Google Launches Android 6.0 as Marshmallow

Google has formally introduced the official Android 6.0 SDK along with the final preview of Android M, now being presented as Marshmallow. In his remarks about the name of the latest release, Android product manager, Jamal Eason, explained that “whether you like them straight out of the bag, roasted to a golden brown exterior with a molten centre, or in fluff form, who doesn’t like marshmallows?”

Apart from its traditionally unique name, there are a ton of new and unique features in the new update that were promised in the launch of the M Developer Preview at Google I/O. The changes include, but are not limited to, updates to the Fingerprint API for better error reporting, fingerprint enrolment and greater reliability, along with an update to the permissions user interface. In addition to that, the latest version of android will also feature Doze, which is supposed to reduce background app activity when the device is inactive in order to provide a longer battery life, and a USB-C connector that aims to charge devices three to five times faster than current chargers.

Google Eyeing Mobile Payment Company, Softcard, Takeover

Several sources have claimed that Google is interested, and is most likely, to buy the mobile payment company, SoftCard. The mobile payment service is currently in collaboration with majority of the top mobile service providers in the United Sates, including AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc.

Softcard has Windows and Android compatibility and also allows its users to make payments via various payment terminals. The company initially entered the market with the name of ISIS but for obvious reasons it had to change its name and went with SoftCard.

How Close is Google's 'Autonomous Driver-less Car' From Reality

Perhaps Google is one of many high-status companies investing large lumps of money on the idea of ‘autonomous driverless cars’ which can drive themselves. If you look up Google, several other major automakers and U.S. government agencies like DARPA and the U.S. Army have been effectively running related research projects. But it is Google who has brought some reality to the idea and is now putting  all-hands-on-deck on its project.

This Tuesday, September 25, 2012, California became the third state of the U.S., following Nevada and Florida, to sign a legislation which legally gives permission to Google for testing it driverless cars on the state's roads. Nevada has already granted an official permission in June 2011, whereas Florida did so in April, 2012. Similar legislations are soon expected to be drawn up in Hawaii and Oklahoma as well.

Before all this in March 2011, the Google engineer who led the research which brought this advancement to light today, Sebastian Thrun, gave an aspiring highlight of his project in a TED presentation which is worth watching. He mentioned his primary purpose was to save the lives of those millions of people from all over the world who have faded due to numerous traffic accidents, also the case of his friends when he was 18.

Chinese Warns That Google Could Hurt Itself by Making False Accusations

It was stated against Google Inc. in the Monday edition of state-run newspaper of China, largely influenced by the Chinese Communist Party, that the latest allegations of cyber hack attacks being originated from China were totally driven by politics. It further straight forwardly warned the Internet Search Giant that if such activates were not stopped, ultimately its own business might suffer. The article in the People’s Daily newspaper mentioned that "Google's accusations against China are fictitious and have ulterior motives and sinister intentions."

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Google Inc. was largely accused of attempting to create disputes between China and the U.S., and intentionally trying to obstruct the cooperation between both the countries to fight cybercrime. It was officially announced by Google last week that it has finally traced the origin of the cyber spying hack attacks, launched in its emailing services, to be near the eastern city of Jinan in China. It was alleged that these spying hack attacks were targeted to victimize hundreds of users of Gmail, specially the U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists. China has been extremely straight forwarded in this regard and refuted every allegation made, blaming it to be related to these attacks in one way or the other. The article further stated that "Google should not be drawn into international political conflicts and serve as a tool for political games, because one fears that if international political winds shift it might be sacrificed and suffer in the marketplace."

China Claims the hacking Allegations to Be “Unacceptable” And Promotes the Idea of International Conference

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The defense minister of China, Liang Guanglie, clearly refuted all the allegations made against China blaming it to be responsible for the Internet attacks on several foreign targets. Moreover, he also seconded the call of US and Britain to hold international talks to tighten the international cyber-security. He stated that "It is hard to attribute the real source of attacks and we need to work together to make sure that this security problem won't be a problem." He was speaking in a security forum in Singapore, when he declared that "actually in China we have also suffered quite a wide range and frequency of cyber-attacks." He added that "the Chinese government attaches importance also to cyber-security and stands firmly against all kinds of cyber-crimes."

