Tip Desk |
your short but sweet tech news supply |
This is a useful update for those of us that manage multiple Google+ brand pages - Google has added the brand pages that you manage to your profile dropdown from the navigation bar at the top of Google+, like such:
Google will be rolling out an improvement for its English (non-Google Apps) Gmail users over the next few days that provide customized autocomplete search suggestions based a user's email content.
The improvements will be coming to "more languages over the next few months" says Google.
On Sina Weibo - which continually gets called the Twitter of China - a 'trial phase' of a community contract/convention that spells out in five sections and 31 bullet points, what the responsibilities of users will be when the contract takes full effect on May 28.
Right now an annoynomous group of folks is live translating the contract into English, and from the translation (which I'm sure will be continued to be refined, so keep an eye on the translation), some articles include "Users may not publish untrue information" and "Promotes evil teachings and superstitions", among many other such speech restricting rules (although for what it's worth, more transparency in the rules - however absurd they are - is generally a good thing).
The contract also includes articles that goes into how a community committee will be involved in monitoring content as well as other info - I highly recommend you read the entire thing.
It will be very interesting to see what kind of response this generates on Weibo itself, as well as worldwide.
This year's Google i/o developer conference (you know, the one where they give out all those no-yet-released-gadgets and, well, talk about coding and stuff...) which sold out in a couple of minutes earlier this year, will be doubling the number of livestreamed sessions this year.
Google will be running four channels during the conference, and if its recent live coverage of the Coachella music festival on YouTube is any indication, the production quality should be pretty high (not that it has been shabby in past years, but the Coachella coverage was kind of a breakthrough).
All sessions not livestreamed will be available to view online 48 hours after they are taped.
Google TV has updated its (very-simply-called) "TV & Movies" that prompts you to rate a number of TV show and movies in order to offer you personalized recommendations - just like Netfilx.
I haven't tried this yet (it was just announced) so I don't know how the recommendations compare to Netflix. Of course, if you've connected your Google TV to an actual cable subscription (and I always have wondered how many people have) then this would go beyond Netflix into the world of "real" TV. That said, as Google TV already links you off to Netflix shows, I'm not sure if this isn't redundant for cord-cutters.
There are a few other updates as well, but the recommendation engine is by far the most interesting development for the some-would-say-on-life-support platform.
Android's new dev stats are out and it shows that Android 4.0+ is on 2.9% of phones - still behind the 3.3% of devices that run Honeycomb and 6% of devices running Android 2.1 (and of course Gingerbread still leads with 63.7% of devices). There seems to be a new Android phone with 4.0 coming out everyday, however, so this shouldn't last too much longer... right?
Twitter.com is prompting users (at least this user) to find friends through email with a pretty-hard-to-ignore banner above the home stream. This is of course pretty standard practice, and you've always been able to find friends on Twitter with email, but this is first time I can remember Twitter making such a push for this front-and-center on the user's homepage.
In addition to announcing new Windows Phone Marketplaces in 13 new countries today, Microsoft says that in three months, over 20,000 apps have been added to the Marketplace in China, and that 15,000 developers have registered accounts.
Nokia announced yesterday that Lumia phones will be coming to China, and Microsoft has said that it thinks WP will eventually be much more popular than the iPhone in China (that's yet to be seen), but 20,000 apps is a pretty good start (assuming that at least some of them are good).
Google has just posted this three minute video of a guy named Steve Mahan getting a "test-drive" of in one of Google's Self-Driving cars. In the description of the video, Google says, "We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it's also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met."
Oh, and by the way: Steve says that, "95% of my vision is gone - I'm well past legally blind."
Amazing.
Lots of Google news today (Chrome 18 released to Stable Channel, new version of Google Maps for Android, featured apps in Hangouts) and now news that Android 4.0.4 has been released as open source AOSP, with "few hundred changes over 4.0.3".
After going so long when Honeycomb wasn't open source, it is really good to see Google continue to push these updates once again.
