Special Projects Editor and Chief Reporter
Incisive Media
Google has acquired news summarization start-up Wavii for more than $30 million. Wavii, which uses natural language processing technology to distil online news into topics the users most care about, confirmed the news in a post on their website.
Yahoo has updated its email app for iPad and Android tablets to allow users to make use of gesture controls. Yahoo also revealed a weather app for iPhone, which brings together crowdsourced images from Flickr with local and international forecasts.
Microsoft is to rebrand its advertising arm as part of a deeper partnership with search firm Yahoo. Bing Ads will replace the Microsoft platform formerly known as adCenter. This rebranding has also already been launched on the adCenter landing page.
Bradley Horowitz says Google+ hasn't yet reached the intense period of growth that has been experienced by competitors such as Facebook and Twitter. Also, Google will partner with Flipboard, allowing users to share, comment on, and +1 content.
Mozilla has accused Microsoft of failing in its commitment to give users a choice in browsers. Mozilla says Internet Explorer will be the only browser able to run on Windows 8, at the expense of rival browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
Google has finally shut its Wave tool and told web users they can no longer access their group discussions and collaborative projects unless they use Chrome. IE and Firefox users are told hosting servers for the service have been closed completely.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has warned against the growing number of restrictions on the Internet arising from governments' attempts to control communications and censor populations in nations such as China, as well as rivals Apple and Facebook.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has started regaining its share of the browser market at the expense of rival browsers, particularly Mozilla's Firefox and Google Chrome. Chrome has been losing users and now sits at 18.57 percent of the market.
Google offered Oracle $3 million plus less than 1 percent of its Android's revenue in the hopes of avoiding a trial over claims that Google's Android operating system has infringed on Java patents. Oracle has rejected the offer for being too low.
Yahoo's woes continue after it confirmed it will lose the head of its labs unit, Prabhakar Raghavan, to Google. Raghaven's research interests focused on search technologies, with particular interests in text, web mining, and algorithm design.
The past two years of Twitter data has been archived and is now available for firms wanting to analyse tweets to identify trends in market sentiment or plan marketing campaigns. The Historics archives includes filtering and search capabilities.
Less than a week after a Federal Trade Commission report condemned the lack of privacy policies and disclosures from mobile application providers, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have agreed to improve privacy protections for their customers.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs emailed Google to ask the firm to stop trying to recruit its staff, according to court documents made public in an investigation into the hiring policies in place at several major technology companies.
Google plans to add filtering mechanisms to Google+, allowing users to receive more relevant social content as the company seeks to challenge rival Facebook. Elsewhere, Eric Schmidt calls U.S. authorities "idiots" and visits new Paris headquarters.
Facebook, Google, Twitter face pressure from the Indian authorities to censor sites for content which may defame the government or offend religious sensibilities. IT minister Kapil Sibal met company executives on monday to ask them to screen content.
Salesforce has launched a new product for enterprises designed to analyse social media conversations and comments on the web and direct them to the relevant professionals in an organisation.
Facebook has identified the group or individual responsible for the attack on its systems that spammed users with porn and violent images earlier this week. Facebook said that the attack "exploited a browser vulnerability" to spread the images.
Google is to take over a seven-storey building in east London next year to support the area's growing start-up scene. Furthermore, known as the ChromeZone, London rather than San Francisco, plays host to the world's first 'Chrome Store'.
