Google

Google is road-testing cars that steer, stop and start without a human driver! The cars have travelled a total of 225,300km on major California roads without much human intervention, according to a posting on Saturday on Google’s corporate blog. The goal is to “help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions,” project leader Sebastian Thrun wrote in the blog post. It’s not the first signal that Google wants to change how people get from place to place....

In my last post, when I published about Google TV, readers were fascinated and started asking me how to get this amazing product. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Google TV is a a software platform for set-top boxes and HDTVs based on the Android OS. It is co-developed by Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech. There are two possible ways to get Google TV (at least for this fall) –...

Google introduced ‘Google TV’ almost five months ago to the world at Google I/O and today they have got all new updates to this amazing product. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Google TV is a new way to think about TV: it’s a platform that combines your current TV programming and the open web into a single, seamless entertainment experience. It is the tech giant’s attempt to bring the full Internet to TV sets, via new TVs and Blu-ray players from Sony and a set-top box from Logitech....

Here’s something you probably didn’t know your iPhone could do: display movies in 3D. Actually, it can’t quite yet. But a company called Spatial View is launching an online 3D movie store, 3DeeCentral, and it has submitted an app that grants access to it for review by Apple. It’s not going to be native three-dimensional video but still offers similar results and the cool thing is you won’t have to wear those hideous polarized glasses!...

In its continuing attempts to make the web faster, Google is trimming down the size of image files, which make up about 65% of the bytes on the web. Google announced that it is releasing a developer preview of a new image format WebP. An alternative to the JPEG format, which is typically used today for web pictures and images, WebP should “significantly” reduce the byte size of images, Google promises....

If you are new to the Android Phone market, Google just made the process of comparing devices a lot easier with the launch of their Google Phone Gallery. This new online database includes all the major Android manufactures along with most of the carriers that sell their phones Android phones can be sorted by alphabetical order or release date. Users can even add up to three devices for a side-by-side comparison....

Apple rules the short term but Android holds more promise in the long term. A survey released by SiliconValley.com says that majority of the 2400 polled developers believe that Android will be the platform for the future. Few key points in the survey - 72% of developers say Android “is best positioned to power a large number and variety of connected devices in the future” – while only 25% said iOS will rule the new device world Nearly 56% of developers said they favored Android’s long-term outlook as a platform for them to make money, while 37% picked iOS 76% said iOS presents the best moneymaking opportunities, while 19% chose Android 88% said Apple has the best app store, while only 10% said that of Android

Just getting started with your Android phone? The Complete Android Guide, a free wiki-style e-book. It covers both the very basics of the phone, and provides some handy tips and little-known fixes for more experienced users. Android is a moving target, of course, so whenever Android or Google’s main apps get an update, I’ll add it to the site.

Close on heels of Google Instant, here comes YouTube Instant and Twitter Instant, possibly the fastest way to instantly search videos and Twitter right now. Youtube Instant is the creation of Feross Aboukhadijeh, a computer science student at Stanford University, who bet with his roommate (after the launch of Google Instant) and built a real-time YouTube search in 3 hours!

The discovery of a similar looking character in an arcade-style action game of 90s by Atari titled, Gauntlet: The Third Encounter has caused much stir in the blogosphere today. Google’s Android logo has turned out to be a look alike of one of the characters of the game. Surprisingly, even the name of the character (“Android”) is same, among others namely Wizard, Valkyrie, Samurai, Gunfighter, Pirate, Punk Rocker, and Nerd. Developed and published by Atari Games in the 1990 for the Atari Lynx, Gauntlet is considered as one of the most popular multiplayer arcade role-playing game of that time....