Mozilla Firefox has been given a new Lease of Life by Google

Google will pay Mozilla almost $300M per year in search deal, besting Microsoft and Yahoo to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is committing close to a billion dollars to bankroll a browser which is a rival to their own browser. 


At $300 million a year, it’s just about three times the size of the last deal ($128M) they signed with Mozilla back in 2008.


That high price might have stemmed from the bidding war between Google and others (Microsoft & Yahoo) and from subsequent anti-trust issues. When it was originally reported that the Google/Mozilla search deal had expired, I thought the end might have come for Firefox, but that is not to be the case any longer with Google's new deal of almost $1 Billion they just signed with Mozilla.


Congrats to you Firefox on the new lease of life.

Google Launches Android Training for Aspiring Developers

It seems that two can play at the same game Microsoft began months ago in trying to pull more developers to the platform. Google’s Android team has just launched some online training sessions to help aspiring developers create their own magic.

Android Training is the name of the program, and so far it includes as many as 11 general sections, 34 lessons to help you get started. We’re not really sure how much of a developer you already have to be in order to not have a hard time following through these courses, but for a free price tag, you can’t lose.
Reto Meier, part of Android Developer relations, said:

“From designing effective navigation, to managing audio playback, to optimizing battery life, these classes are designed to demonstrate best practices for solving common Android development problems. Each class explains the steps required to solve a problem, or implement a feature, with plenty of code snippets and sample code for you to use within your own apps. We’’re starting small and this is just the beginning for Android Training. Over the coming months we will be increasing the number of classes available, as well as introducing over-arching courses and sample apps to further help your development experience.”

Head on over to Android Training to get started.

The Open Governance Index – A new way of measuring openness (Infographic)

The Open Governance Index is a way of measuring the relative openness of 8 major open source projects, from Android to WebKit.

Source: VisionMobile

The 3 Pillars of Google’s Strategy

Google’s strategy is all about ads, not selling services and their three-pronged strategy for making money are the key drivers for the company’s success.

Google is in the first place an advertisement business, as an overwhelming 96% of its revenues come from digital ads. The three pillars of Google’s strategy are what enables the company to sell more ads for more money. Google increases its reach by flattening any obstacle that stands between its ads and eyeballs. Then, Google expands its visibility to the user by providing services, creating more opportunities to show ads. Finally, the company squeezes the maximum out of those opportunities by mining user data, which allows them to understand and target users very efficiently.

In conclusion, Google doesn’t give away all its consumer services for free out of the goodness of its heart. Its purpose is to make profit. If services are provided for free, they are meant to flatten, expand and mine in order to sell advertisements.

Read the full post here

How to Google

SmashingApps released this infographic recently on getting more from Google

Google kills off 7 more products including Wave

Google has announced that it is dropping seven more products in an effort to simplify its range of services. This is the third time that Google has announced a cull of several of its products at the same time after they had failed to take off. This move was announced in their official blog.

"We're in the process of shutting a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward... Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience" - Urs Holzle (Google's vice president of operations).

The seven latest products earmarked for the chop are as follows:

1. Google Wave - an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration
2. Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends
3. Google Friends Connect - allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code
4. Google Gears - much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline
5. Google Search Timeline - a graph of historical query results
6. Knol - a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content
7. Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal - a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power 

It has now given details about when the switch-offs will occur. For example Wave will be retired in April, and Knol content will be taken offline in October.

Google Unveils Android-based Online Music Store

Google has just launched an online music store in the US, which will allow devices running its Android software to buy, store and stream MP3 files.

EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and 23 independent labels with the exception of Warner Music Group are providing content to create a library of 13 million songs.

This new service is being integrated with the Google+ social network. Users will be able to share songs with their Circles contacts who can listen to the full length of the tracks one time without making a purchase.

Songs range in price from 69 cents (44p) to $1.29 and come without DRM copy-protection. The search giant is also offering a different track free for download every day.

The rapper Busta Rhymes - who was at the launch event - is debuting his new studio album on the Android store. The Rolling Stones and Coldplay are offering previously unreleased live performances.

Google is also hoping to link with smaller artists through its new Artist Hub. Musicians can add their own page for a $25 fee and set their own prices. Google will take a 30% share of each sale.

Google is adding music to its app, video and book sales on the Android Market. They are yet to discuss any plans to offer Google Music outside the US.

They sure would with time.

How to bring back the Plus in search recently killed by Google

DuckDuckGo, a one-man project by Gabriel Weinberg is an alternative and is quickly becoming the go-to search engine for discriminating nerds. It was created 4 years ago by Gabriel and has been solely maintained by him until recently when he accepted funding from Union Square Ventures and hired his first full-time employee. It has a vast collection of powerful search modifiers and maintains a good stance against tracking and personalization which google is well known for.

Leaving behind Google search for others is a great challenge to many including me, who would first think Google before Bing or any other search engine, and for people like this, there are other solutions. FindErr is a simple proxy made by a pseudonymous hacker that adds the necessary quotes to every search before shuttling the user off to Google.

The other solutions which seem not to be in your normal way of doing things is to use this userscript, created by electrotype for Hacker News. Chrome users can simply just click the link to install the script while Firefox users who already have the Greasemonkey plugin installed can also just click to install it; but for users who don't have Greasemonkey installed or don't know what it is, 

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to HTML web page content on the DOMContentLoaded event, which happens immediately after it is loaded in the browser (also known as augmented browsing). As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparisons within shopping sites), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes. [Wikipedia]

You can install Greasemonkey here before installing the script.

Google Reader Redesign: A Disaster

A few days ago when I logged into my reader account and saw the new visual changes, I hated Google immediately for it. I spend more time within reader than I do on Facebook these days, and even of Twitter sometimes, but the new redesign of reader repels me more than the engagement it brings. I stand to believe that just as it was discovered than some Google execs don't use G+, the same also applies to whoever did the redesign because reading in reader these days is not soothing at all. It tires the person reading easily and makes me just scan through and close the window immediately. I'm not alone on this anyway; Brian Shih,  a former Project Manager on Google Reader also shares the same thought with me

In the name of visual consistency, Google has updated the visual style to match Gmail, Calendar and Docs. I have nothing against visual consistency (and in fact, this something that Google should be doing), but it's as if whoever made the update did so without ever actually using the product to, you know, read something.

Kevin Fox, a former lead designer for Google Reader also disagrees with the new redesign and is offering his services to Google to help enhance and restore the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google’s new visual standards requirements. He's even willing to go an extra mile and put his current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader.

And so I put my resources where my mouth is. As the former lead designer for Google Reader, I offer my services to Google, rejoining for a three month contract in order to restore and enhance the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google’s new visual standards requirements. I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.

 I know it's all about Google+ that these is happening; just as Google killed it's other plus, which was immensely useful for search, all because of Google+. I know the baseline matters, but keeping your users or customers happy also does.

Google+ is the fastest-growing social network in history, with 40 million users since its June launch. To help them focus, Google's quietly shuttered a number of products, removing iGoogle and Google Reader's social features and closing Google Labs, Buzz, Jaiku and Code Search in the last two weeks alone.

But in doing so, they also killed off one of its oldest and most useful tools, from its most popular product.

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing "plus": the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.

I hope Google doesn't kill off everything besides Google+ with this act of killing everything in its path they've embarked upon.

So Google, some of us seriously dig the old reader, even though it could do with some improvements, but I believe you don't have to force G+ down our throats like you're doing with almost everything. There are better ways to engage us than the way you're doing it.