901am

New Media News Every Morning

Verizon iPad Or Sprint iPhone?

By

After rumors began surfacing over a Verizon iPhone, CEO Ivan Seidenberg decided to shatter the dreams of millions of iGeeks by dismissing the possibility of a Verizon iPhone in the near future.

Seidenberg, talking to investors at the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference in New York, said until Apple introduces a long term evolution (LTE) supported device, it will not be bringing any of the Cupertino based company’s phones to its network. Verizon said it’s excited about the build up of its LTE network, which will support fourth generation technology. Additionally, it said the company has done just fine with Google Android phones. (International Business Times) [Read more…]

Originally posted on September 24, 2010 @ 4:59 pm

Google: Why Use Bing! When You Can Search At The Speed Of Type

By

It wasn’t enough for the search engine giant to perfect real time search (making Twitter’s tweet stream useful for the first time) as it looks like the boys and girls at Google have once again redefined search while at the same time burying their competition.

Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.

As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful. (Official Google Blog)

Despite the fact that Google already rules the search universe, it looks like the Mountain View giant’s latest innovation makes Bing! almost irrelevant, despite the latter’s assimilation of Yahoo! earlier.

If Google is able to successfully port this feature over to the mobile-verse, Bing! could be even further marginalized by Google who right now dominates the mobile map market as well as commands over 98% of the mobile search market.

Unless Microsoft has a secret weapon of some kind (perhaps the upcoming Windows 7 Phone?), Bing!’s attempts at dethroning Google just went from difficult to near impossible.

Originally posted on September 8, 2010 @ 3:06 pm

Google Voice To Email Missed Calls To You?

By

After introducing the Gmail masses to Google Voice, it looks like the search engine giant now will send you an email anytime you miss a call.

Google Voice lets you take charge of your telephony experience, giving you one number that rings all your phones. But what if you’re not around to answer any of them?

Starting today, whenever you miss a call, you can see a notification in your Google Voice inbox, or receive an email notification, or both. (Google Voice Blog)

Users can log into Google Voice in order to adjust their settings, although they may want to make sure incoming Google Voice emails are marked as “important” (for those of you who have embraced Gmail’s priority inbox).

While Android users will probably have no need for this, iPhone lovers will probably appreciate this feature due to the fact that El Jobso has banned Google Voice from the app store.

Although this feature does not in any way help convince Skype lovers to ditch the VoIP king for Google (as Skype already emails me whenever I receive a voicemail), it should help Google remain somewhat relevant for users of the service.

Originally posted on September 7, 2010 @ 12:58 pm

Cops Raid Wikileaks (Pirate Bay Too?)

By

After causing controversy throughout the world for exposing classified information, it looks like Swedish police have begun raiding buildings in search of servers hosting Wikileaks as well as The Pirate Bay.

The Swedish police had raided the premises of the host PRQ of Sweden in Solna in Sweden. This “host activist, who advocates a radical conception of freedom of expression, including the servers hosting the download site The Pirate Bay or sites advocating pedophilia. It is also the host of Wikileaks, the site specializes in the publication of confidential documents made public this summer tens of thousands of reports of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. (Le Monde.fr Technologies)

Note: The snippet above is a Google Translation

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was previously accused of rape by Swedish officials earlier, although the charges later on were dropped do to lack of evidence.

Although the current raid thus far appears to be part of an on going investigation that (according to the article) started years ago, the Swedish’s government is probably being pressured to take a harder stance against Wikileaks by its allies (especially those in the intelligentsia).

The site thus far still seems to be fully operational (as Wikileaks probably has numerous servers located all over the world), although it probably will not be surprising to see more raids conducted against Wikileaks who seems to have earned the scorn of international governments everywhere.

(via Committee To Protect Bloggers)

Originally posted on September 7, 2010 @ 1:24 pm

Google News: Original Is Better

By

In an effort to remove the chorus of a thousand voices saying the same thing, the Google News team is now allowing users to view news services from the original source, a move that will probably appeal to many news organizations.

Enter “duplicate detection.” Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of 20 “different” articles (which actually used the exact same content), we’ll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away.

By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers’ most highly valued content: original content. (Google News Blog)

By highlighting original news sources, blogs and media outlets that break the news will be able to receive the lions share of internet traffic from Google News instead of rival (which could have a greater page rank).

Although this change will probably result in a greater de-emphasis of blogs being highlighted on Google News (to the joy of a few media outlets), it should help Google compete against larger rivals in the future (like Yahoo News).

Originally posted on August 30, 2010 @ 1:49 pm