Hasta La Gadget!

Ready to play PC with your smartphone? If you aren’t picking up a Lapdock 100 from AT&T on the 17th, you won’t have to wait very long — Motorola’s faux-laptop phone dock has been outed for a October 21st launch date for Sprint via an employee rewards email. Passing the Lapdock 100 Sprint Rewards Me training quiz nets employees $10 in Sprint scratch and the opportunity to sell you a rig that lets a handful of devices play netbook. The laptop shell gives users a full Firefox browser, Quick Office, Google Docs, Adobe Flash, a PC-like File Manager and a luxurious 10.1-inch screen. Still no word yet on just how much this ultra-portable peripheral will set us back, but we’ll keep hoping that it’s cheaper than the Atrix 4G’s axed lapdock.

[Thanks, David]

Motorola Lapdock 100 hits Sprint October 21st, earns employees extra scratch originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 15, 2009 by CyberNet.

Google announced today that they will be stopping development on several different services. Among those being given the ax are Google Notebook, Google Video, Google Catalog Search, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Google Mashup Editor.

I can’t say that I’m really surprised with most of those because you never hear too much about them. What makes me happy is that Google isn’t completely throwing in the towel on the services. For example, Google Video won’t accept any new submissions, but videos already posted will remain online. And the Jaiku is being ported over to the Google App Engine where it will then become an open source project.

The one service I was a bit surprised to see on the list is Google Notebook. Luckily Google is planning to leave this untouched, but as their blog describes there will no longer be any development work done:

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

I really love Google Notebook, and it’s too bad they won’t be taking it any further. My wish was that it would someday become an integrated part of Gmail, but that never happened. With the addition of Gmail Labs I still have hope that someday Gmail will get a feature that would prevent having to send those pesky “note to self” emails.

It’s time to bid farewell to these Google services. Some of them have served us well, and some will live on in our hearts. We’ll be telling stories of Jaiku and Dodgeball to our great grandchildren as we reminisce of the times we walked to school/work uphill both ways in hurricane-like weather. Those were the days, weren’t they?

[via Search Engine Land]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Before there was Google+ there was Google Buzz, the company’s big effort to stake a claim in the social networking space. That, of course, didn’t exactly work out for the search giant, and it even managed to spark some lawsuits and attract the eye of the FTC. Now Google has finally swept it under the rug in a bit of fall cleaning, stating in a blog post today that Google Buzz and the Buzz API will be shut down “in a few weeks,” and that it will now focus solely on Google+ instead. Also getting the axe is Jaiku, a social networking service that Google acquired in 2007, as well some of the social features on iGoogle, and the company’s Code Search service, which will officially be shut down along with its API on January 15th of next year. And, if that wasn’t enough, Google also confirmed that today’s the day that the Google Labs site will be shut down (its demise was announced this summer).

Google finally pulls the plug on Buzz amid ‘fall sweep’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Details are still scarce here, but the New York Times is reporting that Google is about to launch a new MP3 store, as part of its ongoing foray into the music business. According to sources within the industry, the platform, not surprisingly, would be directly linked to Google Music Beta and may launch within the next few weeks — perhaps even before Apple unveils iTunes Match, at the end of this month. It remains to be seen, however, whether Big G will be able to finalize negotiations with record labels and publishers before launching the initiative in earnest — a potentially major hurdle, considering Google’s recent track record. As you may recall, previous negotiations over a proposed locker-type storage service ultimately broke down earlier this year, amid concerns over licensing and illegal file-sharing. As one label executive told the Times, the recording industry desperately wants to “make sure the locker doesn’t become a bastion of piracy.” An MP3 store, of course, isn’t exactly a radical proposal, but its future will likely hinge upon Google’s ability to mend relations with a sector it recently characterized as “unreasonable and unsustainable.”

Google to launch MP3 store in coming weeks? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Last week it was DoubleClick, this week it’s Marratech.  Google has just announced their acquisition of Marratech , developers of web and video conferencing software.  Their main competitors would be WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco), Microsoft Live Meeting, and Adobe Connect.

Web conferencing is the newest way to share images, documents, and business plans with a group of people by holding live e-meetings, which is why this purchase makes sense.  Google is getting their hand into a little bit of everything so that eventually, people won’t have any reason to go anywhere else but Google for web the web services that they want.

I could see them integrating this into their Google Apps Premier, or even into Google Docs and Spreadsheets.   It uses Java, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms which makes it extremely versatile.

Participants of the web and video conferencing are able to see each other with the use of web cameras, and they’re able to record and playback the meetings later on.  It would also be great if they made it easy to get the conference up on Google Video in just a few clicks for those who weren’t able to attend.

In their announcement, Google says that this will “enable from-the-desktop participation for Googler’s in video-conference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.”

Google also just released their first quarter results and reported revenue of a whopping $3.66 billion! That’s an increase of 63% compared to first quarter of last year, and an increase of 14% compared to 4th quarter of 2006.

Just as their revenue is coming in, it’s going right back out with all of the recent acquisitions. It reminds me of a recent article over at Google Blogoscoped titled “Google Acquires Internet (May 2017).”

It was a mock-up press release where he “quotes” Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”

Followed by Larry Page saying, “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the Internet in smaller portions.”

Google seems to be on an acquisition kick, so who’s in queue next?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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