Clint Boulton

I love Google’s Web services. I use its search, Reader and Gmail daily to do my job. But I’m also not blind as to how Google is so good at what it does and part of that is the company’s fierce competitive streak, which is deliciously masked by numerous statements of good will and just […]

Many of you may have read that Google has launched a Product Ideas site, which makes one think Google is looking to crowdsource some innovation in lieu of letting programming teams go off on their own to forge failures (Google Lively, Research Datasets.) Google is starting out of the gate with a mobile product ideas […]

I took enough flak for suggesting that Google’s Android mobile operating system would appear on netbooks in 2009 that I’m obligated to point out this post on VentureBeat by programmers who compiled Android for an Asus EEEPC 1000H netbook in four hours. Matthäus Krzykowski and Daniel Hartmann freelance for VentureBeat, taking time out of their […]

It didn’t take long for Google’s Android team to get into the spirit of 2009. Google Mobile App with Voice Search for the Apple iPhone with hidden options for changing the theme color and alternate sounds below the preferences on the Settings tab. VentureBeat’s MC Siegler was all over the options and had pics from […]

I promised to delve into predictions for 2009 made by Google Operating System’s Alex Chitu. Some of them are a little geeky and obscure for my taste, but Chitu has a couple that stand out to me. One real quick: He predicts that Google’s search guru Marissa Mayer will leave, which is timely considering ValleyWag’s […]

The other day a reader using the name Eric Blair and claiming to be a Googler commented that while the Google Chrome Web browser is currently headed for disaster, the powers that be at Google are using marketing tactics in an effort to save it. We’ve all seen the major ad — the button on […]

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld rekindled discussion of an interesting but dubious idea Dec. 28: a combination of search king Google and social network king Facebook. Google and Facebook on the surface are companies whose strengths clearly complement each other’s weaknesses as far as Web services go. Google has unparalleled search capabilities while Facebook has nailed the […]

Google Watch readers are surprisingly skeptical about the notion that Google will create a version of the Android mobile operating system for netbooks. But let us recall how Google’s Android creators have said publicly that they expect Android to appear in devices other than mobile smartphones. Google has been anything but generous about its future […]

Earlier this week, I lamented what Google didn’t do in 2008, but with the year winding down let’s consider what’s on tap at Google for 2009. Garret Rogers over at ZDNet is thinking that there will be several mobile devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system. I know, I know. Stating the obvious a little. […]

In the dog days of August, mere weeks before the credit crunch crippled Wall Street in September, I compiled this piece pondering some of the things I’d like to see from Google before 2009. As I write this in the wee morning hours of Christmas Eve, I realize that Google has proven quite frugal, making […]

Yahoo really opened a can of data privacy worms one week ago today when it said it would peel back its retention period for search user log data from 13 months to three months. Inevitably, privacy pundits called for Google and Microsoft to step up and shrink the time they store users’ search queries, IP […]

By now many of you have surely seen the well circulated holiday e-mail from Google about T-Mobile G1s with custom Android logos being doled out to 85 percent of Googlers in lieu of a cash bonus for Christmas. That’s some 18,000-plus Android-based smart phones if Google truly has over 20,000 employees still on its active […]