Apple Sues Samsung Over Tablets, Smart Phones

Apple is suing Samsung, alleging the Galaxy line of phones and tablets infringe on a number of the company’s patents and trademarks.

The suit, filed on Friday in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges patent and trademark infringement, as well as unfair competition. Apple is seeking injunctions, actual damages and punitive damages, as well as a finding that the alleged infringement was willful

The smartphone industry is filled with patent actions, including an ongoing battle between Apple and Nokia, suits between Microsoft and Motorola, as well as a suit by Oracle against Google. See this, for example.

Apple Sues Samsung, Saying Galaxy Phones and Tablets Too Close To iPad and iPhone Design | Ina Fried | Mobilized | AllThingsD

Steve Jobs Hid iPad From Google

Steven Levy’s book “In the Plex” apparently reveals that Steve Jobs hid development of the iPad from Eric Schmidt while Schmidt was still on Apple’s board of directors.

Jobs reportedly didn’t like how Google’s OS was starting to match up blow for blow to iOS and didn’t want the same to happen with tablets. Jobs was angry because he felt that Android was ripping off the key features of the iPhone.

Read more here

Google Buys PushLife

Google has purchased PushLife, a Canadian company that provides Apple iTunes functionality. Presumably the assets will be used to create a more robust music store capability.

Top Brands: Apple, Google, BMW

Google, Apple and BMW are top brands in a new survey.

Google Management Shake-up: Good for Google?

Both Google and Apple now face scrutiny over management issues at each company.

Google Revising Search Algorithms to Deal with "Spam"

The problem with much "search engine optimization" is that it essentially consists of mechanical "tricks." SEO professionals will argue, rightly, that SEO is not necessarily limited to such techniques, but I suspect most people are familiar with some of the "dumber" techniques.

Google, for example, has recently been accused of allowing too much trickery to seep into search results, and Google seems to be working on making that sort of thing harder. Google itself says that, according to the evaluation metrics it has refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.

"However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality," Google says.

None of that will stop some people, and some sites, from continuing to boost rankings in ways that some might view as the equivalent of "spamming." That's one reason why it is a good thing that Google constantly revises its algorithms.

Official Google Blog: Google search and search engine spam

"As I think about Google's strategic initiatives in 2011, I realize they're all about mobile," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Google needs to do some serious spade­work on three fronts, he says. First, Google has to help foster use of under­lying fast networks, especially Long Term Evolution.

Second, "we must attend to the development of mobile money," says Schmidt. "Phones, as we know, are used as banks in many poorer parts of the world—and modern technology means that their use as financial tools can go much further than that."

Third, we want to increase the availability of inexpensive smartphones in the poorest parts of the world.

read more here

Google,Dominates Mobile Search

Google’s mobile search market share dominance is almost complete, according to Royal Pindgom. Google has made an incredible land grab in the mobile sector.

Compare this to the other search engines. None of them have managed to claim even one percent of the mobile search market.

Google’s piece of the mobile search pie is even larger than their already impressive share of the overall search engine market. For Yahoo and Bing, the situation is the opposite. Their mobile efforts are nothing compared to their search engine market share.

If Google firmly believes that mobile is the future (which is the opinion of CEO Eric Schmidt), they are making all the right moves. This is about as close to "world domination" (to use the tech bubble term) as a company can get.

Google, undisputed heavyweight champion of mobile search

Is Google Now Microsoft? Facebook Bull Thinks So

Rare is the company that keep up hyper levels of revenue growth forever. Even if you agree with this view, Facebook itself is going to be "legacy," sooner or later.

Google to Enter Mobile Payments Business?

Google is considering building a payment and advertising service that would let users buy goods at retail locations by tapping or waving their mobile phones against a register at checkout, BusinessWeek reports. The noteworthy angle is the linkage between the payment function and the advertising function; payments and location; payments and local advertising and promotion.

Many observers think the ultimate value of near field communications mobile payments or mobile wallet services will lie in a range of value the systems provide, beyond the actual retail payments feature.

Google to Enter Mobile Payments Business? | Mobile Marketing and Technology

Google has "Groupon" Options, Says Mayer

Google Makes Comparison Shopping Easier

Google has introduced a new feature for product searching in the United Kingdom, called "Nearby Shops."

Nearby Shops shows stores in a user's vicinity that sell what a user is searching for. As you can well imagine, this is going to help steer users to "stuff" they want, but also could lead to an increase comparison shopping behavior, since it will be easy to find other locations that might have the same items, in case a user decides a price or other item elements are not right.

Google Launches Nearby Shops In UK | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

UN Gives Governments a Monopoly on Internet Governance

The United Nations Committee on Science and Technology has decided that governments alone would be able to sit on a working group set up to examine improvements to the Internet Governance Forum.

This move has been condemned by the Internet Governance Caucus, the Internet Society, the International Chamber of Commerce and numerous other organizations, who have published a joint letter and launched an online petition to mobilize opposition. Read the letter here: http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/files/2010/12/IGF-Working-Group-Decision1.pdf

The petition is here: http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2710

Official Google Blog: Governments shouldn’t have a monopoly on Internet governance

Google Launches Personalized Voice Search

Google Voice Search now enables personalized voice recognition. If you opt into personalized recognition, Google will begin to associate the recordings of the words with a user's Google account. Google then automatically will use these words to build a speech model specifically for a particular user. This speech model enables Google to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.

The first time a user accesses Voice Search, that user will be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. Users can enable or disable personalized recognition at any time.

The personalized recognition functionality is currently available for English in the United States.

To enable it, a user must have Android 2.2 or higher, and download the latest version of the Voice Search app from Android Market.

Official Google Mobile Blog

Android And iOS Lead Smartphone Impression Share

Android tied with iOS as the largest Smartphone OS on the Millennial Media network for November 2010, with both mobile operating systems sharing 38 percent of ad impressions on the network.

Millennial’s ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web.

Millennial: Android And iOS In Deadlock Again For Monthly Smartphone Impression Share

How Telcos Can Live with Google

The NPD Group: Android Extends its Smartphone Market Share in the Third Quarter of 2010

The Android smartphone operating system significantly grew its lead in the U.S. consumer smartphone market in the third quarter of 2010, according to The NPD Group.

Android’s OS was installed in 44 percent of all smartphones purchased in the third quarter, an increase of 11 percentage points since the second quarter.

The Apple iOS held relatively steady versus last quarter, rising one percentage point to 23 percent. The RIM OS fell to third position, declining from 28 percent to 22 percent.

The NPD Group: Android Extends its Smartphone Market Share in the Third Quarter of 2010

Google is the World's Most Successful Ad-Funded Software Company

Google represents 91.4percent of all global searches, according to Pingdom, 98.3 percent of mobile searches, 69 percent of online advertising and 59 percent of web analytics. Google's YouTube business represents 53 percent of all online embedded video and audio.

Then there's Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger, Google Maps and Google's own content delivery network. Google is working on a Chrome operating system, has released Google TV and operates its own public domain name server network as well.

The point, Pingdom notes, is that Google has has an enormous presence on the Web and the Internet, and advertising drives it. Among other things, Google the world's most successful ad-funded software company.

How Google dominates the Web

Steve Job Anti-Android Rant

Google: When You See a Product Hockey Stick Growth Curve, Pour it On

Google's philosophy when it comes to allocating money and resources: If the graph of a product's growth looks like a hockey stick, pour fuel on the fire.

And it looks like Google Instant will be available on mobiles this year.