TechieGroups

ADVERTISING BROKER Google seems to have given its blessing for Motorola to forge ahead with a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple.

Motorola Mobility, which is set to become part of Google, has alleged Apple infringed six patents with its Iphone 4S. The patents include one which is entitled “Receiver having concealed external antenna”, something that could describe pretty much every mobile phone on sale today.

Apple and Motorola have had prior legal clashes with the two firms already locked in a bitter patent battle that is set to reach trial later this year. Motorola had initially tried to get patent claims against the latest Iphone 4S added to that lawsuit, however the judge rejected that, offering Motorola the chance to file another lawsuit. At this point it is not clear if, or when, those latest claims will end up in court.

According to patents gadfly Florian Mueller, Motorola’s actions must have had Google’s blessing due to the merger agreement signed by the two firms. Mueller cited that the agreement does not allow Motorola to “assert any Intellectual Property Right in any new Action” without Google’s permission.

Google’s thumbs up to Motorola is the surest sign yet that Apple and Google will eventually end up fighting each other rather than using handset makers as their pawns. µ

SMILEY FACED FIRM LG has announced that it will present its Google powered TV at the consumer electronics show (CES).

CES kicks off next week in Las Vegas. LG’s Google TV will be available in the US this year but sadly not in the UK until 2013.

Havis Kwon, president and CEO of LG said, “Through Google TV, LG has merged Google’s established Android operating system with LG’s proven 3D and Smart TV technologies, offering consumers a new and enthralling TV experience.”

LG touts the device’s ease of use as a top feature thanks to the combination of its Android-based user interface and Magic Remote control. The software can handle multitasking with search, social networking and TV running simultaneously.

Like LG’s recent line of TVs it will come with passive Cinema 3D capability and 2D to 3D conversion on the fly.

Although LG has joined forces with Google on this product it is not ditching its own Smart TV interface. The Korean firm said that will be available on more than 60 per cent of its flat panel TVs this year. µ

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google might have revealed plans to launch a Nexus tablet within the next six months.

Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt spoke of the firm’s plans to launch a high-end tablet to Italian web site Corriere Della Sera. The Nexus brand isn’t specifically mentioned but we imagine Google would use the same name as its smartphones.

Schmidt said, “In the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality.”

The Nexus smartphones have been consistently popular and successful so it’s possible that the firm wants to extend that success into the tablet market. The tablet would have to pack some serious specifications to rival the Ipad 2 and Ipad 3, whatever that turns out to be.

Schmidt also spoke about continuing competition with rival vendors like Apple and said, “And in mobile communications, the smartphone market, you will see brutal competition between Apple and Google Android. It is capitalism.”

We would certainly be interested in checking out a high-end Nexus tablet from Google, so we hope that what Schmidt said comes to fruition. µ

INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT Google has boasted that it now activates 700,000 Android devices per day.

The numbers were revealed by Andy Rubin in a Google Plus post as a brief note. “There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day,” wrote the Android operating system chief.

Later he clarified the statement and explained that each activation is a new one, as opposed to an old handset making its way into new hands.

“…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices),” he said, adding, “and ‘activations’ means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service”.

This means that there might be uncounted handsets out there, but it’s perhaps unlikely that there are many that have not connected to wireless services. Some might be lurking in Christmas stockings though, so perhaps the new year will see an updated post from Rubin.

In July the company said that it was seeing 550,000 activations each day, and earlier, 400,000. µ

Reiterating what the company has been saying about Android 4.0, Google's Dan Morrill said today that the Ice Cream Sandwich source code would be made available to the general public "soon," after the software begins appearing on new and existing Android devices.

The source code for Android 3.0 was never made available – Google's official reasoning for this is that it didn't want the tablet-oriented Honeycomb code running on smaller screens, though others have suggested (as we noted in our review of the Xoom) that Honeycomb seemed to be a bit rushed at the time of release. Most of the focus on Ice Cream Sandwich so far has concerned what it will do for phones, but for tablets it's likely to represent an iteration of Honeycomb with more polish and fewer rough edges.

The lack of Honeycomb source code has been criticized by the open source community, which often takes advantage of Android's "openness" relative to iOS or Windows Phone 7 to develop custom Android distributions for all kinds of devices, including some (like the HP TouchPad) for which it was never really intended. Once its source code is released, Ice Cream Sandwich should give these developers a more modern and robust platform to start from.

Source: Ars Technica

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has revealed its energy footprint for the first time, and we doubt that it could buy its sandals off the shelf.

It would not take a genius to speculate that the firm uses a lot of energy, but it’s very huge indeed. Headline grabbing trivia include the fact that it could power Salt Lake City, Utah.

According to the New York Times, Google’s datacentres draw a continuous 260 million Watts or, if you prefer, around a quarter of the output of the average nuclear power plant.

This is fine though, as while Google uses a large amount of electricity, it stops its users from using other fuel, like petrol.

According to the company you should remember how much money is saved when, for example, someone does not drive to a library to look for information, but instead searches for it online. The same could be said for online shopping, perhaps.

“The numbers] look big in the small context,” said Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for technical infrastructure in an interview with the New York Times.

The amount of power that individuals use is also small when looked at in perspective, according to the report, and consumption is reckoned to be around 180 Watt-hours a month, equal to running a light bulb for three hours.