China is being accused largely by the United States, Canada and several other nations, who allege that the Chinese government is backing these online hack attacks on their government agencies and companies. Just last week, Google Inc. allegedly exposed a cyber-spying attack supposedly initiated from somewhere in China, aimed to spy on the Gmail accounts of senior US officials, military personnel, journalists and Chinese political activists. Even the U.S. government stated on Friday that it is concerned regarding the Google's accusations towards Beijing, though the Chinese government still asserts that all the allegations, blaming it, are completely "unacceptable".

RIM Keeps Losing Its Market Share to Apple, Google

According to the report of a recently conducted research, the analysts have declared that Research In Motion has laid off even more of its market share to the giants, Apple and Google, in the extremely competitive U.S. smartphone market than ever before. Now that the two mobile phone giants are attempting to cut price targets, it has raised even more concerns for the BlackBerry maker. Even this Friday, the shares of RIM kept on declining, as the research firm stated that the market share of company has been reducing constantly since three months now.

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Meanwhile the rapidly grown Android platform of Google has peaked up to a 36.4 percent shares in its value and Apple's iPhone increased to a 26 percent, whereas, RIM kept falling down and has lessened down to 25.7 percent from its 30.4 percent share last quarter. These statistics were published in the report of comScore, whereas it has lead to a drop of RIM’s position from second to third in the market. This on-going struggle of RIM is very much unlikely to get easier any soon, the upcoming new iCloud service of Apple is anticipated to cause even more troubles for RIM, predicts Sterne Agee analyst, Shaw Wu.

The shares of RIM, who was once the leader in the corporate smartphone market, have almost lost all of their value since Apple's iPhone and Google's Android software completely transformed the whole sector. The shares of RIM have gone 3.7 percent lower on the Nasdaq at $38.93, which is the first time they ever went below $40 since March 2009. Many analysts claim this downfall of RIM to be aided by its poor price targeting in stock citing concerns, increasing competition and uncertainty in the timings of launch of new product.

The new BlackBerry Bold, a touchscreen model of RIM, was actually announced to be released in "summer," i.e. somewhere early May. But this mobile is not even reaches the stores until September yet, pointed out the tech blog Boy Genius.

Trend Micro Claims That Gmail Cyberattacks Also Targeted Hotmail and Yahoo Mail As Well

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It was revealed by Trend Micro, on Friday that the recent cyber attacks aimed to penetrate were not only aimed the online email services of Google, but also Microsoft and Yahoo! According to the investigation of a US federal agent, these Gmail spying efforts were successfully countered by Google. Trend Micro made another allegation that both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail were also subjected to the same hack attacks. The senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, Nart Villeneuve, stated in an online post that "there has been a variety of recent attacks on popular Webmail platforms." He declared that "in addition to Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have also been targeted. While the attacks appear to have been separately conducted, these have some significant similarities."

Google made the announcement this Wednesday that a cyber spying attack, which was allegedly originated from somewhere in China, was aimed to target the Gmail accounts of several senior US officials, military personnel, journalists, Chinese political activists, along with the officials of several Asian countries, mainly in South Korea. Eric Grosse, the head of Google’s security division stated in his official blog post that "We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing." He added that "The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords." Allegedly the campaign was technically traced back to be originated from Jinan, the capital of eastern Chinese province of Shandong. Grosse reported that these attacks were aimed to penetrate the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of Gmail users.

