China may be Apple’s next frontier for smartphone growth, but the company has some catching up to do. Android handsets that cost one-third of the iPhone have taken the market by storm: Android now accounts for 90.1 percent of the smartphone market in China. Read more »
Google is on the brink of crossing the billion dollar mark for its investments in clean power projects. The search engine giant is arguably the most aggressive Internet company in the world to embrace clean power for its data centers. Read more »
With many shaped and sized Android phones, it’s often difficult to find third-party accessories that work with multiple devices. Grace Digital’s gdock speaker won’t work with every Android, but it does support audio playback and charging for Samsung’s Galaxy S2, S3, Note and Note 2. Read more »
Google surprised many with the launch of a $199 Chromebook this week. So what’s the Acer C7 like? Overall the quality and performance is better than I expected for the price and it even has a 320 GB hard drive for those who want local storage. Read more »
Google TV is getting advanced voice control, and the technology behind it is being fed by the knowledge graph that also powers Google Now. Speaking of which: The mobile app will soon be much more closely connected to Google’s TV platform. Read more »
TV broadcasters and programmers must embrace a new set of video-delivery techniques to reach consumers today. Online delivery to so many types of consumer devices means that video programmers must produce multiple internet-streaming formats that use different types of security and different ways of inserting ads. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google opened up on its data center operations today at an industry event in Phoenix. It shared how its thinking and practices have changed as it seeks to lower the costs and environment impact of its servers and IT infrastructure. Read more »
We mapped Google’s transparency data to see which countries want online content removed and why. It turns out that censorship is in the eye of the beholder. Read more »
I tend to upgrade my Nexus phone every other year. Is the Nexus 4 good enough to change my mind and cause me to upgrade from the Galaxy Nexus in just a year? There are many reasons to say yes, even without LTE support. Read more »
Google has released its sixth semi-annual report on government information and takedown requests. The trend is not encouraging but there may be a bright spot in that more and more companies are following Google’s attempt to shine light on censorship. Read more »
The new Android flagship took minutes to sell out in the UK and Germany, but the Google Play Store makes it look as though it never even went on sale. The company needs to work on its retail mechanisms. Read more »
Google’s Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 are now on sale and ship with Android 4.2, which brings a number of software improvements and new features to the platform. Older Nexus devices are getting the software too, plus you can manually install it on the Nexus 7. Read more »
Nicole Wong, a deputy counsel at Google responsible for high profile censorship cases, has moved on to Twitter. She follows several other Googlers who have made the move in recent months. Read more »
The new Acer C7 looks more like a tradtional laptop than any prior Google Chromebook because of the Intel Core processor and 320 GB magnetic hard drive. But it’s an aggressively priced Chromebook at $199, which could sway many to give Chrome OS a try. Read more »
Could a smartphone be your primary computing device? With this $99 Samsung Smart Dock for the Galaxy Note 2, it’s possible. The dock supports 3 USB accessories — think keyboard, mouse and storage — and includes HDMI out for 1080p video on a monitor or HDTV. Read more »
Matt shares impressions of Nokia’s Lumia 810 and 822 while Kevin gives a summary of the Nexus 10: Great hardware but not quite up to par on the software front. Plus, both hosts are addicted to Angry Birds Star Wars: May the Force be mobile! Read more »
Motorola’s Razr M is getting Android 4.1 quickly after launch, illustrating that the Google-owned company is looking to advance the pace of software updates. Verizon is tucking Isis support into the update. And Google is offering price protection on devices sold in the Google Play store. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Samsung’s Galaxy S III was the best-selling smartphone model last quarter, says research firm Strategy Analytics. That may or may not be true due to the “shipped vs sold” argument. Truth be told, it doesn’t matter because only Samsung could possibly rival Apple’s iPhone. Here’s why. Read more »
