Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) has announced that they are creating 3 games for the Google Android operating system available in the Android Market. These three games include Tetris, Bejeweled, and Monopoly Here & Now. Tetris is available now, but the other two will be in the Android Market next month.
EA has at least 5 games running on the iPhone. These include Tetris, Spore Origins, and Scrabble. All of these games are powered by EA’s Mobile division. This is great news for Google as EA is one of the biggest game distribution companies in the world.
I think it’s about time that Rockstar Games creates miniature versions of the Grand Theft Auto game for the iPhone and Google Android operating systems. Or perhaps create something as addictive as their console smash hit games.
Unlock-TMobileG1.com are the first people that has been able to unlock the T-Mobile G1 phone. They are selling the codes to unlock the phone for $23. You will be able to use a SIM card from any country on any mobile network and it will work.
Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic swears by it too: Here is how I unlocked my G1 Android phone in 10 mins check here how to unlock it. worked fine for me http://www.unlock-tmobileg1.com
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) will be selling the T-Mobile G1 powered by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android phones on the cheap. Starting tomorrow, 550 Wal-Mart stores will be offering the phone at $148.88 with a 2 year agreement.
This move is a blow to Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), who is selling the iPhone for $199-$299. T-Mobile stores sell the phone for $31 more. What will this do for Wal-Mart? This will help them improve get a more tech-savvy demographic.
This sucks for T-Mobile stores because they’ll lose customers as the deal news begins to spread.
Amit Chowdhry | October 28, 2008 | 190 Views | Add a Comment Categorized under Google
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has settled a 3 year battle with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers. As part of the settlement, Google will be establishing a Registry to make sure that copyrighted works will receive compensation from subscription services or advertising revenue. The settlement will cost Google about $125 million.
The deal still needs to be approved by a U.S. district court.
Students at universities and other institutions will have the ability to log into Google Book Search for free, but others may have to pay for lifetime access. Those who pay can create an online bookshelf within all of the books that Google indexes.
Google’s 21 book partners are:
1. Bavarian State Library
2. Columbia University
3. Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)
4. Cornell University Library
5. Harvard University
6. Ghent University Library
7. Keio University Library
8. Lyon Municipal Library
9. The National Library of Catalonia
10. The New York Public Library
11. Oxford University
12. Princeton University
13. Stanford University
14. University of California
16. University Complutense of Madrid
17. University Library of Lausanne
18. University of Michigan
19. University of Texas at Austin
20. University of Virginia
21. University of Wisconsin - Madison
Amit Chowdhry | October 27, 2008 | 245 Views | Add a Comment Categorized under Google
Over the last few weeks, it seems like GMail has released a plethora of Labs features. But from what it sounds like, paid GMail Google Apps users don’t have the same benefits of using them versus those who use GMail for free. As of this past July, it seems like Google Apps advisors have been manually enabling Labs for individual users requesting for the service on a Google Groups forum.
“Please remember it’s still an experimental feature,” stated a Google App Advisor after enabling the Labs for certain users. LMckin51, a user in the forum also mentioned that Google Apps Labs fix is on the low priority fix for the Google Apps Engineering Team so there really isn’t an ETA for paid Google Apps users to have the same benefits as free GMail users.
This information was brought to my attention by Harry Maugans, founder of DesktopNexus.com, a top wallpapers website. Maugans receives a large number of e-mails regularly regarding his site and he mentioned to me that GMail for Google Apps does not have the ability to move the signature to the top of a message either. There is a GreaseMonkey script that has this ability, but it does a shoddy job.
Not providing Labs for paid users seems unfair to me. Each Google Apps GMail account costs $50/user/year. I think by paying this fee, Google Apps users have earned the same rights as those who have free GMail accounts.
Amit Chowdhry | October 22, 2008 | 530 Views | Add a Comment Categorized under Google
The presidential voting process is officially less than two weeks away and it is getting closer. What Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) found on their Trends service is that many people do not know where to find voting information or where the closest place to vote is located. Google now has a solution and it’s called the US Voter Info Site.
On the US Voter Info site, users can find out where to vote and where to register. If you’ll be absent or away from the country on voting day, Google will show you how to get an absentee ballot. In order to get this project off the ground, Google worked with the League of Women Voters, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Voting Information Project.
If you enter your home address on on the Google US Voter Info site, then Google will show you where the closest place to vote is located. This is the most important election of our generation. Make sure you exercise your right to vote on November 4th.
Amit Chowdhry | October 22, 2008 | 296 Views | Add a Comment Categorized under Google
Chad Perry, an engineer at GMail has created a new Labs feature called Canned Responses. This feature is especially useful for those who are constantly sending generic responses to incoming e-mails. Users can save and send common messages as well as automatically send e-mail responses using filters.
To get the feature running, log in to your GMail account. Click on “Settings” and then “Labs.” Scroll down to where it says Canned Responses by Chad P. Then click on Enable and save the settings.
Once that is complete, you will need to set up some Canned Settings. To do this, go to Compose Mail and click on the arrow pointing next to Canned Responses to create a new canned response (screenshot below).
After creating several canned responses, you can add them to your filters. To set up a canned response filter, click on Filters within the GMail Settings and click Create a Filter. Setup the filter you desire and then click on Next Step:
After setting up the filter, click on Send Canned Response for messages that you want to have sent to a specific person, subject, keyword-based response:
And there you have it!
Personally I don’t have a reason to use Canned Responses. I actually enjoy writing personalized e-mails to people.
Just imagine if Facebook had this feature to use for writing on other people’s walls. Everytime Facebook tells you when it is someone’s birthday, you send them a generic happy birthday message. There’s no fun in that!
However if I worked at a SMB or a major company and had to write hundreds of e-mails per day, this feature may just come in handy.
The Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) G1 phone with the Android operating system is now being sold in T-Mobile stores today. The cost of the phone is $179 with a 2 year contract. The phone is available in stores where T-Mobile’s 3G services are supported. These cities include Boston, Chicago, Dallas, L.A., Minneapolis, NYC, and Seattle.
The first sale was made in the T-Mobile San Francisco store yesterday evening. The G1, manufactured by HTC, comes with a QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Yesterday Google provided the download links for the open source operating system powering the phone.
Wired reported that there were about 150 people in line at the T-Mobile San Francisco (699 Market Street) store as early as yesterday evening. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE:DT).
If you have any stories about the lines at T-Mobile stores in major metro areas, make sure to send them over or comment on this post.
Amit Chowdhry | October 21, 2008 | 204 Views | 1 Comment Categorized under Google
As Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) promised, they have open-sourced the code for their Android operating system. Google makes this move just-in-time for tomorrow’s opening sales day of the Android-powered T-Mobile HTC G1 phones. Google is officially dubbing the project as the “Android Open Source Project.”
Below is a brief description of the project, provided by Google software engineer Dave Bort :
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.
The source code is 2.1GB in download size and requires 6GB for the complete build.
