Google has now made Google Profiles, a centralized settings for all Google services, searchable by Google’s Search Engine. In a statement acknowledging the move, Google said:

Recently, we added the ability to search all public profiles created by users. If a user has checked the ‘Show full name publicly so people can find you’ box on the profile edit page, their profile is a publicly accessible Web page and is indexed in search results.

Although Google is framing the move as a way to make the search engine more contextual, it also has the potential to turn the search giant into a global social network unlike anything that we have seen till now.

[via CNET]

Dell has announced a partnership with Universal as a result of which the pc maker will pre load its devices with music from Universal. Users will have the option to select from a variety of music bundles starting at $25, each of which includes a curated selection of MP3s for approximately half of current standard per track pricing.

In addition to this, Dell is working on preloading the systems with movies as well in partnership with CinemaNow. The movie bundles will also start at $25.

[via GigaOm]

Legendary Pictures, the makers of titles like 300 and The Dark Knight, is acquiring Epic Games, a game developer that has already shipped 5 million units of Gears of Wars already. Prior to the outright acquisition the two entities had already decided to partner on developing a movie based on Gears of Wars game. One of the prime reason that Legendary has made this move is because most of their upcoming movies are prime candidates for PS3 and XBox based games. See the lineup for a perspective:

• Superman: Man of Steel (2011)
• Clash of the Titans (2010)
• Gears of War (2010) (already an Epic tie-in)
• Untitled 300 Sequel (2010)
• Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
• The Hangover (2009)
• Observe and Report (2009)
• Watchmen (2009)
• Kung Fu (2009)
• Ninja Assassin (2009)

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Reddit, a Digg competitor has announced a new strategy going forward, which would include distribution of its technology across the globe rather than staying a stand-alone destination. As part of this approach, Reddit has partnered with UK’s Independent newspaper and would be installing Reddit’s technology on Independents servers which would allow the newspaper’s readers to vote on online stories by clicking on a prominent button. In addition to this the newspaper will also accept links from across the web.

I personally think that Reddit, has a better chance of going mainstream compared to Digg, specially given the open mentality that its co-founders have adopted.

[via The Social]

Cruz, a smart browser developed by Todd Ditchendorf, allows you to easily set up multiple panes in your browser with sophisticated controls. This enables users to set up separate apps in different panes or just an app in a sidebar, additionally the functionality could be used to comparatively analyze webpages by opening them up side by side. On the down side, the browser lacks bulk-import bookmarks from other browsers and also does not support opening up of multiple Google accounts simultaneously. See the video below to know more about the browser.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

FlyScreen, an Israel based startup, updates your mobile phone from status updates from Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, weather, sports and other such feeds, even while the phone is in sleep mode. The company has found out a way to use the screen even when the phone is sleeping, allowing the app to consume very little battery for updates. The application currently works for Nokia Symbian phones only. See a video demo of the app below.

[via CenterNetworks]

MySpace, which previously had no formal and easy way to upload photos to the social networking site from mobile phones has now overcome that shortcoming. In order to make it work you would have to change your settings, go to “MyAccount” and than to “Mobile” and just enable the "Send Photos From Your Phone”. Once you do this MySpace generates an automatic, unique email address to which you could email your photos from your mobile device and they’ll automatically get uploaded to your account. One shortcoming of this approach is that it deprives you of sending photos to a particular album.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

With its mountain of cash, almost $25 billion with no debt, Apple has the potential to make some serious investments. This is exactly what’s all the chatter about in the blogosphere right now. MG Siegler has come up with a list of companies that Apple could easily buy without a sweat:

Aside from Dell, with $24.5 billion in cash, Apple could now technically afford:

• Yahoo, with its $17.53 billion market cap, and still have about $7 billion in cash left over.
• Sun Microsystems, about seven times over, with its $3.38 billion market cap.
• Sony (at least the part traded on the New York Stock Exchange) with its $21.54 billion market cap.
• Netflix, which arguably competes with the Apple TV — about 20 times over.
• Blockbuster, which arguably competes with no one anymore — nearly 100 times over.
• Xerox, whose early experiments with graphical user interfaces (GUI) and the mouse influenced early Apple, about 4 times over.
• SanDisk, which, like Apple, loves flash memory, over 10 times over.
• PDA maker Palm, about 60 times over
• NVIDIA (which makes Apple’s graphic chips), about 6 times over.
• Chip maker AMD, over 12 times over.
• Texas Instruments, with its $22.14 billion cap.
• It could nearly buy BlackBerry-maker RIMM (one key iPhone competitor) with its $26.13 billion market cap.

