Hasta La Gadget!

Not too long ago word broke that the company behind popular wireless smart thermostats, Nest, had been acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. This is actually one of Google’s most expensive acquisitions, its right up there with YouTube and Motorola. Despite the fact that the Nest team is now part of a much bigger company with significantly more resources, not a lot of people are happy about the acquisition, in fact some have heavily criticized it due to privacy concerns. Addressing those concerns, Nest CEO Tony Fadell has revealed that any future changes to the company’s privacy policy will be opt-in, and that Nest will be “transparent” about the changes made to the privacy policy.

Fadell made these comments at the DLD Conference in Munich. He said that right now no changes are planned, and that all user data will remain in “Nest’s world.” Though he doesn’t rule out the possibility of changes being made to the privacy policy down the line entirely, saying that whatever changes are made, Nest will be transparent about it and that customers will be able to opt-in to them if they want to. Its not hard to understand why Fadell wants these concerns to subside, part of the reason why Nest would have agreed to an acquisition would be the opportunity to expand exponentially, and with Google writing the cheques, its going to be a lot easier than ever before.

Nest CEO Tony Fadell Promises That Future Privacy Policy Changes Will Be ‘Opt-In’ original content from Ubergizmo.

What do states want, deep down inside? What to they yearn for in the dead of night? According to this delightful map from Mashable—with a little help from Google autocomplete—the answer is mostly secession. But also some pretty freaky stuff!

Read more…

This article was written on April 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

There’s no doubt that Google has a focus on making their presence known around the Globe. Their latest move of investing money into the Maxthon Web Browser could be part of this effort, and really comes as no surprise.

Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that the Maxthon Browser has sold a stake to Google worth $1 million dollars.  They’re also reporting that it’s a smaller part to the bigger picture between them. 

We’ve covered Maxthon before – it’s a web browser based upon the Internet Explorer platform that has tabbed browsing and lots of customization. It’s a cross between Firefox and Internet Explorer.Their developers are based in Beijing, as well as a good portion of their users.

Half of all Maxthon users at this point are Chinese, and in fact, 17% of the Chinese web population uses the browser for web search.

Read/Write Web points out how Firefox may feel some jealousy towards this deal.  Afterall, they’ve been Google’s #1 side kick in terms of web browsers go.  However, I don’t think Firefox really has much reason to worry.  If anything, Google is getting involved with Maxthon in hopes of making a bigger presence in China.

Another possible motive behind this is that Baidu is currently the default search for the Maxthon browser in China, and Yahoo is the default search engine elsewhere.  With this deal, one would probably expect that those default searches would change to Google all around. Smart move Google.

Maxthon (Stable Version 1.5.9) – download

Maxthon Beta 2 – download

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