Technology Blog

The long awaited Google Earth app for iPad has just gone live in the iTunes App Store. This is basically Google Earth 3.0 which comes as a universal binary to support both iPhone and iPad. The official description of the app is as follows.

If you have a Nexus One running Android 2.1 then there’s some awesome news for you! Nexus One has been hacked to record video in high definition (720p), all thanks to a member of XDA-Developers Forums. 


 

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he'll explore where our industry is and where it's going -- on both micro and macro levels -- with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

  

According to the sources at TechCrunch, the next version of iPhone OS, which is set to release this June will have Bing as its default search engine in Mobile Safari. Microsoft and Apple have reportedly been in talks over a possible search deal since January of this year, but since then there has been no real news on this.

On2 VP8 achieves high compression with a bitstream that is less compute intensive to decode than either its predecessor (VP7) or competing technologies like H.264. Here's how it works.  

Google made some waves yesterday when it announced the new Google TV platform, backed by major players like Sony, Logitech, Intel, Dish Network, and Best Buy. Built on Android and featuring the Chrome browser with a full version of Flash Player 10.1, Google TV is supposed to bring "the web to your TV and your TV to the web," in Google's words. It's a lofty goal that many have failed to accomplish, but Google certainly has the money and muscle to pull it off. But hold up: what is Google TV, exactly, and why do all these companies think it's going to revolutionize the way we watch TV? Let's take a quick walk through the platform and see what's what.

Google Inc. is attempting to answer the increasingly difficult question posed by television viewers faced with hundreds of programming choices: What should I watch?

 

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) is disputing Google (NSDQ:GOOG)'s recent suggestion that companies should hold off on upgrading to Office 2010 and instead use their existing versions of Office in conjunction with Google Docs. Google's rationale is that Google Docs actually makes Office 2003 and 2007 better because it can store Microsoft Office documents in the cloud and share them in their original format. Google also plans to add real-time collaboration from within Office documents in the coming months using technology it gained from its March acquisition of DocVerse.
But Alex Payne, director of Microsoft's online product management team, says Google's position that Office 2007 and 2003 can work seamlessly together isn't accurate, in part because Google Docs converts Office files into a different file format for viewing and editing, which strips out fonts, styles, charts, and other page elements.
In fact, Microsoft has made sure that Office 2010 files created with the rich client are "almost identical" when viewed through a Web browser using Office Web Apps, according to Payne. "We strive for high fidelity between the PC, phone and the browser and we are very excited about the new collaboration capabilities this will enable," Payne said in a Tuesday blog post.
Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division and one of the company's foremost cloud proponents, also dismissed Google's claims of Office-Docs interoperability.

The new beta of Chrome for Windows is nearly a fifth faster than its more stable sibling, but still lags behind speed leader Opera, benchmark tests show.  

 

Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, has acquired Bump Technologies Inc., a company whose software makes computer desktops appear to be 3-D.

This is an overview of the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth as it currently exists with Google Earth 5. The 3D Buildings layer has evolved a great deal since Google Earth was first released. In the early days, Google only provided simple 3D gray buildings with no color or photo textures (see example). Over time, as Google Earth graphics capabilities advanced, the 3D Buildings layer models have become much more realistic and interesting. You can now find many complete 3D cities rendered in photorealistic detail in the layer for Google Earth. One of the biggest detailed examples is New York City.

 

If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy! 

Client for Google Translate — this is a free translator for Windows which enables the fast translation of text in the majority of applications, such as Outlook, MS Word, Internet Explorer, and Firefox using the Google Translate service.
Google Translate is one of the most popular computer-aided translation services, however, using an online-translator for text translation is inconvenient: you have to launch the browser, open the website, copy and paste the text, select the language... Too time-consuming!

Google has explained how it intends to print from its browser-obsessed Chrome OS netbooks. Naturally, it will send all your jobs across the net, through its servers, and back down to a PC elsewhere in the room.
In fact, Google intends to send all your print jobs through its servers, whether they're coming from a desktop or a mobile or some other notebook that has nothing to do with Chrome OS. Well, through its servers or - in theory - someone else's.