You are here: Home / Archives for google

Game of the Week: Angry Birds – in Chrome

May 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This week an older game, that used to be an install. Now it’s available in Google Chrome: Angry Birds.

Rovio stated in the keynote on Google I/O 2011 that when the Webstore would be fully operational, they would make the Mighty Eagle available as well.

I guess that’s all I need to say about that.

Oh! One more thing: there are several Chrome levels built into the Chrome version.

Have fun!!!

Filed Under: Features, Games Tagged With: , , ,

Google I/O 2011 – Keynote Day 2

May 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

I was unfortunately tied up for the whole afternoon and part of this morning with production issues, but here is a little bit of information about the 2nd keynote for Google I/O 2011.

The keynote for Google I/O 2011 Day 2 is centered on the Chrome browser, and the HTML5 push.

  • Chrome has now 160M active users (on Automation Adventures, the number one browser is Firefox with 35%, followed by Chrome and IE, both with close to 29%)
  • Voice recognition built into Chrome
  • Demo with clicker – easy addition of speech recognition
  • Demo of Google Translation with speech recognition
  • TinkerCad demo of HTML5 and WebGL
  • Chrome WebStore In-app payments: 17 million installed, 2x more time spent in apps, 2.5x more transactions. Literally 1 line of code to activate.
  • Webstore will expand around the world, available in 41 languages.
  • Angry Birds now available in the Chrome Web Store!
  • Chromebooks coming next month. Samsung and Acer will be producing Chromebooks, which will be available June 15th through Amazon.com and Best Buy. Available in 7 countries.
  • Monthly Chromebook subscriptions for businesses ($28/user/month) and schools ($20/user/month). Also starting June 15th. More info here.

The main focus seems to be on ease of management for the IT department: the hardware and OS fade away by being replaced by the netbooks, and the applications are centralized web applications. The main pain will actually be felt by the same IT department, since a lot of the applications in most organizations are not web based. Virtualization is an alternative there, but I haven’t seen a proven and reliable Remote Desktop or Virtual Machine client for Chrome OS yet. Until then, this remains an interesting alternative to installing a browser on a bare machine…

Filed Under: Features, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , ,

Google I/O 2011 – 1st day Keynote

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The first keynote of the Google I/O 2011 focuses completely on the Android platform. Here are some of the highlights.

Android

  • 100 million activations
  • 4.5 billion installs of applications
  • over 200,000 applications
  • Honeycomb 3.1 update available very soon
  • 3.1 can act as USB host – directly connect USB devices to your Android tablet (camera, keyboard, game controller)
  • Also coming to Google TV this summer

Next release Ice Cream Sandwich

  • Q4 2011 targeted launch
  • Focus on choice of device: available for phones, tablets, and tablets turning into laptops(!)
  • New tools to accommodate different screen sizes
  • Completely Open Source
  • Demo of feedback from position of head vs. tablet, Android’s version of Photobooth. More useful demo: on video chat with multiple speakers system focuses automatically on the person speaking.

Android Cloud services

  • Android market expanded to movies.
  • $3.99 rental for 30 days
  • Ability to make movie rentals available offline (for viewing on for example airplane)
  • Available across all devices, phone, tablet, laptop and PC.
  • Music Beta by Google
  • Makes music available across all devices
  • Instant mix based on a selected song
  • Adding music over the air – never have to use a cable again, no syncing (hey, Apple!)
  • Make Available Offline also available for music
  • When getting new phone, all that is needed is signing into Google account
  • Rolling out in beta, up to 20,000 songs, free while in beta

Industry partnership

  • New platform releases rolling out faster based on new industry partnership
  • New updates automatically for 18 months as long as hardware supports

More

  • Android Open Accessory API
  • Takes openness to a new level by allowing hardware by 3rd parties
  • Demo of exercise bike connected to Android phone, automatically starts CardioQuest application, and bike detects that CardioQuest is running and relinquishes control to phone.
  • API for Gingerbread and Honeycomb available today
  • Starting out with USB, Bluetooth available later
  • ADK (Accessories Development Kit) based on Arduino.
  • Demo of Labyrinth game where controller is an Android tablet.
  • Completely open, no NDA, no fees, no approval process.
  • Android@Home
  • New protocol to allow devices to communicate with each other and with Android – Partnering with Lightning Science – LED lightbulbs and switches – by end of year.
  • Android@Home hub – project Tungsten. Demo of music playing through multiple devices. Combination of Music and @Home to identify music cds and automatically start playing them

 

Filed Under: Features, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , ,

Google eBooks

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

While I’m enjoying my Cr-48, it has a few drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is that you can’t install any programs on it, other than Chrome extensions and apps. This is a big hurdle towards reading eBooks on the device – Amazon’s Kindle requires an application to be installed on the device, whether it’s a PC, Mac, or mobile platform.

Luckily Google saw this too, and came up with Google eBooks. As most of Google’s products, this is completely web-based. And as thus, it’s easy to see how they can provide a seamless reading experience between different devices: you can read a book on your PC, then continue exactly where you left off on your smart phone.

The selection of books is pretty broad. Google eBooks touts 3 million selections. And not just Computers & Internet, but also Mystery, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc.

 

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , ,

Get Cr-48 camera working again with YouTube

April 12, 2011 By 4 Comments

I played around with the Cr-48 camera a few weeks ago, and noticed that you can easily upload video to YouTube. Today I noticed it was broken – YouTube said that no camera was detected.

Luckily the fix was only a Google search away. It turns out that on the about:plugins page there are two Flash players shown. Disable the one that has version number 10.2.158.6, path /opt/google/chrome/pepper/libpepflashplayer.so. Reopen the YouTube upload page, and all should be well.

(Thanks to Google Groups, Cr-48 Test Pilots)

Filed Under: Network Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »