BNO News said that, a fire broke out at Google's UK headquarters in London on Thursday afternoon. There is no immediate report of casualties.
The six-story building is located at Buckingham Palace Road, near the Victoria Place Shopping Centre. "We were called in at 1.53 p.m. (local time)," a fire team spokesman said. He added that the fire breaks out on the fifth floor.
There are six fire engines and 25 firefighters are on the scene to battle the fire. The spokesman told the fire is "not very large." As per UK time 3 p.m., the fire was still burning.
Both Buckingham Palace Road and Elizabeth Street have been blocked as firefighters work to extinguish the fire, a police official said. The building has been vacated.
Witnesses posted photos of the fire to the social networking site Twitter. One photo, posted by Jon Swaine, it showed flames shooting from the roof of the building, others showed only the smoke.
It's a little tweak with a few lovely implications: Now Google Maps has much more tightly integrated Google Street View, so you can switch seamlessly between the two when looking for an address.
After performing a search in Google Maps, you'll see an option underneath the search result will go to "Street View," it's takes you to the street-level view of the business or location which you're searching for. The address will have a marker right in front of it, and you can use all the normal street view tools to zoom and navigate the representation of the space.
From the street view you get a link to "Search nearby," which then seamlessly takes you back out to Maps level to see results close to where you just were. You can click on any of the found icons to go back to Street View and see that location's positioning relative to other businesses or homes in the area.
Google has announced that they are now supporting forty languages. They are very excited that by adding support for Hebrew and Arabic, new optimized mobile Search experience is now available in 40 languages for feature phones.
The company said that they now support as many as 40 languages on mobile search which is an important milestone for them.
Google said that the universal search now works on all of these languages providing the best search results on their mobile devices.
It promised the world views of the whole globe from their laptop. But could Google Earth have unravelled our favourite anonymity of the deep?
One internet fan claims he found the famous Loch Ness Monster in satellite images on the virtual globe.
Sun reader Jason Cooke said the shape seen on the surface of the 22-mile Scottish loch is 65ft long and appears to have an oval body, a tail and four legs or flippers.
Jason told the Sun: 'I couldn't believe it. It's just like the descriptions of Nessie.'
Researcher Adrian Shine, of the Loch Ness Project, said: "This new image is really intriguing. It needs further study."
'Surgeon's photograph': A highly valued British surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson, claimed he took this picture, which appeared to show a sea serpent rising out of the Loch, in 1934
The Loch Ness Monster has been a topic of mass intrigue and debate since it came to the world's attention in 1933.
Scientists have extensively written off the idea as a modern-day myth and continued sightings as set ups and wishful thinking.
Yet it has remained a contested phenomenon for almost 80 years.
To see the object, enter co-ordinates Latitude 57°12'52.13"N, Longitude 4°34'14.16"W in Google Earth.
Google has discovered that it is working to deliver a 64-bit port of its Chrome browser for Linux users.
Chrome was released almost accurately a year ago, and is presently available in 32-bit versions for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
But, 64-bit on the desktop is much more commonplace in the Linux world, and Google is likely to be reacting to stress from Linux users for a 64-bit release.
The move was discovered in a developer forum posting by one of the Google Chrome software engineer Dean McNamee, along with a link to build instructions for those interested in trying out the 64-bit code.
The 64-bit version under development is really a port of Chromium, the open-source code on which the release version for Windows is based.
Google said that the V8 JavaScript engine at the core of Chrome does not presently compile in 64-bit mode on Windows. Development hard works are focused on making the 64-bit version of V8 work on Linux and Mac first, but Windows support is coming.
If your office provides you a BlackBerry for work purposes, you may soon be accessing Google Apps Gmail, calendar, and contacts through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
On Friday, Google announced that some features in Google Apps, its suite of premium enterprise-level applications, will now give company-issued BlackBerrys some push and sync functionality.
The Google Apps connector promises to push Gmail inbox within 60 seconds, and sync in-box actions assigning labels and emails archived. You can also search contacts from the company's global address list, a huge bonus for mobile workers. Synchronization between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry calendar is one-way in this release, with Google's calendar populating your plan on the phone. Google plans to include two-way calendar syncing in the future.
While the connector opens up syncing to some of the Google Apps, in this iteration it does not sync with Google Docs, the intranet site-hosting application called Google Site, and Google Video. You'll still be able to view content via the mobile browser, however.
The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (download) is available at no charge to corporate Google Apps Premier and Education Editions customers, and must be implemented by an IT administrator.
Have you ever sign in to Google to find that the logo has changed? This is generally made by Google to mark birthdays of famous artists or scientists such as Rabindranath Tagore. Some of the changed logos - referred to as Google doodles - even celebrate certain historical events or events such as the solar eclipse.
Now, Google has thrown open a competition for school children in India called Doodle 4 Google - to design their own Google doodles around the theme 'My India'- classes from 1 to 10. Arvind Desikan, head of consumer marketing from Google said "We are asking children to pictorially depict what India means to them." The winning doodle will be featured on google.co.in on November 14, Children's Day.
