Hasta La Gadget!

If you can’t fix it, buy someone who can. That must be Google’s rationale behind this latest acquisition, as the proprietor of YouTube has just bought Green Parrot Pictures, a company concerned solely with enhancing and improving the quality of video content. Through the use of some fancy motion prediction algorithms, the Irish startup has been able to build a name for itself over the past few years, and now it’s been snapped up by the biggest fish in the online video ocean. The removal of flicker, noise and blotches from poorly executed recordings sounds nice, but we’re most excited by Green Parrot’s video stabilization feature. With all the cameraphone video being uploaded nowadays, there’s plenty of camera shake populating YouTube’s archives, and the addition of such a potent post-production technique seems like a veritable boon to us. Check out video demos of the stabilization algorithm and Green Parrot’s other technologies below.

Continue reading Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye

Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now this is the sort of activity you’d expect from a true search giant. Instead of sitting on its hands during the tsunami that has stricken Japan today, Google has put together a Person Finder tool where people worried about the plight of their loved ones can look them up by name. There are only a few thousand records up on the site at the moment, but it should still be a useful repository for missing person data, particularly since mobile networks were taken down by the tsunami’s damage earlier this morning. Information should also start piling up as recovery efforts continue. Let’s just hope this Person Finder won’t have to be used for too long and things can be brought back to normal soon.

Continue reading Google reacts to Japanese tsunami with a Person Finder tool

Google reacts to Japanese tsunami with a Person Finder tool originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 07:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe’s Flash Player 10.2 is (somewhat infamously) still absent from mobile devices, but the company is bravely promising that its brand new desktop beta of version 10.3 will be coming to both desktop and mobile devices “soon.” Improvements in the latest iteration include some acoustic hocus pocus for better internet telephony, new video analytics APIs, privacy controls integrated into browser settings in Firefox 4 and IE8 (Chrome and Safari to follow), and native control panel integration with both Mac’s System Preferences and Windows’ Control Panel. Beta testing ends in Q2 2011 for the desktop and a mobile release should follow swiftly thereafter. As to when we’ll finally be able to stop discussing which devices have or can run Flash, not even Adobe could provide us with a reliable roadmap for that.

Adobe Flash Player 10.3 enters beta before Q2 release on desktop, mobile to follow soon after that originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Mar 2011 03:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The internet, it’s kind of a big deal. So much of a big deal, in fact, that UK property search site Rightmove is said to be planning to list broadband speeds as part of its standard information package for homes up for rent or sale. This would be done in partnership with BT, reports the Daily Telegraph, though neither company is yet ready to make the deal official. BT would have little trouble providing the data in question since most of the UK is connected to its ADSL lines — every ISP in the country outside of Virgin Media just resells BT’s copper wire — or newfangled Infinity fiber optic services. Part of this new agreement will involve Rightmove displaying whether or not homes are capable of connecting to the newer, faster Infinity network — which mirrors Virgin’s efforts at informing people whether they’re covered by its cable internet through deals with independent estate agents. Soon there should be no excuses for Brits getting stuck in a picturesque home with a grotesquely slow web connection.

British property search engine Rightmove will soon list broadband speeds alongside standard home info originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How far we’ve come from the heady days when Microsoft was willing to splash $44 billion to acquire Yahoo! Since then, the online portal has done whatever the opposite of going from strength to strength is, and today it’s suffered the somewhat predictable ignominy of losing its second spot in search to Microsoft’s upstart Bing. Statcounter places the February global share of search at 4.4 percent for Microsoft and 3.9 percent for Yahoo! (the Redmond giant can actually lay claim to a bigger slice since Bing “powers” Yahoo! search results in some countries), neither of which should give Google much reason for concern while it’s sitting pretty with a share of just under 90 percent. It’s the first time Google has dipped below the 90 percent mark for a long time, but Statcounter says “it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon.” So that settles that.

Continue reading Bing advances past Yahoo! to become world’s second most used search engine — with 4.4 percent

Bing advances past Yahoo! to become world’s second most used search engine — with 4.4 percent originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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