Clint Boulton

Google made good on reheating leftover scraps from its failed Google Wave experiment by launching Shared Spaces with gadgets from the defunct real-time collaboration platform. A new Google Labs project, Shared Spaces leverages more than 50 gadgets, or mini-apps from Google Wave to let people collaborate with planning and productivity tools, Sudoku puzzles and polls […]

Google’s Android team prefers that carriers and handset makers provide unlocking mechanisms for Android smartphones so application developers can tweak the operating system without circumventing Android’s security. Android, which is aggressively challenging Apple’s iPhone in the U.S., is by nature open source. However, wireless carriers and handset makers “lock down” the devices to prevent tech-savvy […]

Google Dec. 20 said it will continue to make its Gmail calling capability free through 2011, a sign that the company wants to make sure more of its Webmail users embrace the technology. Google launched its Call Phones from Gmail feature in August, leveraging the company’s popular Google Voice phone management software. Google said the […]

Google’s inclusion of Twitter’s Promoted Tweets into its real-time search results represents more than just the first time Google is including ads not fueled by AdWords on its properties. It sets up the possibility that Google could acquire Twitter at a later date, according to Paul Byrne, a senior account manager at search engine optimization […]

Top 10 Google Goofs, Black Eyes of 2010 by Clint Boulton Google WiSpy Easily our No. 1 choice for Google gaffe of the year, the WiSpy incident was the worst thing to happen to Google in 2010. What happened? Google in May revealed its Street View cars had inadvertently scooped 600 gigabytes of data from […]

Gmail creator Paul Bucheit and coiner of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” credo has as good a non-technical explanation of Google’s cloud strategy and Chrome Operating System on his personal blog Dec. 18. Bucheit added the color after his cavalier tweet, “Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android),” kicked the proverbial hornets’ […]

Motorola has released a brief video on YouTube teasing the introduction, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, of a tablet computer based on Google’s Android Honeycomb operating system. The clip, titled “Tablet Evolution” and set in a museum, is a 1:36-minute history lesson of actual stone tablets, beginning with an Egyptian hieroglyphic tablet dated […]

The European Commission has tacked on two German cases to its antitrust investigation into whether or not Google is unfairly promoting its own Web services in its search results on Google.com. The New York Times said the Commission has taken up complaints from a conglomerate of 450 newspaper and magazine publishers, known as the B.D.Z.V. […]

Google TV continues to take its lumps and it looks like the Internet TV endeavor will hit a bump in the road at the Consumer Electronics Show next month. Google TV is the search engine’s effort to wed Web surfing with channel surfing by putting its Chrome Web browser on TV sets and making all […]

Samsung’s Nexus S smartphone, slated to go on sale at Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy U.K. in the U.K. Dec. 20, is being pushed to Dec. 22. That delay, which still makes the device available to shoppers before Christmas, was tempered by a price cut. The unlocked phone (no SIM card) will cost U.K. consumers […]

Google should be prevented from buying leaders in adjacent markets so rivals such as Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo and other companies can acquire them and make the online market more competitive. That’s the clarified position Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein offered for Google’s response to his complaint that Google has grown too powerful. The discussion […]

Apple’s iPad will command 44 percent of the total tablet market by 2012, with tablets based on Google’s Android operating system nipping at its heels with 39 percent, according to researchers at Piper Jaffray. Apple that has the dominate position in 2010, selling 90 percent of the 14.5 million tablets shipped this year after launching […]