More interesting is a shoulda list that ZDNet has come up with:

Apple should use a little of its cash to:

1. Acquire TiVO, the fledgling DVR pioneer has been decimated by flush cable companies giving away DVRs to all their customers. This would allow Apple to turn the Apple TV into the DVR that we all want it to be.
2. Acquire Pandora and re-brand it Genius or somesuch.
3. Acquire Last.fm while they’re at it.
4. Acquire Hulu.com, which may be tough because it has the backing of NBC and Fox (which is owned by the News Corp.)

Do you have any woulda, coulda, shoulda for Apple to buy with its cash ? lets us know.

Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service, that up until now was completely free and ad supported has made a transition to freemium – free plus premium accounts.

The two paid options now available to users are:

For $8 a year the ads will also be removed for everyone viewing the bookmarks, profile or tags of the premium user.

For $25 a year the ads will be additionally removed from all the pages of the groups premium user creates on Ma.gnolia.

Ma.gnolia has lately been experimenting with a lot of things like opening up its code base to get some good karma and reputation amongst the developer community. However, like its freemium model, response to its open source initiative is yet to be seen. It seems unlikely that the service would be able to catch up with Del.icio.us anytime soon, let alone compete with it.

[via Profy]

VBrick, a Wallingford, Connecticut based developer of online networked based video solutions has raised $10.4 million out of the planned $15.7 million in Series F from Adams Capital Management, Menlo Ventures, Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, Redshift Ventures and Two River Associates. This takes the total funding raised till now to $50 million since 1999.

VBrick’s solutions enable customers to stream videos (live or stored) over networks

[via PE Hub]

Google has launched an enhanced version of Gmail that supports J2ME and BlackBerry mobile devices. The mobile client for these phones has been rearchitected to push all the processing to the background. What this means for you in a nutshell is:

• Overall performance improvement: You should experience significant raw speed improvement, smoother scrolling, and no freezing.
• Multiple accounts management: If you have both a Gmail and Google Apps email account, you can easily switch between them quickly. You will no longer have to use two different mobile apps to access personal and work emails.
• Multiple mobile email drafts: You can save multiple email drafts in your mobile phone, so that you can pick and choose what you would like to send later.
• Powerful shortcut keys: If you have a QWERTY phone, you can use shortcut keys. Hit ‘z’ to undo, ‘k’ to go to a newer conversation, and ‘j’ to go to an older conversation. See Menu/Help in the app for more shortcuts.
• Basic offline support: Can’t get a signal? Not a problem. You can compose and read your most recent emails even when there is no signal. Also, any outgoing messages will be saved in the outbox on your phone and sent automatically when you’re back in coverage.

In addition to this the mobile version of Gmail is now available in 35 languages.

[via Gmail Blog]

Google teamed up with MediaVest and NeuroFocus conducted some experiments in order to determine the ad quality by reading brain waves and psychological responses to ads on video content. The goals of the experiment were to measure the impact of overlay ads on attention levels, emotional engagement, and other psychological metrics.

According to Garett Rogers:

Google, with the help of NeuroFocus, used a sample group of participants, and measured things likes skin responses, eye movement and an EEG brain scan. EEG is a more portable and convenient, but slightly less accurate way to measure alpha and beta waves in the brain compared other common methods that require you to be laying horizontal in a machine.

They came to three conclusions when it comes to InVideo overlay advertisements:

1. InVideo overlay ads are compelling
2. InVideo overlay ads add to user experience
3. InVideo overlay ads improve positive brand response

One might ask, why isnt CTRs enough for video ads. According to Google’s Leah Spalding “Click through was important.. but since we’re looking at brand impact, it’s not enough to just look at the click through rate (CTR). CTR will not give us any indication as far as how memorable an ad is, or metrics on brand impact, etc.”

