra made clear at Web 2.0 this fall, the company's whole identity is shifting. Here are four major trends in how Google search has evolved over time.
The social web is a well reported topic within the media today, and for good reason. We are in a transitional change with how we communicate with each other online, how brands reach consumers and how organisations market to their audience. We are undoubtedly immersed in the technology age, and our lives, the way we interact with others, is changing totally.
The monumental success of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's world leading social platform, has enticed brands, consumers, investors alike, and the world is continually awaiting for that 'next big thing'. A likely reason therefore that the majority of news stories, magazine articles and blog posts on Google's latest foray into the social web repeatedly draw up comparisons to Zuckerberg's global giant.
Once upon a time, Google had a pretty nasty reputation among traditional media companies, many of whom lampooned the search giant for promoting piracy and even "stealing" content outright. Much of the criticism was overblown, but it remains true that there is copyright-infringing content on the Internet and Google is may people's gateway to the Internet.
Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.
Several years ago, three location check-in based startups stormed the tech world. Since then, Foursquare has taken off to somewhere near 15 million users, Gowalla has essentially died and the third and always the little sister, SCVNGR, has quietly maintained. Now two million with two million users and some strong brand partnerships, SCVNGR is not going to fade away. Will it thrive though? That remains to be seen.
The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone's type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company's new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.
The President of the United States has just joined Google+. Well, sort of. This new page is actually a Google+ brand page for the Obama For America 2012 campaign. Republican presidential nominees Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul had already joined Google+, and while none of them are doing anything spectacular, they did join.
There is one politician that Obama could learn a few things from: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been using Google+ since July 14, 2011, and his presence is frank and personal. Viral videos of Bernie Sanders spread like wildfire across the Internet, especially in progressive politics circles.
The fact that Obama waited until just today to join Google+ and launched as a brand instead of a person is troubling, and further solidifies the idea that he is just that - a brand. So now that Barack's on Google+, will he actually hangout?