Other numbers are described in fun terms, and Google reckons that running Gmail for a year, per user, is the equivalent to drinking a bottle of wine, sticking a note in it and tossing it into the sea, while performing 100 searches is the same as running a 60W lightbulb for 28 minutes.

Google also makes an effort to improve the way its buildings use energy and has cut down on car numbers by offering its workers shuttle services to use between their homes and offices. It added that it also offsets its carbon through “very high quality” outlets, such as livestock farms.

In a blog post Hoelzle said that Google is very close to completely offsetting is carbon emissions thanks to these and other novel methods.

“We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and data centers in the world-using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our newest facility in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity,” he explained.

“Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’ve purchased the output of two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-quality carbon offsets.” µ

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has revealed its energy footprint for the first time, and we doubt that it could buy its sandals off the shelf.

It would not take a genius to speculate that the firm uses a lot of energy, but it’s very huge indeed. Headline grabbing trivia include the fact that it could power Salt Lake City, Utah.

According to the New York Times, Google’s datacentres draw a continuous 260 million Watts or, if you prefer, around a quarter of the output of the average nuclear power plant.

This is fine though, as while Google uses a large amount of electricity, it stops its users from using other fuel, like petrol.

According to the company you should remember how much money is saved when, for example, someone does not drive to a library to look for information, but instead searches for it online. The same could be said for online shopping, perhaps.

“The numbers] look big in the small context,” said Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for technical infrastructure in an interview with the New York Times.

The amount of power that individuals use is also small when looked at in perspective, according to the report, and consumption is reckoned to be around 180 Watt-hours a month, equal to running a light bulb for three hours.

Other numbers are described in fun terms, and Google reckons that running Gmail for a year, per user, is the equivalent to drinking a bottle of wine, sticking a note in it and tossing it into the sea, while performing 100 searches is the same as running a 60W lightbulb for 28 minutes.

Google also makes an effort to improve the way its buildings use energy and has cut down on car numbers by offering its workers shuttle services to use between their homes and offices. It added that it also offsets its carbon through “very high quality” outlets, such as livestock farms.

In a blog post Hoelzle said that Google is very close to completely offsetting is carbon emissions thanks to these and other novel methods.

“We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and data centers in the world-using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our newest facility in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity,” he explained.

“Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’ve purchased the output of two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-quality carbon offsets.” µ

Google announced last October that they would be beta testing their Google Fiber initiative in a small residential neighborhood affiliated with Stanford University, and one lucky Redditor posted the results. The service is being provided free to the faculty and staff of Stanford that live just off campus and the speeds are mostly unheard of in this country. This beta test, of course, comes ahead of the roll-out of their Kansas City experiment in 1 Gbps fiber internet service. Speedtest results linked and pictured below for you to drool over. 

Source: Reddit

Google Music Beta, the search giant’s music streaming service, launched earlier this summer to tepid reviews before drifting into the background after the much-ballyhooed release of Spotify in the United States. While garnering praise for its audio quality and Android connectivity, it was knocked for lacking an iOS app and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to purchase music.

While there’s still no music store, Google’s hoping to renew your interest in Google Music with Magnifier, a new music discovery site curated by the Google Music team. Not only does Magnifier offer daily song recommendations, it can download those tracks for free into your Google Music account.

Like most of Google Music, Magnifier’s smooth. It took just a few seconds for the song to appear in my library and then just a handful more for the song to start playing. While Magnifier hasn’t been around long enough for me to know if my tastes match up with those of its editors, I can see myself checking back regularly based solely on the ease of use.

If Google could only secure the rights to actually sell music, a stream of interesting free music coupled with Google’s generous cloud storage (roughly 20,000 songs for free compared to for 10GB on Apple’s iCloud service) could put Google Music on equal footing with iTunes and Amazon’s Digital Marketplace.

ADVERTISING BROKER Google has announced a large jump in year on year revenues and made the staggering announcement that 550,000 Android devices are being activated daily.

Google’s financial results for the second quarter of 2011, the first with Larry Page as CEO, had very little wrong about them. A 32 per cent increase in year on year revenue to just over bn with profits of .51bn simply cannot be sniffed at. As impressive as that was, Page’s claim that Google has loaded Android onto 130 million handsets and that figure is growing at the rate of 550,000 a day really highlighted Google’s dominance in the growing smartphone market.

Google’s earnings release singled out revenues from the UK, which accounts for 11 per cent of the firm’s revenues. While the percentage of revenue that the UK provides Google hasn’t changed in the past 12 months, the fact it has held steady as overall revenue has grown 32 per cent is rather impressive.

Ultimately for Google the number of adverts it can sell makes all of this possible, and the firm reported an 18 per cent rise in paid clicks from the same period last year. Perhaps the only blot on Google’s copybook was a two per cent drop in paid advertising from the previous quarter.

Google said, “We expect to continue to make significant capital expenditures” and reported a war chest of .1bn to go out and buy whatever takes its fancy.

A few months ago Google announced that it was activating 400,000 Android smartphones a day, and while Page’s figure of 550,000 daily activations is likely go both up and down as the months progress, there’s no doubt that the army of Android devices has well and truly arrived.

While Google’s share price fell all day yesterday, since the earnings report and at the time of publication it was up over 12 per cent, hovering just below the 0 mark in pre-market trading. It seems investors believe Google has a lot more potential in the coming months. µ