Clint Boulton

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system completed 2011 with 47 percent of ad impressions across smartphones, with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) also finishing the year strong at 33 percent of impressions, thanks to its iPhone. The statistics came by way of an annual report from mobile ad firm Millennial Media, which is going public this year as the […]

Obama Weighs In on Privacy The Obama Administration introduced a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which provides a “baseline of clear protections for consumers and greater certainty for businesses.” “American consumers can’t wait any longer for clear rules of the road that ensure their personal information is safe online,said President Obama. “As the Internet evolves, […]

Roughly three dozen state attorneys general have written a letter to Google expressing concern over the search engine company’s plans to distill 60 product privacy policies under one blanket policy. The National Association of Attorneys General is concerned with Google’s desire to have applications such as Search, Gmail and YouTube share user data with each […]

Google’s Fiber ambitions for high-speed Internet access are slowly but surely coming together in the form of paid TV programming, and it’s something we should have seen coming. Remember when we first learned of Fiber two years ago this month, when wacky political wonks jumped in shark tanks and ice-cold water to win Google’s hand […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Docs for Android received some much-longed-for features Feb. 22, including native editing and real-time collaboration capabilities. Prior to this upgrade, available now in the Android Market for Android 2.1 devices and up, the native Docs for Android app was a read-only program. Users who wanted to edit their documents had to do so […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been sued by computer users who claimed their privacy rights were violated when the search giant sidestepped control settings intended to protect users of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Safari Web browser from being tracked online. Attorneys for Safari user Matthew Soble said in a complaint filed in Delaware federal court that “Google’s willful and […]

Linux software distributor Canonical Feb. 21 introduced a version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system for Android, a platform tailored for multi-core Android smartphones that can dock with a keyboard and monitor. The software, which Canonical will show off at Mobile World Congress next week, aims to let users sync their contacts, Short Message Service/Multimedia […]

When Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) launched its Appstore for Android applications last March, the assumption was that the portal would challenge Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android Market as a welcome alternative for consumers to download free and paid applications for smartphones. App download data collected last month on U.S. users by Distimo suggests that’s correct. While the proportion of […]

For a company without major cloud computing collaboration clout, Microsoft has a good sense of humor regarding its competition with Google. Coming from the underdog–if only because Google has over 4 million business customers, thanks to a four-year head start in Web-based collaboration software for businesses–“Googlelighting” is cute. It’s a video that strongly suggests Google […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) confirmed it has purchased seven search patent applications of Cuil, the failed search startup that set out to defeat the search engine giant when it was launched more than three years ago. Financial terms of the patent purchase were not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans for the […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has filed patents covering a voice-activated remote control, a move that could ultimately provide speech input for the company’s Google TV service. The patent filing, discovered by Patently Apple, came Sept. 29, 2011. That was only days before Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) launched its Siri voice-based search software with the iPhone 4S. As with Apple’s […]

Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), also known as the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) of Russia, has struck a deal with Twitter to license the microblog’s full firehose feed of public tweets for its blog search engine. Financial terms of the deal, announced Feb. 21, were not disclosed. Twitter posts of users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, […]