Hasta La Gadget!

Google today started rolling out the latest version of its Google Play services for Android. Just like earlier updates, version 4.1 brings a number of incremental changes to the company’s service for integrating Google services into mobile apps. The rollout is currently in process and should land on all Android devices worldwide within the next few days.

Today’s update brings support for turn-based multiplayer games to Play services, for example. With this, developers can easily build asynchronous games with up to eight participants. Every time a player takes a turn, the data is uploaded to Google’s servers and shared with the other players. Google has integrated this service with its tools for matching players with others, too.

Also new in this update is improved support for Google+ sharing. This, the company says, will make it “even easier for users to share with the right people from your app.” As part of this update, users will be able to get auto-complete support and suggested recipients for all Gmail contacts, device contacts and people on Google+.

Developers can now also use Play services to access Google Drive through a new API that’s now in preview. With this, they can read and write files in Drive. Users will be able to work on these files offline, and changes will be synced automatically.

For developers who use Google’s ad products, this new version introduces full support for DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Search Ads for Mobile Apps. What’s most interesting for advertisers, though, is that publishers can now also use a new location API to give Google access to a user’s location when requesting ads. Location-based ads are likely to perform better than generic ads, after all, though users have generally been a bit nervous about sharing this data with advertisers given the potential privacy ramifications.

One other feature most users will likely appreciate is improved battery life. While Google isn’t sharing any details about this, the company said that anybody who has Google Location Reporting turned on should see longer battery life after this update, though whether that means less than 1 percent more (likely) or 10 percent more (very unlikely) remains to be seen.

This article was written on August 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Most of you are familiar with Google Trends by now, it’s Google’s application for telling you what’s hot around the web as far as search queries go. It launched into Google Labs back in mid-2006 and since then they’ve added some features to it every now and then. If you understand what Google Trends is, you’ll probably be wondering why it is that Google just launched Google Insights as a separate application. This is something that they could have easily integrated into trends, but they didn’t. So what is it?

Google Insights allows you to “see what the world is searching for.” Unlike Google Trends, Google Insights looks as though they are trying to cater to advertisers and businesses. They say, “With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.” If you were an advertiser trying to figure out geographical regions to target and what people are interested in, Google Insights would be a great tool to have at your disposal.

We decided to search for Apple iPhone since that’s been a hot topic lately. Once I entered my search term (which you can add multiple terms, if you’d like) I could filter it by location, time, or category. I decided to filter it only by time – filtering by the last 90 days. Here are the results I got:

Interestingly enough, we found that the number one place where people are interested in the iPhone is India, a country where the device isn’t even available yet, followed by Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

Another interesting feature we found was that once you perform a search, next to the graph you’ll see a little box with a lightbulb that says, “See worldwide top rising searches by clearing the search terms.” We did this and found the top rising searches from 2004 to the present include:

• youtube
• you tube
• myspace
• facebook
• orkut

Overall we’d say Google Insights for Search is a nice tool to have if you are an advertiser, but it would have made sense for Google to integrate it into Google Trends.

Source: Lifehacker

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

The last five years have been full of reinvention for Motorola; it’s gone from being kind of a dinosaur, to launching the super-popular Droid line, to being swallowed up by Google, to making some of the best, easiest-to-use smartphones out there. It’s been quite a roller-coaster.

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Google has been slapped with a fine by France’s CNIL, a data protection entity that has taken issue with the Internet giant’s privacy policy migration into a single unit. Though … Continue reading

Do you cringe when you hear people talk about Google Glasses? So does Google, it seems. The company today released a set of branding guidelines for its developers to clarify how they can use the Glass™ icon and brand name in their products.

Update: looks like the guidelines were actually on the Glass Developer site before, but mostly went unnoticed. Google recently updated the navigation of the site (that’s how I found out about them) and made the link to the branding guidelines more obvious, likely to emphasize most of the rules we describe below.

In this document, Google stresses that “Glass” can never be part of the name of a company that produces software for Glass, for example. You can call a product “Cat Facts for Glass” but never “Glass Cat Facts.” It’s okay to use “Glass” as a descriptor (Glass optics), though.

Google also stresses that whenever you use the “for Glass” construction in your logo, “for Glass” must be a smaller size than the rest.

Another rule states that Glass is always supposed to be capitalized and “is never plural or possessive.” This means, you aren’t supposed to say “”Wear Google Glasses” or “Swipe forward on Glass’s timeline.” I can see why the plural doesn’t make sense, given that the product name is Glass, but the only reason not to use the possessive, it seems, is that any word that ends with an ‘s’ always looks a bit off once it becomes a possessive.

One interesting guideline Google notes is that whenever users share content through Glass, developers are supposed to use the #throughglass hashtag “to categorize it for easy discoverability and aggregation” or “Sent through Glass” in emails.

Most of this is pretty straightforward (except for the odd rule around the possessive). It does show, however, that as more Glass software slowly becomes available now that the Glass Development Kit is in “Sneak Peak,” Google is starting to lay down a few more rules for developers.

Glass is a trademark of Google Inc.