Google may dominate the online world, but they are finding out the hard way that jumping into the mobile phone industry is a different story entirely.

In November, Google, along with more than 30 partners, announced that they would be offering handsets based off of their mobile software, Android. At the time, Google was confident that they would be able to have these phones on the market sometime during the early part of the second half of 2008. Of course, a project of this magnitude can change many times over and is based on thousands of factors. For this reason, Google has announced that the phones will not be made available to the public until sometime during the 4th quarter.

Although the project has been delayed by several months, many insiders are still reporting that many carriers are having a difficult time keeping up. The same holds true for companies that are working on programs for the Android operating system.

T-Mobile believes that they will be able to have an Android powered phone offered in the United States by the 4th quarter. That being said, since Google is working so closely with T-Mobile, it has pushed other carriers further behind. For instance, Sprint Nextel was hoping to also launch during the 4th quarter, but it now appears that they will have to wait until 2009 to move forward.

The United States mobile market is not the only one missing out due to these delays. China Mobile, a company with 400 million subscribers, had major plans to launch an Android powered phone during the 3rd quarter of 2008. This project is believed to have been put off until late this year, or early 2009.

It is safe to say that Google has a thing or two to learn about the cell phone industry. When the company’s phones finally arrive, they will be up against stiff competition from the likes of Apple as well as many others. The results are sure to attract a lot of attention!

As you have probably heard by now, all communication between Yahoo and Microsoft has been broken off. Just a couple of months ago it appeared that the two companies would work out a deal in which Microsoft was to purchase Yahoo for tens of billions of dollars. But although Yahoo did not strike a deal with Microsoft, they are still in the news. This time around, it appears that the company is going to strike up a partnership with search engine giant, Google.

On the surface, the terms of the partnership are simple: Yahoo will now have the ability to display Google ads with some of their search results. This covers results on both Yahoo search as well as publisher networks in Canada and the United States.

At this time, it is believed that Yahoo will have full control over which pages the Google ads will appear. To go along with this, it is not known how the company will decide which pages to use and which ones to leave out. Sue Decker, Yahoo President said, “We wanted to make sure we’d have control in the advertiser segments we’re comparable with or superior in performance.”

The big question is: is Yahoo going to be able to make additional profits through this partnership? With their current business model struggling, Yahoo has not been able to make up any ground on Google. Luckily for them, it is thought that they will be able to generate up to $450 million in cash flow through this deal. Obviously, this is good for the company as they will hopefully be able to steady a ship that has been rocked when the Microsoft deal fell through.

Although many tech savvy web users are confused by this partnership, it is safe to say that things will clear up over the months to come. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if there are any other developments between the two biggest players in the search engine industry.

In January, rumors started to surface that Google was working on a virtual world to be based on their ever popular Google Earth platform. While these rumors were never confirmed or denied, it seems that the public is getting closer to answer as each day goes by. There is word circulating around the tech industry that Google will be testing their virtual world on the campus of Arizona State University.

Google Operating System has released the following information: Arizona State University students will have the chance to test a new product that is set to be launched late in 2007 by a major internet company. Additionally, this new product is said to be related to video games as well as social networking. As you can see, it appears that Google is doing all it can to build the hype around this new product before it becomes available to the rest of the world.

Second Life is the main player in the virtual world at this time. It is hard to say if Google’s new product is going to be a true competitor. But one thing is for sure; Google definitely has the technology, power, and platform in place to make this happen.

Many feel that Google’s virtual world will be closer to IBM’s virtual world than to what Second Life has to offer.

Even though everything is still in the “rumor stage” at this time, there is no denying that Google is working on something big. After the students at Arizona State get their chance at the product, the rest of the world will be able to jump in on the action.

It is safe to say that Google has become quite comfortable with large product launches like this. There is no reason to think that this one will be anything less than a huge success!

Ars Technica has more about this and the name of is supposed to be “My World”

So what exactly does the title mean? At Google, a noogler is known as a new employee. The Reactor is what employees call the back end operations of the ever popular Google Reader.