China Asserts US Is Culprit in Raising a Global 'Internet War'

Finally the Chinese military has responded to the on-going accusations made against it, it rather blamed U.S. on Friday, alleging that the U.S. is attempting to launch a worldwide "Internet war." China asserted that this internet war is aimed to target the Arab and other governments, and it is just framing China to be responsible for these Western hack attacks just to provide cover for its own actions. This declaration was made by the Chinese military academy scholars on Friday, as they pleaded to have an even tougher policing of Internet. These actions are a result of an accusation made by Google Inc., regarding hack attacks on its emailing system being originated from within China, aimed to acquired personal information by hacking the accounts of government officials, military personnel and political activists of the U.S.

Precisely Google stated that it has traced the hack attacks to be originated from the city of Jinan, which is actually also housing a military vocational school. China immediately denied the all the allegations, imposing that it was not responsibility for either of the two alleged attacks. It was written in one of the Communist Party-controlled China newspapers, Youth Daily: "Of late, an Internet tornado has swept across the world ... massively impacting and shocking the globe. Behind all this lays the shadow of America." This article was signed by both Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian, identified scholars at the Academy of Military Sciences, also mentioning that "Faced with this warmup for an Internet war, every nation and military can't be passive but is making preparations to fight the Internet war."

Twitter CEO Declares That 80 Percent of Advertisers Will Be Renewing Their Approach

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More than 80 percent of all the companies which advertise on Twitter Inc.’s microblogging website are going to renew their marketing approach, declared the company's CEO on Wednesday. Twitter is specifically working lately, on restructuring its advertising-based business. CEO Dick Costolo also mentioned that company's future is not only dependent on getting more prices for its shares in the initial public stock offering. Costolo was present at the D9 conference of All Things Digital when he claimed that Twitter's long-term success is not "correlated" with an IPO. Investors are always keeping a sharp eye on such fast-growing social networking companies like Twitter and Facebook, only hoping to become the next blockbuster IPOs. Just last month, the professional social networking site LinkedIn Corp made the decision of listing itself as a publicly-listed company and its shares literally doubled from the original offered price on the first day. Twitter has topped above 200 million registered user accounts, allowing them to constantly update with 140-character long short messages.

Just this Wednesday, CEO Costolo unraveled the latest feature of the company which makes it easier for the users to post photos directly from their Twitter homage along with an additional enhanced search. Costolo asserted that Twitter Inc. hosts an estimated 600 advertisers, which is a steep rise from previous 150 advertisers in 2010. Even though Twitter is boosting up and restructuring its advertising business, Costolo made it clear that Twitter is not doing this under pressure for better revenues at all. He stated that "we don't need to optimize for short-term revenue."

Google Expects to Counter Facebook’s Superiority with Its New “+1” Recommendation Tool

Google has enrolled its “+1” feature to the World Wide Web on 1^st June, 2011. Google Inc expects that all major websites will adopt its new feature in respect to its gigantic search engine, as this new recommendation tool will enhance that search engine to display better online content and ads. Google has been using this "+1" recommendation button in its own official websites, like Google blogs etc, since two months from now, but the feature is now expanded to all other publishers on the web as of this Wednesday.

Analyst’s claim that this new +1 feature is quite akin to Facebook’s revolutionary "Like" button, which is now one of the world’s most integrated share features on almost every website on the web. The “+1” button will allow the users to recommend any content on the web, like articles, photos, products, videos, songs or anything else of that sort, to their Google friends. This new tool will also allow Google to collect more personal information of its users, as it is beneficial for either Google or Facebook, to gain this information for providing their users with more related online adverts generating them immense revenue.

Facebook is always getting more inside and personal information regarding its users as they spend most of their time sharing their thoughts, photos and links on the website. This strength of Facebook is very troublesome for Google as this personal information of Facebook users, which are more than 500 million users, is not even remotely shared with Google's search engine. Former CEO of Google Inc., Eric Schmidt, admitted that ever growing popularity of Facebook is a great threat for Google, while he was giving an interview on Tuesday at the D: All Things Digital conference. Schmidt confessed that his powerlessness to counteract Facebook four years ago was one of the biggest regret of his decade-long career.

