Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Next year will prove to be an interesting year for a lot of vendors. Market leaders like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft will face their greatest challenges and strongest opportunities, new arrivals will undoubtedly have us wondering why we hadn’t come up with a similar billion dollar idea, and in the U.S., we’ll likely have an election whose outcome will be controlled by computers for the first time. Granted, some of the concerns coming this decade will likely cause all of this to be trivial by comparison, but let’s look ahead to 2012 anyway.

Analysis – Google is rumored to be paying at least $1 billion in advertising revenue, or royalties, depending on your view, to Mozilla over the next three years. This investment may seem over the top, especially since Mozilla has seen its market position weaken in 2011 and since we have seen plenty of public Mozilla firing poisoned darts in the direction of Google’s Chrome team. However, even at a billion dollars, it’s a good idea for Google to have Mozilla on its side. It appears that Mozilla has played its cards very well.

The Kindle Fire has showcased that a product well differentiated with a strong user experience running Android has the potential to challenge the iPad’s shipment numbers. However, Amazon had to create a unique Amazon controlled version of Android to make the Fire approach its potential. Google may not do what is necessary to achieve a similar result.

Google has just been granted a patent that describes a possible switch from a car that is driven by a human to an autonomous driving mode. The patent was written by a group of engineers that includes the winners of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

The development process of Chrome and the way Google has scaled the release of Chrome in an apparently effortless way to hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of users is one of the big success stories in software development these days. A Chrome developer recently gave some insight in this release process and the pillars that allow Google to succeed with a model that causes so much headache for other software companies.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced that the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, launched by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, have given half a million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia.

Google unveiled preliminary information about its new Aura window manager for Chrome and Chrome OS, which had us guessing for the past half year. Now we know that Aura will be the next big milestone for the browser as it transitions to a hardware-accelerated user interface that will enable much richer visuals than Chrome does today.

Intel and Google recently reaffirmed their relationship at the Intel Developers Forum by announcing they will optimize Android for the Atom platform. While some believe that Intel needs Google more than the other way around in order to compete against the ARM onslaught, I disagree.

Video gaming is a big topic for web browsers as well as HTML5, but there are few enthusiast gamers who are taking this scenario serious. Can a Joystick API and a 3D Client change the perception?

Google announced a paid version of its Translate API, a commercial version of its translation service that can be used by commercial software developers and businesses that require a permanent translation service within their organization. The cost of the service may prompt an entire industry to reevaluate the pricing of its services.

Lucky students are reporting that they now have free access to Google Fiber, a project that aims to provide ultra-fast Internet access to up to 500,000 people in the U.S. We have seen reports of download speeds of more than 500 Mbps so far. AT&T, are you paying attention?

I have spent much of this week with a large number of peer analysts in the mobile space. As you can imagine much of the conversation is on Google’s purchase of Motorola and consensus appears to be that you can’t trust Google. This appears to be a recurring theme, because the poor OEMs are constantly blindsided by that company and they are particularly incensed that Google would buy one of their competitors.