Clint Boulton

Tune Out The cleanest way to avoid Google’s privacy policy changes is to avoid Google altogether. Think you can do it? Good luck. Bing It While Google gets more than 1 billion searchers, it’s not the only search engine available. You can go to Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, which is powered by Bing. Microsoft has […]

850K and Counting That’s the number of Android devices that have been activated, according to Rubin, who played up that stat and others in a Feb. 27 blog post. Next up: 1 million daily activations, which we expect to see by April. This Android train has momentum. 450K Apps The Android Market boasts 450,000 apps […]

Much of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s keynote discussion at Mobile World Congress Feb. 28 concerned very forward-looking, sci-fi-type stuff. Sample: People will deploy robots on their behalf to conferences and concerts when they can’t be both places at once. People will experience both activities through the robot via a screen they control at home. […]

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Feb. 28 said it has improved application statistics in its Android Market to help publishers get a better handle on how users are accessing and interacting with their applications. Launched nearly a year ago, application statistics make up a set of dashboards in the developer console that shows publishers’ installation download numbers […]

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) product privacy policy changes will go into effect March 1 despite protestations from regulators in the United States and Europe, which has said the alterations will violate European Union data protection rules. CNIL, the French data protection regulator tasked by the Article 29 Working Party to pore over Google’s policy changes, said Google’s […]

Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) demonstrated how Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Voice Actions speech-recognition software defeated Apple’s own Siri voice-based assistant in three video contests, pitting Motorola’s Photon 4G, Atrix 2 and Electrify versus the iPhone 4S. The videos, which show the Android phones conducting the same voice prompts alongside the iPhone 4S, are humorously couched as boxing matches, […]

Google CEO Larry Page said during his last earnings conference call that Google+ has more than 90 million users. He declined to reveal the user engagement of those users. Now comScore reveals that Google+ users only spend an average of three minutes there a month, compared with 405 minutes per user on Facebook. People are […]

In a classic high-tech case of if-you-can’t-beat-them-sue-them, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) Feb. 27 accused partner Facebook of infringing on patents related to social networking and other technologies. Yahoo is struggling to boost user engagement at a time when it is losing eyeballs to Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Internet companies. Yahoo wants Facebook to pay to use […]

Acting on the notion that it is harder to find exploits than security bugs, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is offering up to $1 million in rewards to those who find full and partial exploits in the popular Web browser. The awards, which will be doled out at the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the CanSecWestCanSecWest security conference in […]

While several mobile technology themes came out of Mobile World Congress this week, one that will stick in every mobile watcher’s mind is that the show was a coming-out party for quad-core smartphones. LG, HTC and Huawei all showed off quad-core Android handsets at the event in Barcelona, Spain. Quad-core phones will provide faster performance […]

Telefonica Digital and virtualization powerhouse VMware Feb. 28 unveiled a new service that lets users separate their corporate work data and their personal data on one Android handset. The Telefonica Dual Persona service is designed to help IT departments provision and manage corporate email, applications and data to an employee’s Android device over-the-air via a […]

The whole “Is Google Evil?” meme has grown to be a ridiculous, farcical debate, prone to solemn punditry by some of the most authoritative voices in high tech. I’ve defended Google countless times here, but I’ve never subscribed to the notion that Google is good, much less evil. No business deserves the evil mantle. Well, […]