Google

A text conversation has revealed a big problem with the G1 mobile phone - powered by Google’s Android software.

The newly discovered bug causes the phone to restart when owners type in the word “reboot” soon after starting up the device.

Google hurried to repair the problem, which causes the phone to interpret any text entered just after the phone was turned on as a command.

Google has rushed out a fix for the bug which will soon be available in the UK.

The bug was discovered when an owner of the phone typed the word “reboot” into a text message after restarting the phone.

“I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded,” said a user called jdhorvat in the description of his discovery that was posted to Google’s problem reporting website.

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Yahoo

Yahoo said the “For Sale” sign is still on its front lawn and that Microsoft should buy the company.

The internet portal’s co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made the comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 (£21) a share offer from Microsoft back in May.

Mr Yang’s suggestion also came hours after Google pulled out of an internet advertising partnership with Yahoo.

“To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo,” said Mr Yang.

“I don’t think that is a bad idea at all, at the right price whatever that price is. We’re willing to sell the company,” he told a packed ballroom at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

During the on stage conversation in front of a standing-room only crowd, Mr Yang was asked why the company did not take the $33 a share offered back in the summer. The company’s share price closed Wednesday below $14 (£8.80) a share.

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When I joined the Gmail for mobile team a year ago, the mobile client worked like a web application designed for networks that were always available. This was fine on a fast and reliable network, but when you hopped on the subway, network reliability could be a big problem.

Today, we’re happy to announce Gmail for mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. For this version, we changed our fundamental assumption about the network. We re-thought every action that you might perform with the app and tried to solve for the case where there is no signal. We wanted to make the mobile client faster and more reliable and added some other new features along the way.

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The first mobile telephone using Google’s Android software has been unveiled.

The T-Mobile G1 handset will be available in the UK in time for Christmas.

The first device to run the search giant’s operating system will feature a touch screen as well as a Qwerty keyboard.

It will be available for free on T-Mobile tariffs of over £40 a month and includes unlimited net browsing.

Other features include a three megapixel camera, a ‘one click’ contextual search and a browser that users can zoom in on by tapping the screen. continue

YouTube is to ban footage showing weapons being used to intimidate people on its website in the UK.

The new policy was being introduced because of “particular concern” in Britain over the subject, the site’s owners, Google, said.

MPs criticised video-sharing websites, including YouTube, in July, saying they should be doing more to vet content.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith welcomed the YouTube ban and called on other internet sites to follow suit.

YouTube said the introduction of the new rule on weapons and intimidation would be the first time the site had made a policy change targeted specifically at the UK.

Direct threatening of any groups or individuals has always been banned worldwide, but a spokesman for YouTube said it was necessary to reflect “local laws and sensitivities” in countries viewing the “diverse content posted by users” as the site’s community evolved.

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Your Web browser is probably the most important program on your computer, and it’s now getting the competition it deserves.
Mozilla Firefox, the most successful challenger to Microsoft’s incumbent Internet Explorer, is an outstanding piece of work and more than deserving of the raves it has won since its debut four years ago. (I made it my default browser in Windows even before its 1.0 version arrived.) But its developers don’t have a monopoly on all the bright ideas in browsing; people looking for better ways to the Web have two new options.

One comes from Microsoft, which two weeks ago shipped an impressive, but unfinished, release of IE’s next version. The other comes from Google, which last week offered a preview of its own browser.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 ( http://microsoft.com/ie) and Google Chrome ( http://google.com/chrome) each show thoughtful attention to the ways busy people who don’t read manuals try to read the Web.

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So far we’re pretty smitten with Google’s Chrome. It’s certainly not without its faults, but for version 1.0 of a browser it’s pretty sharp. We’ve compiled a list of 10 things we’d really like to see added or tweaked. Some come from other browsers, and some are just improvements on some of the existing features. Google, we hope you’re listening.

1. Profile roaming between multiple browsers. This may be a pipe dream, but if Foxmarks for Firefox has proved anything, syncing up your bookmarks between multiple machines is awesome. Doing the same with passwords, settings, and history would be even better. Considering Google already has a way for your browser to send data back to the mothership, and a hosted Web history service of its own, a little sync using my Google account doesn’t seem that hard does it?

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Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

“We realised… we needed to completely rethink the browser,” said Google’s Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

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Last month the Home Office announced that everyone in England and Wales will have access to crime maps of their local area by the end of this year. But will they help cut crime, or could they have unforeseen consequences?

Today the world is at your fingertips and so is your neighbourhood. Five minutes spent Googling can reveal a whole catalogue of information that you didn’t know about your local area. Typing my neighbourhood into Google spills out 136,000 hits for everything from the rugby club to the local sewage station.

Whilst some results are clearly of niche interest, there’s one subject that everyone wants to know about - crime. So it’s not surprising that both Labour and the Conservatives have outlined plans to make crime maps of England and Wales available online.

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T-Mobile to launch first Google-powered mobile: T-Mobile said Monday it plans to launch a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, making it the first operator to do so and posing a direct threat to Apple’s popular iPhone. A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s German parent, declined to comment on the launch date for the device which is made by mobile phone maker HTC.

According to a report in the New York Times, the phone will hit the stores in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

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The former Google engineers roll out Cuil, which they say will index a larger portion of the Web than Google, and more quickly and at less cost.

A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index. The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

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Yahoo to implement ad-tracker opt out

Facing privacy pressure from Congress, Yahoo Inc. said Friday that it will institute a system to let consumers opt out of ads on its site that target their Web browsing behavior. Behavioral targeting is a technology that seeks to deduce consumers’ interests by tracking what sorts of Web sites they visit.

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