One of the many announcements flooding out of Google I/O that may have gotten lost in the shuffle is Android's expected support for Bluetooth Smart technology. This may seem like an odd development, especially if you know that many Android devices already feature Bluetooth 4.0, the version in which Bluetooth Smart (that is, Bluetooth Low Energy) first appeared.
Google announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages.
Google says it has rebuilt Google Maps for the Web with a new version that's more immersive and social. The new version takes a page from Google's mobile efforts by putting the search box inside the map and making use of cards - Google's take on interactive information widgets. "It's simple and powerful. The map is the user interface," Google's Bernhard Seefeld told attendees at the company's annual developers conference, where the new Web service was unveiled.
After last year's Google I/O conference, the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team started to think about how attendees experienced the event. They wanted to help attendees gain more insight about the conference space and the environment itself. Which developer Sandboxes were the busiest? Which were the loudest locations, and which were the best places to take a quick nap? They think about data problems all the time, and this looked like an interesting big data challenge that we could try to solve. So this year, they decided to try to answer their questions with a project that's a bit different, kind of futuristic, and maybe a little crazy.
The update to the struggling Windows 8 operating system, known by the code name "Blue," will be called Windows 8.1, a naming convention that Microsoft has used for its software updates for years. Tami Reller, the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of Microsoft's Windows division, disclosed the name during a speech at J.P. Morgan's Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston this morning.
Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+. These recommendations will appear as small widgets at that bottom of the screen as users browse a news site that has enabled this service. Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites. Recommendations, Google says, can appear regardless of whether a users are signed in to Google+.
Over the course of the last week, Microsoft started a very negative anti-Google Docs campaign that fits the mold of its more general Scroogled anti-Google ads. But why the sudden focus on Google’s productivity tools? Quickoffice, which Google acquired last June, allows users to read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the iPad, iPhone and Android.
Today, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Tab 3, a 7-inch tablet, a slim mobile device which may be able to directly compete with the smaller tablet ranges offered by rivals Apple, Amazon, and Google. The South Korean electronics maker's latest tablet offering sports a 1024x600 pixel screen - although perhaps underwhelming at today's standards - but is able to support full 1080p HD playback. The Galaxy Tab 3 is powered by a dual-core 1.2Ghz processor, and is available with either 8GB or 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM.
After the Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked into on Tuesday and the accounts of CBS News programs "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were hacked over the weekend, it's been made clear that Twitter needs to boost security. But, it may be doing just that. According to Wired's Mat Honan, the social-networking site has reportedly been working on creating a two-factor authentication for user password verification. Honan writes that the company is currently carrying out internal testing before rolling out the new security control.
Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked Anthony Ha through the new features in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types and timing that might lead to a better response.