Hence now the current CEO of Google Inc., Larry Page, is doing all he can to develop the social networking aspect of Google’s Search Engine. This release of +1 button is also aimed to get the people’s review on their interest and gather more personal information as they highlight their recommendations in Google's influential search engine. The results with friend’s recommendation will only be visible to the search results of the users who have told Google to enable the new feature.

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These personal recommendations of Google will also be shared with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine, as Bing also continues collaborating with Facebook's Like button as part of a partnership.

China Highly Accused For By U.S. Officials for Being Responsible for Lockheed hacking

The widely growing suspicion of a citizen or an organization from China being responsible for the recent cyber attacks on Lockheed Martin has taken another turn, as more and more investigation is being done on the matter. One of the U.S. officials anonymously stated that "It's unclear at this point precisely who conducted the attacks, but given past history with these sorts of things, there's a strong tendency to look east. The Far East, in fact, and a country that not so long ago hosted the Olympics," from which it is clear that it’s China is being accused so far.

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The government and private sources working on the national cyber security control reported that forensic tracing of these attacks has revealed that it was aimed to target the Lockheed network temporarily. It was mentioned that the hackers have cleverly laid an elaborative false trail behind their tracks. Even then, according to another U.S. official working on this investigation, reported that the suspicion is largely getting stronger that the Lockheed hack was initiated from "someone in China."

Court Declares That EPIC and Other Sidelined Privacy Group Should Also Be Distributed the Money of Google’s Settlement

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It has been recently accepted by a U.S. judge that in respect to the previous decision of settling over Google's Buzz social network issue, an Internet privacy group, EPIC, was left with no proper reason, hence it is now rewarded $500,000. EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was previously ignored and not enlisted in the deal finalized by the court and implemented by the Federal Trade Commission last year. The case asserted that Buzz actually puts the privacy of Gmail users in great risk. Google finally made a settlement with FTC in March, 2011, and arranged to pay the fine to the listed independent privacy audit firms.

Last year, Google also had to agree to resolve another separately filed lawsuit, registered by a complaint from a Gmail user. A part of the deal negotiated and agreed at that time, stated that more than $6 million will be distributed among the major groups which were supporting Internet privacy issues. This list of the group did not include EPIC, which later took Google to court again and filed a legal claim against the announced decision. EPIC, along with few other gathered groups, asserted that Google has cleverly made the deal to channel most of the funds to the same groups which already "receive support from Google for lobbying, consulting, or similar services."

Google’s former CEO and Executive Chairman, Schmidt, Reviews Its Rivals Including Microsoft, Apple, Facebook at an Interview

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Eric Schmidt, Google’s co-founder and executive chairman, stated that his company is a member of “gang of four” kings leading the consumer technology. His list of these four kings including, except Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook hence it specifically ruled out Microsoft. He was giving an opening interview at the All Things D conference, held in southern California. Schmidt was very certain to ignore the world’s largest software company in the race of enterprise, he stated that Microsoft was “not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of consumers.” He explained that most of the profits of Microsoft are gained by the corporate sales and not from consumers. Schmidt did not even include the Xbox gaming system in the evaluation as he stated it was “not a platform at the computational level.”

Schmidt made it sound like a threat for Microsoft, that it should be afraid of Google and its enterprise space. Schmidt declared that we are all seeing “the death of IT as we know it,” as innumerable companies are taking the major step of moving their data from local servers to online servers. Microsoft is one of the great rivals of Google, in the race to release better cloud-based services in the market.

Schmidt had ambivalent words for Apple; Google has partnered Apple in some cases like search and maps, but it is also among its chief rivals in cases like mobile operating system. Schmidt admitted that Apple has very “beautiful products” in the market, but also stated that the company is a little too harshly on its iOS developers. He said, on the contrary, that the developers of Android relatively enjoy more freedom in the app development and releasing sector. He stated that “Apple’s model is the reverse of the Google model,” adding that “the Google model is, let the market decide.”

