Google

Google has upgraded its Priority Inbox, a recently launched Gmail feature that automatically places important mail on top of your inbox, with a couple of improvements based on user feedback. The Priority Inbox now reacts much faster to users’ manual corrections. Furthermore, if you hover the mouse cursor over the importance marker of individual emails, you’ll see a short explanation of why that message is considered important. As far as what kind of impact the Priority Inbox has had on Gmail users, Google claims that typical Priority Inbox users spend 43% more time reading important mail compared to unimportant, and 15% less time reading email overall, when compared to Gmail users who don’t use the Priority Inbox. ...

Google has finally announced its new phone ‘Nexus S’ manufactured by Samsung and is the first phone powered by the latest Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS. Nexus S is a successor of Nexus One and looks an amazing Android phone with powerful hardware. Nexus S Official Specifications: Connectivity Quad-band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900 Tri-band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700 HSPA type: HSDPA (7.2Mbps) HSUPA (5.76Mbps) Wi-Fi 802.11 n/b/g Bluetooth 2.1+EDR Near Field Communication (NFC) Assisted GPS (A-GPS) microUSB 2.0 Display 4.0″ WVGA (480×800) Contour Display with curved glass screen Super AMOLED 235 ppi Capacitive touch sensor Anti-fingerprint display coating Size and weight 63mm x 123.9mm x 10.88mm 129g Hardware Haptic feedback vibration Three-axis gyroscope Accelerometer Digital compass Proximity sensor Light sensor Processor and memory 1GHz Cortex A8 (Hummingbird) processor 16GB iNAND flash memory Cameras and multimedia Back-facing: 5 megapixels (2560×1920) 720 x 480 video resolution H.264, H.263 MPEG4 video recording Auto focus Flash Front-facing: VGA (640×480) 3.5mm, 4-conductor headset jack (stereo audio plus microphone) Earpiece and microphone Software noise-cancellation Battery Talk time up to 6.7 hours on 3G (14 hours on 2G) Standby time up to 17.8 days on 3G (29.7 days on 2G) 1500 mAH Lithum Ion Software Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) Android Market Calendar Gmail Google Earth Google Maps with Navigation Google Search Google Talk Google Voice Voice Actions YouTube Official Video – Introducing Nexus S ...

Google’s Chrome team has sent out invites to a press event in San Francisco, “where we plan to share some exciting news about Chrome,” the invitation reads. The event will be hosted at DogPatch Labs’ San Francisco office on Tuesday, December 7 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. PT. We will be reporting live from the event. We expect the team will unveil the long-awaited Chrome OS, the first operating system Google has designed for traditional computers, such as desktop PCs, laptops and netbooks, rather than smartphones and/or tablets. ...

Google announced on Friday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Widevine, a Seattle-based company that has focused on DRM and security for streaming internet media for the last decade. “The Widevine team has worked to provide a better video delivery experience for businesses of all kinds: from the studios that create your favorite shows and movies, to the cable systems and channels that broadcast them online and on TV, to the hardware manufacturers that let you watch that content on a variety of devices,” said Mario Queiroz, Google Vice President of Product Management. ...

Screen Capture (by Google) is an effective and useful extension for Google Chrome, which allows users to quickly and easily capture quality screenshots of Web Pages. The extension has 3 screen capture modes: capture visible content of a tab, a region of a web page, or the whole scrolling webpage as a PNG image. It also offers some editing tools to edit the screenshot before saving it. The screen captures can also be copied to clipboard in a simple click. ...

Google just released version 8 of its web browser Chrome. It fixes 13 security vulnerabilities of which 4 got rated “high”ly critical – the people reporting these all got rewarded with 1.000 US-$ and 500 US-$, respectively. Additionally to these security fixes, the update to Chrome 8.0.552.215 contains more than 800 bugfixes and stability improvements according to the Google developers. The new version officially includes and uses the built-in, stripped-down PDF reader which is additionally secured with a sandbox. This feature, tied together with Googles sandboxing of the browser processes in general and including and updating the Flash Player automatically makes Chrome one of the most secure, yet full-featured web browsers currently available. ...

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that’s really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the “Share” button and copy the link. Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it’s not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled “Linked Comment”. You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment.

Google Earth 6 doesn’t have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. “To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available,” explains Google. ...

Google Chrome has always supported multiple profiles, but you had to use a command-line flag (–user-data-dir=”c:\path\to\the\profile”) to associate a profile with a folder where the browser will save its state. At some point, Google added an option that allowed you to open a new window and use a separate profile, but it was quickly removed. According to a design document from Chromium’s site, this feature be available again. “The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to associate a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running instance of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows associated with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on — all those elements which are bound to a specific user’s identity.” ...

Reuters: Google Inc plans to hire more than 2,000 people around the globe, bumping up its workforce as it expands into new markets and battles for talent with faster-growing rivals. The world’s largest Internet search engine, whose finance chief told investors in September that the Internet industry was waging a “war for talent,” has job openings listed for 2,076 positions on its website, according to a Reuters tally on Thursday. ...

Native Google Docs support has finally arrived for Android and iOS (the mobile version of Google Docs has been available for over three years). Edits show up in near real-time (so they aren’t completely seamless) and Android even lets you insert text using voice recognition. The biggest improvement is the new layout, which makes mobile document editing much easier and allows for collaboration from other Docs users. Currently, Google Docs supports devices with Android 2.2 (codename Froyo) and up, as well as Apple devices with iOS version 3.0 or newer. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t specify if third-party browsers will work with the new Google Docs or whether it plans on adding new platforms such as Windows Phone and webOS. ...

Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...

Mashable: If you live for data, slave over spreadsheets and constantly find yourself sifting through endless rows and columns of facts and figures, Google’s got a lovely new product just for you — and it’s free and open-source, too. Google Refine is a project born of Freebase Gridworks, a data-cleaning tool Google acquired when it bought Metaweb during the summer. Google has since renamed Gridworks and relaunched it as Refine. ...

Mashable: If you didn’t think the Nexus S was real, perhaps these pictures of the purported device will convince you otherwise. Kudos to Engadget, which was the first publication to get pictures of the mythical successor to the Nexus One. As we reported earlier today, the device is built by Samsung and has a lot of similarities to the Galaxy S Android phone. According to multiple reports, the Nexus S runs Gingerbread (Android 2.3), sports a 4-inch AMOLED screen, sports a curved back, hosts a front-facing camera and will be available on T-Mobile. It’s expected to be announced at the same time as Google’s official Gingerbread announcement. ...

This is amazing news indeed. Its has been feature talk with many of clients and colleagues all long for many years. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well. ...