Google

Google has given all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%, a loyal reader tells us. The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011. In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance. ...

Reuters: Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants. Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users’ information. ...

For Google Chrome users, viewing PDFs in the browser has been a colossal pain for lo these many moons. That’s why we are (and you should be) thrilled to learn that Google is rolling out a better way to look at PDFs in Chrome. For the time being, Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer will be available through the beta version only. If you’re using the non-beta version of Chrome, you can download the beta to get the PDF-related improvements or enable the PDF viewer by typing about:plugins in address-bar and enable PDF viewer. ...

Mashable: A beta version of Google Instant is now available on many U.S. iPhone and Android mobile devices. According to the Google Blog, the Instant search option is presently on Android 2.2 devices, as well as iPhones and iPods running on iOS 4. As of right now, Google Instant is only available in English, although Google plans on adding more languages and bringing the service to other countries and devices. ...

Mashable: Today marks exactly three years since Google and a slew of hardware and carrier partners officially announced the Android mobile operating system. It was almost a year after that before the first major Android handset was released – the G1 on T-Mobile – and not until late 2009 that the Motorola Droid, complete with an aggressive ad campaign, catapulted the platform into the mainstream consciousness. Today, a wide variety of manufacturers are producing Android phones, and they’re sold on all major carriers in the U.S. In fact, in aggregate they’re now outselling those running on Apple’s iOS, with recent numbers putting Google’s share of the mobile operating system market at nearly 20%. ...

The Redmond company today published its announcement for the upcoming November Patch Tuesday. Microsoft wants to release 3 security bulletins which deal with 11 security vulnerabilities within Office and PowerPoint (up to the brand new Office 2011 for Mac) and Forefront Unified Access Gateway. A patch for the just recently detected 0-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer is not in the list. Adobe meanwhile ships an update for the Flash Player to version 10.1.102.64 today and plans one for the Reader and Acrobat next week. The Flash update is available via the Download Center and fixes the“authplay” vulnerability which got public last week. But the company has to deal with a new security vulnerability as well. It’s not yet exploited and it remains currently unknown whether it is exploitable to infect PCs with malware, but Adobe investigates the flaw. On a public security list a so-called Proof-of-Concept (PoC) has been published which just shows a Denial-of-Service attack. ...

Google Operation System blog: Google Chrome is the first browser that has a meaningless version number. Since Chrome is automatically updated, most people use the latest version of the software a few days after it’s released. Google’s help articles aren’t the only ones that ignore Chrome’s version number. Yahoo has recently released a report that recommends developers to assume that Chrome users are running the latest version. “Chrome has been progressing rapidly through versions, and Google has communicated its intent to continue rapid development and short release cycles. As a result, we’ve modified our strategy for Chrome to advise testing on the latest [generally available] release of Chrome as soon as it is issued, with prior versions moving to X-grade as soon as they are superseded.” ...

Wall Street Journal: It looks like Steve Jobs may have something to be nervous about after all. Google Inc.’s Android platform has taken the lead in the U.S. smartphone market, according to several new reports by technology research firms. In the third quarter, devices with the Android operating system were installed in 44% of smartphones, while Apple Inc.’s iPhone came in second place with 23%, according to market research firm, NPD Group. RIM’s BlackBerry trailed behind in third place with 22%. One big caveat: NPD tracks consumer activity, but doesn’t measure corporate cellphone purchases. ...

There are a lot of URL shortening services out there, but Pingdom has worked out which is the fastest. Reliability and performance is key for URL shortening services and Goo.gl is on top! As you can see from the above chart Goo.gl has the fastest service in all locations. Additionally, it was reported that they have a 100% uptime. So if you have already checked out the Goo.gl service then make sure you take a look.

Google Docs may soon be getting an update that will help it better compete against Microsoft’s latest cloud based Office product and make its upcoming Chrome OS a whole lot more useful. Top among the new features is cloud printing, which will let you print documents — whether web-based, on a mobile device or desktop — to any Internet-connected printer anywhere in the world. The cloud printing service was announced a few months ago as part of its web-centric operating system’s capabilities, so the update to Docs makes sense if Google wants to make Chrome OS + Docs a better rival to Microsoft’s Windows and Office, for example. Basically Google is doing away with the need of locally stored drivers by keeping them on their servers and simply sending the print job to the appropriate printer. ...

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Geographic and Local Services, joined in 1999 as the company’s 20th employee. During a recent 22-minute interview on Digg Dialogg, Mayer was asked “What do you think Google’s biggest mistake has been during your presence there?” Mayer’s answer pertained to three products: Wave, Dejanews.com, and Gmail. “Wave. Certainly there are things we’ve learnt from that, certain things we would have done differently,” Mayer said without any hesitation (this one we’re not really too surprised about). “Shutting down Dejanews.com at 11am on a Monday morning, and not having anywhere to post to or browse usergroups was perhaps a mistake,” she also admitted (Dejanews was a discussion group website on the Usenet network which Google shutdown and silently archived to its Google Groups service). “Launching Gmail on April Fools day was widely misinterpreted,” she added as a final thought (Google often “launches” ridiculous products on April Fools, so many thought Gmail was a joke until they realized it was still around the next day). ...

Google Scribe may not seem very useful, but it’s one of the features that could significantly improve virtual keyboards from mobile phones. Instead of showing suggestions from a dictionary, Google Scribe can provide contextually-relevant suggestions. Scrybe is a free Android keyboard that uses Google Scribe to generate suggestions. It’s not developed by Google and it uses an unofficial Google Scribe API, but it’s an interesting application. ...

Let’s take a look in the Email I got from Google right now: Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year. Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case. ...

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered hiring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the company’s first CEO, according to a new documentary. After interviewing a dozen unsuitable candidates during Google’s early years, Page and Brin went to meet Jobs, a personal “hero” of theirs. The pair then asked investor John Doerr, “Why can’t he be our CEO?” The anecdote comes from an episode on Page and Brin from the Bloomberg documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers.” Earlier this month, the Bloomberg series, which looks at “today’s most influential leaders,” aired an episode on Jobs. ...

Gmail has just added a new “Labs” feature that should save you some time if you’re the type of person that tends to plow through your e-mail inbox in bunches. As the name implies, the new “Auto-advance” option (that can be enabled under “Settings” > “Labs”) lets you automatically move to the previous or next conversation after archiving, deleting or muting an individual e-mail message. While that might sound like expected behavior, up until today, Gmail simply took you back to your inbox after taking any of those actions, meaning you essentially needed to scroll back down to wherever you were in your attempt at e-mail triage. ...