Google Claims That Chrome OS Will Be Exclusive to Chromebooks, At Least for Now

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The senior executives of Google Inc., claim that the company will keep on focusing its Chrome operating system mainly on the notebooks, and has no intentions to extend it on other tablets or to even merge it with popular Android software for smartphones in near future. Google has been eyeing the area of PC operating system in the industry, which is single handedly dominated by Microsoft Corp, whose Windows OS is powering almost 90% of the PCs worldwide.

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Google’s Chrome browser has gotten its users quickly doubled last year, as their senior V.P. of Chrome, Sundar Pichai, acclaim the user base has risen up to almost 160 million active members. This Tuesday Pichar was hosting a press conference at the Computex PC show in Taipei, when he stated that "Chrome OS is a computer model designed with various form factors in mind, but we are entirely focused on the notebook form factor for now. We have no other plans at this time," while replying to a question regarding the availability of Chrome for tablet PCs.

Google’s Chromebooks hosted by Chrome OS, are exclusively manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Acer Inc., and will be making their way in the market sometime this June. Chromebooks are direct challenge to Google’s rivals like Microsoft and Apple Inc. in computer operating systems. Google has recently inaugurated its first Chrome center in Taiwan, aimed to connect with more partners in the region, announced Pichai.

Facebook Users Constantly Fall For Fake News Articles Spreading Virally

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Many Facebook users were utterly stunned to read the news telling them that the last four minutes of the famed Harry Potter’s movie series is going to be divided and played in seven different movies.  It was obviously a fake prank by the notorious website, The Onion, which is popular for its fallacious headlines. The blog has been getting some very intense comments as the readers fall for the prank and believe the unbelievable news. Hudson Hongo, 24, is the humor writer who actually penned down this publication. Previously he wrote a humor article, titled ‘Planned Parenthood’ and was pretty surprised to see that many Facebook users were not able to recognize it as a joke. Hence he began poking around last week, and realized that there were a lot of public Facebook pages which were full of "Onion"-related confusions. He wrote on his personal blog that "When I found out that people were reacting the same way to many other Onion articles, I felt the phenomenon was worth documenting and put it up my blog."

One of the reader of his article commented: "Wow ... really? I guess it's one way to milk a franchise,” while another complained that "Eh, I've enjoyed the last few, but paying around $70 to basically see the end of one movie is a little sad." While responding to another such fake blog post titled "Abortionplex,” one user wrote "This is unbelievable," and another claimed that "THIS IS SICK ... really unbelievable that our taxes are paying for this!”

Google Adds a new tool of ‘Quick Flight Search’ To Its Powerful Search Engine

Google has just added yet another extremely useful tweak to its powerful search engine, this time making it considerably easier to hurriedly search flight information anytime. Now any user typing simple keywords like “flights from [a city] to [another city]” in the Google search engine will, in less than a second, a very concise and quickly display of a summarized version of all flight information, right on top of the results on the page.

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All the analysts who have tested this new tool of Google have declared it to be extremely helpful and successful. It was officially announced, and perhaps released, by Google on Friday through its Inside Search blog. All the analysts claim that the result of almost all major cities comes instantly and this feature ‘works like a charm.’

For Example, if a user types in Google Search: “flight LA SF”, it will instantly display the lengthy list of all the flights going to and coming from either cities. Moreover, it will almost always include the name of Airlines and the duration of a non-stop flight as well. Moreover, if you type precisely, like “flights LA,” Google will give a brief list of every flight coming to LA from all airports worldwide, also additively including the name of airlines and flight durations. Users will also be able to search for the flights originating from one place, by typing “flights from [your destination],” and it will display all the flights flying from that destination. This feature has a language support of ten different languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Catalan.

Google Would Have Paid More Than $100 Million to Major Labels for Licenses

Google has faced many critical reviews by analysts regarding its new Google Music Beta service, the new cloud-based locker which released by Google at its Google I/O event few months back. The reviews are so skeptical mostly because the lack of the facility for the users to purchase online music and stream seamlessly without having to upload their own library. Hence, consequently Google is now even ready to offer unavoidable offers of large sum of money to get the required licenses. It has been reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, that Google is already prepared to give out as much as $100 million to all four major labels, without any bitter condition, to acquire the licenses. But despite even this offer, the music labels did not negotiation due to “the music industry’s concern that search results in Google and YouTube often point to pirated music.”

