Clint Boulton

News Analysis: When Google released its Google Gesture Search feature for Android smartphones March 3, it fanned the flames of a long-standing complaint about fragmentation and inconsistency among Google’s mobile operating system platform. Google Gesture Search, which lets users surface contacts and applications on their devices by tracing letters on the screen with their fingers, […]

Google March 9 opened its Google Apps Marketplace, an online store selling enterprises business applications that integrate with and extend Google Apps. The Google Apps Marketplace will let Google Apps users access business apps for project management, billing and accounting, travel management, and other services. This will provide third-party software developers a larger cloud computing […]

Google is soliciting help from U.S. communities to build ultrahigh-speed broadband networks that zip 1G bit of data per second to users’ computers, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google plans to test the networks for anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 users. The idea is to help stimulate the creation and use of new applications, […]

Google Sees Microsoft Bing, Yahoo as Chief Rivals, Not Apple by Clint Boulton Microsoft Bing With Microsoft waging a scintillating proxy war on the ground, Google’s biggest threat in search comes from Bing. Yahoo With 17 percent of the market, Yahoo is not exactly a slouch, but the company is beginning to feel as though […]

Google and satellite TV provider Dish Network are experimenting with a service that would enable users to search through programs and Web video on their televisions, according to the (paywall warning) Wall Street Journal. The Journal March 8 said Google is testing its search software on TV set-top boxes, which as one of the modern […]

Location, location, location. Some of you may have seen my earlier coverage of Google considering integrations between Google Buzz and Google Latitude. Still others may have seen my supporting story detailing Google’s appreciation of location-based mashups. Steve Lee, the product manager for Google Latitude and Google Maps for Mobile who so graciously granted me chat […]

Google sees value in using location-based services such as Google Latitude and Google Buzz to provide recommendations by connecting to disparate Web services. But the search engine believes it’s just as important to mitigate the potential privacy scares associated with such services. eWEEK described to Steve Lee, product manager for Google Maps for mobile and […]

Google will try different points of integration between Google Latitude and the new Google Buzz for mobile application, a product manager for the company told eWEEK in a recent interview. When Google launched Google Buzz Feb. 9, it launched in parallel a mobile version of that application for Google Android smartphones and Apple’s iPhone. Google […]

Wireless carriers AT&T and T-Mobile are playing a game of musical default search engines, giving and taking away in a fun display of mobile phone brinksmanship. Days after iPhone carrier AT&T said it had chosen Yahoo as the default search engine for the Android-based Motorola Backflip, T-Mobile USA replaced Yahoo with Google as its default […]

Some 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, according to new research from comScore. That number is an 8.3 point jump from the 22.5 percent figure the researcher tallied one year ago, and is much greater than the 6.8 percent of feature […]

Google’s acquisition of collaboration software startup DocVerse for a reported $25 million March 5 validates the market for applications that bridge the gap between the Google Apps cloud computing suite and the on-premises Microsoft Office suite. DocVerse makes a plug-in that lets users group-edit Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents, which are created offline and […]

Google March 5 decided to open-source the code for its recently acquired ReMail application, citing strong interest in the product. Google purchased ReMail on Feb. 18. ReMail’s founder, Gabor Cselle, built a popular application that lets Apple iPhone users download their e-mail and conduct full-text e-mail search. The application was considered by many iPhone users […]