Hasta La Gadget!

Google Fiber is already settling down in Kansas City, and it’s been slowly making its way to more neighborhoods in the area over the past few months. However, speculators have been wondering where the search giant will take their internet service next. According to recent reports, home of the SXSW festival Austin, Texas may be getting a deal.

According to VentureBeat, Google and the City of Austin have sent out special invites for a press conference next week for “a very important announcement.” Of course, at this point, we know that when Google is partnering up with a city government body, it’s assumed that one of the things to possibly be in the works is Google Fiber.

Of course, that’s not always the case, but it seems the evidence heavily favors Austin as a hot spot for Google Fiber internet, since it’s a tech-based city with many technology-based companies located in the city, as well as a number of startups. And of course, the city is home to the annual SXSW festival that has become more and more of a technology-centric festival.

The invitation lists April 9 at 11 AM as the announcement date, and it’s expected that “more than 100 community leaders and elected officials to be in attendance to celebrate this announcement.” We’ll keep our ear to the ground throughout the weekend, and by Monday afternoon, we should be hearing official word about what Google is up to in the Lonestar State.

[via VentureBeat]

Google Fiber reportedly coming to Austin, Texas is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Business battles are often ecosystem battles, in which brands develop a matrix of conveniently connected products and services, in an attempt to lock customers into a dependency. Offline companies follow this tack (think razors and blades). But the internet, with its many connection nodes, crossovers to tangential realms and parallel on-ramps is where ecosystem wars are most elaborately waged.

Only rarely do market conditions cultivate a broader ambition in which a company has a chance to step beyond mere ecosystem competition to a higher level of sovereignty. Facebook’s imminent release of Home represents a stab at that rare imperialism.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, HTC, Facebook

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Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. The true ramifications aren’t entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won’t be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won’t actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won’t prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork — the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works.

Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it’s expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it’s already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit’s baggage.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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The Internet is great and all, but the fake Internet on TV is even better. This mashup from Slacktory takes you on a whirlwind tour of all the best (read: worst) sites that (probably) don’t and shouldn’t exist. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to kickin’ it on WinAtBingoAndRock.com. [Slacktory] More »

The Firefox folks have been talking up the latest additions to the browser’s beta streams for Android and desktop users. If you’ve signed up for the former, then you’ll soon see open-source fonts Charis and Open Sans replacing the default lettering in the OS, for a more “visually appealing and clear reading experience” — as well as some HTML5 compatibility tweaks. On the desktop side, users will find more granular “do not track” options as well as letting you now re-open tab thumbnails that you’d previously closed. As for us? We’re still waiting for the G-Fox version of the beta, where we navigate the internet through the power of cuddling.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: Firefox, (2)