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It was known since day one that Google was facing serious troubles while getting the green signal from music labels, but it has now been disclosed for the first time that piracy is the main reason behind it. Further it was stated that Google is now actually ‘fed up’ of trying to convince the labels, above all WMG, as it was asking Google to charge the users with an annual fee of $30 for the cloud service. Whereas, Google had intended that, and was unmoved on the matter, users should be able to check out the new service for free with at least 500 tracks stored for free at first.

Making money from paid apps in Android Market a challenge for app developers

It has been revealed from the study conducted by app analytics firm, Distimo, that it is relatively more difficult for the app developers to earn money by developing their apps in Google Android Market rather than putting it in Apple App Store, using the one-off fee model. The finding of the study were revealed publically this week illustrating that, evaluating all the paid apps in the Google Android Market, almost 80% of them are only downloaded less than 100 times.

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Distimo also revealed that it’s “more challenging for developers in the Google Android Market than in the Apple App Store to monetize using a one-off fee monetization model.” The actual big sellers in the Android market are only two, whereas if we compare Apple paid apps downloaded, it accounts more than half a million. Moreover Apple App Store has almost six total big sellers of paid apps, only accounted for two month time period and within US alone.  Moreover, if we consider the stats, there are almost five paid games in the Android market which are downloaded more than 250,000 times. But if we consider the same for Apple App Store, again in two months time period only, there twice as many, i.e. ten, paid games which have been downloaded more than 250,000 times within U.S.

After Being Challenged By Apple, Lodsys Now Decides To Threaten the Android App Developers

Lodsys went after several iOS app developers last week, for supposedly utilizing their patented in-app payment technology without permission, and had to face threat from Apple Inc. Apple gave an official statement claiming that it has all the licensed rights for the technology it has extended to its developers.

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Hence, when Lodsys feared a legal confrontation with Apple Inc., it deviated from its goal and has now sinisterly lodged similar complaints against the Android app developers. A group of Mac users identified in a public forum thread that an Android developer has also mentioned that he was contacted by Lodsys over the same issue. A user with a screen name “Markusn82” wrote in the forum: “We recently implemented in-app purchases for our Android application and several weeks later we received a letter from Lodsys, claiming that we infringed on their patents.” The post further also makes an inquiry asking fellow Android app developers, if anyone has also received such notification or have fallen victim to this incident. Furthermore, the more important inquiry was made asking whether or not shall they expect Google to step in and do something to help its developers, like Apple had done.

Google, Facebook lose social network patent ruling

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Both Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. have failed to get a lawsuit dismissed, which was filed by a New York company, Wireless Ink Corp, putting the service of letting users to take part on social networks via mobile phones into question. Winksite, the title service of Wireless Ink Corp, now has the rights to pursue its claim accusing both Google Buzz and Facebook Mobile to be infringing its patent of October, 2009. This verdict was announced by a U.S. District Judge, Kevin Castel, in Manhattan who gave a public ruling on Friday.

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The patent is linked to the method of helping beginner mobile phone users to create mobile websites which other phone users will be able to visit. Wireless Ink is expecting the court to not only freeze the activities which infringe on their patent but also hoping to get a triple compensation of all thr damages. It was written in latest amended version of the complaint filed in December, that Wireless Ink's application for its so-called '983 patent was first disclosed publically in January 2004.

It was not until 2007 when the mobile website of Facebook was lunched, and the mobile version of Google Buzz was released even later in 2010. Wireless Ink has written that "If two of the most resource-rich, patent-savvy and technologically advanced companies leading the Internet were not aware of the '983 patent, despite its potential ramifications upon a major segment of the defendants' business," than "this was solely due to a deliberate indifference on the part of defendants."