Clint Boulton

Nortel Networks April 4 has agreed to sell its remaining 6,000 wireless, networking, and other patents to patent-poor Google for $900 million in cash. Google craves the patents, which Nortel said spans “nearly every aspect of telecommunications and additional markets as well, including Internet search and social networking,” to stave off increasingly rampant patent litigation. […]

RockMelt April 1 launched its second beta version, adding better Facebook Chat, a new and improved Twitter application and support for Google’s speedier Chromium 10 open source browser technology. RockMelt is a social Web browser launched last November to lofty hype, thanks to its backing by Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen. RockMelt frames the browsing […]

Google is working on two security projects to improve the public key infrastructure, which was rocked by the Comodo digital certificate spoofing incident late last month. A lone hacker infiltrated Comodo Security’s root authority system, logging in and issuing digital certificates to Websites owned by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Skype and Mozilla. The attacker obtained the […]

As of this writing, Google’s Android operating system has captured 33 percent of the U.S. smartphone market share through February, according to comScore. That’s one third of the total market in less than three years since the T-Mobile G1 appeared in late summer 2008. Research In Motion, Microsoft Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian abroad are […]

Few disagree that Google’s Android operating system is becoming the Microsoft Windows of the mobile operating system world. Analysts from both IDC and ABI Research estimate Android, which lives on more than 100 phones and just hit 33 percent U.S. market share, will top 45 percent share over the next five years. It’s the No. […]

Verizon Wireless’ iPhone helped Apple iOS gain nearly a full percentage point of market share through February, but it didn’t impede the progress of Google’s Android operating system, according to the latest U.S. data from comScore. Android led the market in February with 33 percent share, up two percentage points from comScore’s count of 31.2 […]

Google March 30 launched its long-awaited, supposed Facebook-flaming +1 button to the world as an experimental feature, with a slow rollout coming as the search engine tunes and tweaks the feature. +1 is best thought of as simply Google’s version of Facebook’s Like button, the social network’s recommendation engine. Users will click the +1 next […]

Google’s Chrome Web browser garnered 11.5 percent market share through March, gaining at the expense of Microsoft Internet Explorer. IE, far and away the market leader with 15 years of legacy use behind it, commands 55.9 percent share but fell from last month’s tally of 56.77 percent, according to researcher Net Applications. Mozilla Firefox share […]

The blogosphere was set ablaze this week with the report that Google was building a facial recognition application that would let users take pictures of people and identify them within seconds. The problem with the CNN report is that it isn’t exactly true, or at least not yet. The real story is more nuanced than […]

Google this week proved just how bullish it is on NFC (near field communications) technology, ending support for QR codes on Google Places and other products and joining the non-profit industry group NFC Forum, as a principal member. Until last week, the 2D bar codes (pictured right) directed people to businesses’ Google Places Pages. Some […]

Google’s Android operating system will rise to command 45 percent of smartphone market share worldwide by 2016, ABI Research said March 31. The market researcher, which said Android accounted for 69 million of the 302 million smartphones shipped in 2010, said the phasing out of Nokia’s Symbian OS over the next two years would leave […]

HP March 31 made it possible for users of Google Cloud Print to print documents, Web pages and other files to any HP ePrint-enabled printer from any supporting Web, mobile or desktop application on any computer or smartphone. HP is the first major printer maker to officially pick up the Cloud Print cause. Interested users […]