Clint Boulton

Google said it has received its last shipment of Nexus One smartphones from manufacturer HTC and will no longer offer the Android 2.1-based handsets when this batch is gone. However, the company will still provide customer support for current Nexus One customers, which began receiving Android 2.2 upgrades over the air in late June. Customers […]

Google July 16 said it has purchased Metaweb, whose Freebase open-source database catalogs 12 million movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations and companies, among other data sets. Freebase maps the relationship of real-world entities, or people, places and objects, to deliver relevant answers. Metaweb provides widgets and custom integrations of this semantic search technology for […]

Demand for the Motorola Droid X proved greater than anticipated as Verizon Wireless struggled to put one in the hands of everyone who waited in line at its stores July 15 to buy the Android smartphone. The Android 2.1-based handset, which has a major multimedia focus, is sold out online and at most Verizon retail […]

After two straight weeks of fielding complaints about the revamped Google News, the search engine has finally bowed to the whiners consumers who use it. Google June 30 offered its biggest refresh for Google News ever, adding more personalization features that let users promote or demote content and publications they liked or disliked. The problem […]

When Apple acquired Siri in April, industry watchers immediately wondered how Google would respond. Siri created a personal assistant application that enables users to speak requests such as “find me a taxi,” or “book me a reservation at a French restaurant,” and have their action items fulfilled. Siri adds layers of semantic and artificial intelligence […]

The Federal Communications Commission said it wants to invest in broadband infrastructure to power some 2,000 rural hospitals and clinics in the United States, part of the agency’s plan to pump $400 million per year into health care IT. The effort, introduced in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking July 15, is part of the FCC’s […]

Google July 14 said it is working with Wikipedia contributors, translators and “Wikipedians” (I assume these are users) across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. While Wikipedia has the so-called common languages English, German and French covered […]

Vlingo, which makes speech recognition software for smartphones, released a SuperDialer feature for its Android application that connects users to businesses on the Web. Vlingo’s applications let users of Apple’s iPhone, Google Android devices, RIM BlackBerry handsets, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 gadgets trigger phone calls via voice instead of manual dialing on a touch […]

Motorola’s Droid X smartphone launched July 15 from Verizon Wireless, which is selling the device online here and in its retail stores for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year customer agreement. The device is powered by a 1 GHz processor and Google’s Android 2.1 operating system, though an upgrade to Android 2.2 […]

Google July 15 announced net revenues of $5.1 billion for the second quarter on earnings per share of $6.45, providing the latest in a string of strong quarters. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected $4.99 in revenue on EPS of $6.53. Google’s Q2 numbers are still much better than the same period a year […]

Twitter July 14 officially christened its @earlybird account by offering two-for-one movie tickets to see the “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” film from Walt Disney Studios. Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers lets advertisers promote deals and events on Twitter’s new @earlybird account. The microblog retweets offers advertisers have created solely for Twitter, broadcasting deals to the account’s current […]

In the spirit of such wonderfully polarizing opposites as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” a social software programmer has come up with a cute analogy of the different users Google and Facebook (or other social Websites such as Twitter) appeal to. Adam Rifkin, co-founder of social app site Renkoo, said Google, with […]