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Planet Google

By Nitasha Tiku 2/29/12 12:57pm

Planet Google

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Google’s New York City Office Went on a Hiring Binge and Added 750 People in 2011

The Wall Street Journal devotes considerable inches today to covering Google’s expansion in New York City. In 2011, the tech giant added about 750 employees to its Chelsea outpost, bringing the total number of employees here up to 2,750.

About half of those new staffers are from acquisitions. Google acquired four companies, also in New York City, last year.

While the company overall grew 33 percent from 2010 to 2011, Googleplex East expanded by 38 percent. The Journal called it, “the most prominent example of a technology company shifting its focus toward New York. “

It reminds us of what one former city official said after Facebook’s big presser about vague plans to start an engineering hub in New York. “Thank you? I guess,” said the source, contrasting it with Google who just “all of a sudden had 1,400 engineers.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/23/12 9:29am

Planet Google

Hello, Neo. Do you know who this is?

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick: ‘Google Has Taken the Blue Pill’

Some of the top minds in the startup world have been sharing deep thoughts in plain sight on the Internet for anyone to see. Your host for this chance to peer across the dinner table of the tech elite? The conversation platform Branch. (For when 140 characters and an @ is not enough . . . is an imaginary tagline we’re toying with.)

The startup, originally launched as the group blogging service Roundtable in New York City picked up early traction from industry insiders and recently reemerged with a shiny new interface.

Conversations stem from a particular question, like this one from Twitter/Obvious Corp’s Evan Williams wondering about the downside of parallel entrepreneurship. That line of questioning yielded a particularly compelling series of responses from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, PayPal CTO Max Levchin, MySpace CEO Mike Jones, and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly, with an invitation for Fred Wilson to join. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/22/12 10:06am

Planet Google

minority-report

Google’s New Terminator Glasses Bring the Future to Your Goddam Face

You know when people say ” . . . not until they figure out how to put computer chips in our brains”? Well this is one step closer. We would smash our iPad 2 on the floor right now if we could get our money back and spend it on this instead.

Yesterday evening, the New York Times‘ Nick Bilton reported that Google is planning to put its heads-up display [HUD] glasses, which “stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time,” to the public by the end of the year at somewhere between $250 and $600. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 1/13/12 9:19am

Planet Google

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Google Finally Offers a Style Guide for Cleaning Up Your Crappy Android App

Google’s philosophy towards Android developers has been something along the lines of: If you build an app market, they will come. Leave the rigid quality control (and censorship) to companies named after fruit. But yesterday, three-and-a-half years in operation, Google finally launched an Android Design Guide. Considering that there are 700,000 new Android devices activated everyday, now’s the time. Well, now or three years ago, either way. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 1/10/12 4:01pm

Planet Google

Personal Results

Why Google’s New Social Search Features Will Make You Dumber

Today Google unveiled three big new features for its campaign to bake Social Search into your browser. Over the next few days, the company plans to roll out these developments to anyone signed in and searching in English. In a blog post called, “Search, plus Your World” the company enumerated the changes that will empower the search engine to understand “not only content, but also people and relationships.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 12/28/11 11:13am

Planet Google

Does Santa Have an Android Bias? Google Claims 3.7 M. Activations Over the Weekend

Google senior vice president Andy Rubin happily tweeted out some holiday cheer this morning: “There were 3.7M Android devices activated on 12/24 and 12/25.” It was an update on another bit of pre-Christmas good news, namely that more than 700,000 Android devices are now activated everyday.

Yesterday, Venturebeat shared statistics from the app analytics company Flurry that activations for Android and iOS devices shot up to 6.8 million on Christmas day. It’s not yet clear whether Apple or Google can claim more activations, but it’s more evidence that of that unflashy eventual market dominance Android fans keep promising will come. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 12/15/11 8:25am

Planet Google

via www.googlezeitgeist.com

Shame on Humanity: Rebecca Black Was the Fastest Rising Google Search in 2011

Google just released its 11th annual Zeitgeist site, covering the most searched terms in 2011. In a year that brought us the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, nuclear disaster in Japan, floods in Brazil, and the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the fastest growing search turns out to have been a manufactured pop star. Don’t ever change, humans! No, you’re good just like you are.

Google claims the second fastest rising search term this year was for Google +. See! Sometimes using your search engine as an ad for your plans to destroy Facebook really does pay off! Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 12/09/11 5:31pm

Planet Google

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Does ‘Find My Face’ Sound Like Something You Want to Let Google Do?

Google landed on the right side of the privacy debate by making its newly released facial recognition feature for Google+ opt-in. If you’ll remember,  “Tag Suggestions,” Facebook’s similar service, is not only opt-out, but also strongly encouraged! (“Before you opt out of using this feature, we encourage you to consider how tag suggestions benefit you and your friends. . . “) Read More