Google

Girl's winning Google Doodle shows her dad home from war

A picture depicting a girl's reunion with her father returning from war has won the top award in a Google Doodle contest.

On display Thursday at Google's home page, "Coming Home" is a simple but powerful piece of art that portrays a young girl holding an American flag and running to reunite with her father. The returning soldier appears. They exchange a glance. And finally they fall into a deep embrace as they treasure their moment together again.

Created by 12th grader Sabrina Brady of Sparta, Wisc., "Coming Home" faced great competition in being crowned the 2013 U.S. Doodle 4 Google national winner. Google received more than 130,000 submissions for the contest, which garnered millions of votes. But in the end, Sabrina's drawing clearly moved the voters.… Read more

Kim Dotcom threatens to sue Twitter, others over patent

Kim Dotcom says he doesn't really want to sue Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies, but he really needs some help funding his defense.

The eclectic and controversial MegaUpload founder today said he invented two-factor authentication, which is being used by more and more companies to secure access to their sites. The verification steps aim to reduce the likelihood of online identity theft, phishing, and other scams because the victim's password would no longer be enough to give a thief access to their information.

Along with Twitter's recent introduction, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal, and countless other … Read more

Gmail service Mailbox redesigns app with iPad in mind

Mailbox, the popular e-mail app snapped up by Dropbox earlier this year, has redesigned its app for the iPad.

The new app, which currently only works with Gmail accounts, has the same functions as the old app. It lets users organize their e-mail using swipe motions with the ultimate goal of reaching "inbox zero."

Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood said there were a lot of requests for an app designed specifically for the iPad. Formally, users could use Mailbox on any iOS 6 device, including the iPad, but the layout was created with smaller devices in mind.

The new … Read more

Siri competitor Sherpa goes after Google Glass

Sherpa, a voice control app that promises a better experience than Apple's Siri, plans to beat Google at its own game on Google Glass.

Sherpa CEO and co-founder Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria unveiled the company's plans for the new app on Thursday in Spain, at the Sherpa Summit, an event with a lineup of speakers such as Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker and John Sculley, former CEO of Apple.

Uribe-Etxebarria said the voice command app is actually more suited for the Google Glass hardware than Google's own software.

"Right now, with Google Glass, it's not taking advantage of … Read more

Google X acquires kite-power startup Makani

Google is in the process of acquiring Makani Power, a startup building power-generating cable-tethered flying wings, and is incorporating the technology within its Google X "moonshots" division.

"We look forward to working with our new colleagues at Google[x] to make airborne wind a cost-effective reality," the company said on its Web site. "This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels."

The acquisition was reported Wednesday in a BusinessWeek story about Google X, … Read more

Google Drive on Android scans receipts, adds Cards

Google Now's interface sensibilities are spilling over into other Google services.

The latest recipient of a healthy dose of the Now virtual assistant is Google Drive, which updated its Android app on Wednesday with several new features.

A new Scan feature lets you back up and track important receipts, business cards, and documents by using existing optical character recognition (OCR) tech already in Drive. Choose Scan from the "Add New" menu, take a photo of the document, and Drive will automatically turn it into a searchable PDF.

The new interface leverages the Cards look from Google+ and … Read more

Now for sale on Craigslist: Google Glass

A Craigslist ad is perhaps not the most subtle of ways to go about doing things, and that includes selling your Google Glass.

One Craigslister, based in San Francisco's East Bay according to the ad, is selling his or her pair of Google Glass Explorer Edition, something that's expressly forbidden by the Glass Terms of Sale.

Violating a product's sale terms is practically a rite of passage, from ripping the safety tag off a mattress to ripping CDs and DVDs. What makes this case unusual is that the Craigslister is clearly trying to make a buck: this … Read more

Finding faces in Google Maps terrain

Something our human eyes seem to do, without any prompting, is to pick out shapes and structures that resemble other shapes and structures. Called pareidolia, it's a form of pattern recognition -- and a good example is the way we often see a human face where only a random collection of shapes or shadows exists. This, it is now known, is the reason for the infamous face on Mars.

Our own Earth, as folded and rippled as it is, is also prone to this phenomenon when viewed from above: the Badlands Guardian, discovered on Google Earth in 2006, for example. But we're sure there are many more human-esque faces lurking in strange corners of the Earth.

That is the premise behind Google Faces, a project by Berlin design studio Onformative: can pareidolia be imitated by a machine? Using OpenFrameworks, the studio has created an application that crawls Google Maps, using facial recognition algorithms to seek out areas that look like faces. … Read more

Vint Cerf: Social conventions have not kept up with technology

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. -- Echoing comments from other Google executives, Vint Cerf acknowledged that Google Glass, as well as other mobile devices, come with unresolved privacy issues. "We have a problem with these technologies. Our social conventions have not kept up with the technology," Cerf said, speaking at the Future in Review conference here.

He gave an example of someone standing in front of the Egyptian pyramids and asking a stranger to take his picture. Someone standing nearby is caught in the picture, which is uploaded to a photo-sharing Web site and made publicly available. Someone else searching … Read more