[via Googling Google]

Gmail is continuing to roll out features at a very brisk pace. The latest new feature is the ability to add emoticons to your emails. So the days of plain vanilla emails are now history. In addition to this the emoticons have also been added to GTalk with the added bonus of group chats, which previously was a serious lacking in GTalk.

[via Gmail Blog]

Medialets has released some data after the first 24 hours of the launch of Android Marketplace. The report found similarities between iPhone app users and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users

Some other Observations include:

The average application has 7,800+ downloads

Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 - 10,000 range.

Nine apps made it to the 10,000 - 50,000 downloads range

ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to

Games are the most popular mobile apps

[via Medialets]

Apple is planning to set up Apple University and has hired the dean of Yale’s Business School Joel Podolny as Vice President and Dean of Apple University, according to WSJ. Podolny will be joining Apple in the early 2009 and according to an email sent to Yale students, the Yale Dean said:

These events are part of the fabric of my life, and I am excited to know that I will be joining an organization for which I have so much respect and enthusiasm, a company whose reputation for innovation and excellence is second to none,

Jobs is not new at setting up such learning initiatives, Pixar an animation studio, which was founded by Jobs has a program that is dubbed as Pixar University, which offers three month long animation courses.

[via CNET]

CDBaby, one of the largest online sellers of indie bands that was sold to CD and DVD duplicator Disc Makers at a price tag of $22 million, according to an interview given by founder Derek Sivers to VentureVoice. Since Sivers held 100% shares of the company, we now know how much he bagged.

[via PaidContent]

Yahoo is planning to open up shop in Nebraska, days after it has officially announced that it will be cutting 1,500 jobs due to economic slowdown. The project would be officially announced by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in a news conference on Friday. According to Associated Press:

Earlier this year, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo applied for the biggest slate of state tax breaks available in Nebraska to help set up some operations in La Vista.

If the company goes ahead with the project, within four years it would have to invest at least $100 million and create at least 50 jobs with a minimum average salary of $68,700.

Break.com, a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based online video site which at one times positioned itself as a competitor to Youtube, has laid of 11 workers. According to an email by CEO, Keith Richman:

Essentially, we are profitable. We have 80 people, are growing 100 percent year over year and still actively hiring for a bunch of jobs. At the end of our quarter we just looked at what was working well and are focusing more efforts on that. The other stuff was working OK, but just not as profitable.

The company is now trying to position itself as an entertainment destination for guys and bankrolls promising videographers and also partners with production companies to produce higher-quality content than amateur-made clips.

[via CNET]

Microsoft, has announced record revenues for $15.06 billion for Q3, 2008, an increase of 9% over the same period last year. The net income stands at $4.37 billion. Some Divisional revenues for the quarter include:

• Client revenue hit $4.2 billion, up slightly from $4.14 billion a year ago.
• Sever and Tools revenue grew 17% in the quarter to $3.4 billion. Op income was up 20% in the period.
• Microsoft Business Division revenue grew by a similar 20% to $4.9 billion. This unit, as well as Sever and Tools were the heroes of the quarter, as the company pronounced its enterprise activity as "healthy".
• Online services revenue grew to $3.4 billion from $2.9 billion; op losses grew, however, to $480 million.
• Entertainment and Devices slipped slightly to $1.8 billion

"Our customers are asking how they can save money and do more with less," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. "Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help our customers save money through supplier consolidation, increased productivity, and a low total cost of ownership through the depth and breadth of our product portfolio and solutions."

Press Release

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), that provides users with on demand access to Linux server, has now left beta and is in full production. In addition to this Amazon is now offering Windows based Compute Clouds in beta testing mode.

In addition to this EC2 now has a new SLA stating that the services will have an availability of 99.95%. Prior to this only Simple Storage Service (S3) had an SLA. Jeff Barr, Amazon’s web services evangelist has highlighted four areas that would receive special focus from the Web Services Group:

• Management Console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You’ll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.
• Load Balancing: The load-balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
• Automatic Scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.
• Cloud Monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real time, multidimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

[via CNET]