The delivery of real-time query makes Hadoop accessible to more users — and by orders of magnitude. Its significance goes well beyond delivering a database management system (DBMS) kind of query engine that other products have had for decades. Rather, Hadoop as a platform now supports a whole new paradigm of analytics. With the introduction of real-time query, Hadoop has taken a major step toward unifying the majority of big data analytic applications onto one platform. This research paper targets information technology professionals who have in-depth experience with traditional RDBMS and seek to understand where the Hadoop ecosystem and big data analytics fit. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hack/reduce will launch its cool new work space near Cambridge’s Kendall Square on Thursday. The goal of the effort is to bring together the best big data people from private and public sectors and academia to train up the next generation of data scientists. Read more »
MIPS Technologies has sold it’s business to Imagination, the graphics IP company, while selling more than 500 of its remaining patents to a consortium led by ARM Holdings, a onetime rival. The deals are an example of the huge shifts taking place in the semiconductor world. Read more »
Android’s fragmentation continues to recede with new data showing 28.5 percent of Google phones and tablets now running either Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean. The software’s pace of change has slowed and more devices are shipping with the newest software. Read more »
Google might be getting antsy about getting its mapping app for iOS approved by Apple. Monday anonymous sources at the company said they’re pessimistic that Apple will approve a competing Google Maps app. But that goes against what the company’s chairman has been saying. Read more »
On this week’s audio podcast, Kevin shares hands on impressions of the iPad mini: he likes it better than iPad 3. Meanwhile, Matt explains what Microsoft announced at the Windows 8 launch event and recaps his usage of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet. Read more »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Several hundred Harvard Business School students and others gathered on Sunday to hear technology company founders and visionaries talk shop. Here are my top 5 highlights. Read more »
With an ailing economy where manufacturing jobs are gone forever, what hope does America have? Mark Sigal of Unicorn Labs says companies—and our country—can prosper again only by embracing a unified approach to business, or an ethos of Indivisibility. Read more »
This week was huge for Android devices. The Nexus 7 gained a 3G model and more storage for less money. LG’s Nexus 4 launched with a low no-contract price of $299 while for $100 more you can get a Nexus 10 tablet with outstanding screen. Read more »
How do you design for smaller screens that we manipulate with our fingers? You use data. Lots of it, parsed with sophistication and nuance. Read more »
Although Hurricane Sandy put the kibosh on Google’s Android event this week, the company still introduced the Nexus 4 smartphone. My first impressions show some nice evolution from last year’s Galaxy Nexus, including more memory and a slimmer form-factor at the same price or lower. Read more »
What would happen if you put hackers and scientists together and let them play? That’s what Ariel Waldman is trying to find out with Science Hack Day, a wildly popular event that brings together science, design, and technology. Read more »
Android Police has gotten a hold of a leaked version of a new Google Wallet which suggests the company is preparing to release physical Google Wallet cards to work alongside its NFC-based mobile payment system. Read more »
Half of the base stations now deployed by telco operators are small cells, which means telcos have to deal with the problems of scale out systems. Here’s what they can learn from IT guys who deal with the same issue in their data centers. Read more »
Chasing a potentially huge market, Microsoft has inked a pact with the municipality of Shanghai and with ISP 21Vianet to offer Windows Azure services in China. The deal could be huge but also problematic, given problems Google and other U.S. companies have had in China. Read more »
A new research paper from Google highlights the importance of big data in creating consumer-friendly services such as voice search on smartphones. More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next — letting you keep your eyes on the road. Read more »
Steven Huffman, who co-founded Reddit and then Hipmunk, used Google App Engine to teach novice programmers web development on Udacity. He is impressed with it as a real-life development platform. And Google really, really wants you to know that. Read more »
Brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. Within the next 36 months cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars to online viewing and the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google is releasing an updated search app for iOS devices that allows users to ask their questions by voice and get quick responses, many of them spoken back to users. It doesn’t replicate everything Siri does but it also provides more answers. Read more »
The purpose of the on-screen guide has shifted. By connecting the guide to content-recommendation engines and advertising platforms, service providers and connected-TV device manufacturers are using the EPG as an access point for understanding consumers and reaching out to them to own the living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
