Yesterday at Moscone West in San Francisco, Google kicked off its largest developer conference of the year - Google I/O. Over two days, 5,000 people from 66 countries will hear from 200 speakers, see 180+ developer demonstrations and participate in more than 90 technical sessions, breakouts and fireside chats to meet engineers from Google and partner companies.
Read MoreAuthorities in both Germany and the US are expected to begin inquiries into Google's "accidental" collection of WiFi payload data by its Street View cars. German commissioner for data protection Peter Schaar has asked for a detailed probe of the incident while consumer group Consumer Watchdog has demanded that the US Federal Trade Commission look into Google's activities on this side of the pond.
Yahoo has acquired Associated Content, one of a few companies that has been scrambling to fill the Web's appetite for cheap, fast, diverse media content.
A few days ago, Chrome turned 6. Version 6, that is, though only on the developer preview channel. The move doesn't mean a radical new version of Google's browser is available to test--the changes over the 5.0 series are pretty minor, chiefly reflecting the fact that a new branch has sprouted from Chrome's source-code tree. But the change is important for a couple reasons.
Microsoft made available on Monday Sliverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, an add-on package for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE providing tooling for the Sliverlight 4 rich Internet plugin-in platform.
Firefox Director Mike Beltzner has presented his plan for Firefox 4, the next major update of Mozilla's browser. Most strikingly, the new version of the browser is set to switch to an
interface reminiscent of the one that Google pioneered with Chrome—tabs
running along the top of the window, subsuming the window's title bar.
Intel showed two future products--a dual-core Netbook and tablet design--at its 2010 investor meeting Tuesday, and didn't waste time in touting the advantages of an Intel-based tablet over the Apple iPad. Intel Vice President Mooly Eden, who heads the chipmaker's client group, flourished a tablet and didn't mince words when comparing it with the iPad (though he didn't mention the iPad by name).
According to several sources, John Lilly, the well-regarded CEO of Mozilla, is preparing to give up his post at the open-source software nonprofit foundation, which is also a for-profit start-up.
Read MoreAs Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight duke it out over their plugin-based, HTML-alternative web platforms, Apple is using Gianduia, its new a client-side, standards based framework for Rich Internet Apps, to create production quality online apps for its retail users.