Although the video has since been removed from the Google website, several sources did get a good look at it, and have made it well known what the video was all about. Here are some of the major points that are touched on. More…

1. The backend of the feed grows at an astonishing pace of approximately 4 percent per week. It contains data from just about eight million feeds.
2. More social features are bound to show up in the near future. The social team is working diligently on these projects, and once complete they are sure to increase the overall usability of this tool.
3. Soon enough Google Reader will be able to recommended new feeds. This will be based on Google activity as well as feeds that have been subscribed to in the past.
4. FeedBurner statistics confirm that Google Reader is the largest full content reader in the world. As far as headline readers are concerned Yahoo has the advantage. But with iGoogle increasing in popularity this may change very soon.

As you can imagine, this video was never supposed to get into the hands of the public. Even though it did not contain any top secret information, there were some useful tidbits (such as the ones above) that are quite interesting. If nothing else, this will give the public an idea of what direction Google is moving in.

Fans of YouTube are beginning to weigh in on the advertisements that are being added to the site. Some people have found the ads to be annoying, others don’t mind them, and of course, many are thinking about how they can profit from them. While there are sure to be thousands of opinions on this move, one thing is for sure: Google will finally start to make money off of YouTube.

The ads on YouTube appear when a video begins, and cuts out after 10 seconds. Located at the bottom of the video, it is safe to say that the ads are definitely in a visible area. The placement of the ads is one thing that seems to be bothering most YouTube fanatics. But with that being said, YouTube was not nearly as obtrusive with the ads as they could have been.

For now, the YouTube ads will only be available to users in the United States. This has annoyed many international users who are wondering when they will have the opportunity to get a closer look.

YouTube has stated that they will only use ads on videos that are created and posted by “select partners.” Google is going to charge $20 for every 1,000 page views, and also has plans on sharing revenue with their partners.

All in all, most YouTube users agree that the ads will eventually become commonplace, and will be ignored in time. Even though they may be disruptive at this time, soon enough most people will not think twice about them.

With the chance to make money through the videos that they post, some users are taking kindly to this move by Google. After all, this is a great way for some of the more popular users to earn a nice income.

It will be interesting to see what Google and YouTube come up with next. Users are split as to the current ad format, and only time will tell if this will change.

(You can view a sample of the ads.)

I also found the following to be worth mentioning: while not at all a new feature, iPod users are able to put a subway map of their choice city in their respective (nano, photo, and video) iPods. City subway maps include: New York, New York; Paris, France; Los Angeles, California, and many more.

Paths you wish to take on your trip will be highlighted plus you can add your own text and photos for annotation to truly personalize your map. Its creation of a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file will allow compatibility with the software, Google Earth.

But imagine how happy the small company that runs YouTube must be, which consists of only 67 employees. YouTube’s own success had been so powerful that their bandwidth bills have exceeded over in the millions of dollars a month. But now they need not to worry about it because of Google, who has an endless supply of money, and bandwidth.

In the end, I think that this deal is good for both Google and YouTube, and even the millions of YouTube watchers. Google will most likely make more money by inserted some type of advertisements, to monetize it, but the visitors to the site will also most likely get better quality and service. I predict that the 100mb limit to video uploads will get a long awaited boost, as we all know google is very generous with their size because we all use their more than 2 and half gigs of gmail.

Go on, have fun check out some of those hilarious youtube videos, here is one of my favorite videos from youtube.

Apply here https://checkout.google.com

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Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Gmail Pictures

Gmail Pictures allows you to associate a picture with an email address or contact. User-selected pictures show up when you roll over a name in your inbox, Contacts, or Quick Contacts list. You can choose your own photo for yourself and for your contacts, suggest a photo for a contact to use, or see what your friends have selected for themselves.

Google Search History

Google.com/searchhistory Shows all your previous google searches, for better search optimization for your later searches in google. Because they know what you search for and what you click on. You can also create bookmarks of your favorite sites and add labels, and access them on any computer and search for any bookmarks and your labels.

Google is testing a new search feature within its search results. It’s an expandable content that can display more information about a site including an image and a short text based on the content of the site, Related links, and “Inside this site” links. There is also a search “Search this site” feature. The feature is apparently in testing phase as it appears only randomly.

Via (http://www.yellowpipe.com)

That may not sound like much but it all adds up when you realise that Americans alone did more than 2.7 billion searches via Google in January 2006, according to figures gathered by Nielsen/NetRatings. The analyst firm estimates that 48% of the 5.7 billion searches carried out by Americans in January were done via Google. It also said that 39% more searches were done in January 2006 than in the same month in 2005. But, said the firm, this was not because search engines were doing a bad job.

BBC News