Apart from this, the winner will get a laptop and the school he/she belongs to will get a technology gift from Google worth Rs1lakh.
To apply, students can register online at www.google.co.in/doodle4google. The entries have to be posted to the said address by end of Spetember.
The judging board will include faculty and students of the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, renowned cartoonist N Ponnappa, and a young emerging Indian artist Raghava KK.
But do school kids, specially the young ones, know sufficient about Google to really design a logo? Desikan said "The doodle is more about what India means to you than Google. The picturisation is basically about India, although you will be doing it against a Google template. The Google 4 Doodle homepage has tips for teachers on how to help students through this whole process."
A few months back, Google added the ability to import your old mail and contacts to Gmail.Google made this feature available for all newly-created Gmail accounts first could import their contacts from other Web-based mail services, since people new to Gmail benefit most from being able to move their stuff with them.
Marcin Brodziak, a Google software engineer, wrote in a blog post that "Often, these accounts predate Gmail, and occasionally we have to log into them to look at some old confirmation email or find the email address for someone with whom we've lost touch,"
To activate, just go to Settings in Gmail and go to Accounts and Import. Click "Import mail and contacts" and a window will pop out to lead you through the short import process.
Google will forward any new mail from your other accounts to Gmail for 30 days.
Google has already launched bookmark syncing for users on the dev channel of its Chrome web browser. This will allow you to keep your browser bookmarks in sync no matter which of your computers you are using.
Syncing has been a standard feature of Apple's Safari browser for some months now, but you need MobileMe for it to work. And Firefox users can download add-ons like Xmarks (previously called Foxmarks) to get the functionality, but with Chrome it will be built-in, and most prominently, unlike MobileMe, free. Google notes that the bookmarks are stored on users Google account alongside Google Docs for easy web access and sync via XMPP.
To activate this feature, you apparently have to launch the dev version of Chrome with the "enable-sync command-line flag".". If you understand what that means, you're fine to go. If not, you'll probably want to wait for the feature to hit the regular release channel, something that will probably happen relatively soon.
Bookmark management emerge to have been provisionally disabled on the latest versions of Chromium for Mac, after they were first turned on last week. When they come back, expectantly this syncing will work for Macs as well. To stay up-to-date on the latest versions of Chromium for Mac, check out our updater tool.
According to news reports, the majority used social network by worldwide monthly active users Facebook.com may become the next super computer OS for communications.
Facebook is making tactical moves to develop itself into something greater. Last week, it has purchased social sharing service FriendFeed. Moreover, it has upgraded its search engine functionality, and urbanized a new aptitude to share status updates with the complete network in real-time. It has also released in Facebook Lite, a trimmed down version of Facebook which is similar to that of Twitter.
All of these moves work to keep Facebook to establish itself as a must-use platform for every-day Internet users. The really fascinating question is what tactical perspective underpins the Facebook acquisition.
Google's page-rank search technology is fine, but it's still cute primitive-- try looking for a hotel in any Iran town. You could say that search is about 5 percent solved. With 95 percent still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or two-way dimensions to pure computational algorithms.
Facebook's purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ever-present among techies and unknown to everybody else. It's an application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media behavior.
Google has long tried to get into the social game, and Facebook surely wouldn't mind expanding into some of Google's province. It's as classic an American move violently as Pepsi vs. Coke. Two companies, one market. Despite which side you choose, Facebook will be happy to air your thoughts on the matter. After all, that's why Facebook bought FriendFeed. So it could own you.
Google is now offering a way for authors and publishers, who release their work under Creative Commons licenses to distribute it through Google Books, a free service that allow users to search and read books online.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit group that heartens artists, writers and others to use its licensing tools to let their work to be reused and shared by others in sure ways.
Xian Ke, associate product manager for Google Books said that, if rights holders are already part of Google's partner program, they can make their book available under Creative Commons by updating their account settings. Otherwise, they can sign up to be a partner and choose one of seven different Creative Commons licenses.
People will be able to download these books from Google Books and share them freely. If rights holders specify that people can modify their books, readers will be able to do that, too.
Those who download the books will be agreeing that they will only use them in the ways specified by the license. This could include giving the author credit if they remix the work or further public distributions, Ke wrote.
The hard working journalists at the Onion News Network have produced yet another worldwide exclusive: Now Google is offering users the chance to completely defend their privacy by simply moving to some remote mountain village.
John Carter, Opt Out Village director, said "If you want to keep your information personal, just move to our 22-acre Opt Out Village and not speak to anyone from the exterior world."
In fact, a van will arrive within minutes of opting out to pick users up at their homes. Villagers are likely to know how to grow their own food and bury corpses by hand, and will have to barter or fight for resources.
"If you don't want to give us complete access to your most personal thoughts and feelings, that's fine," Carter added. "You can just toil in the hinterlands and die young."
Data Viz, Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading provider of Microsoft Office compatibility solutions has announced that it is now shipping Documents To Go 2.0 for the Google Android mobile platform.
The new version of the popular office suite brings the enterprise-grade productivity tool to Android devices such as the T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G, Samsung Galaxy and HTC Hero, as well as several future Android phones.
The 2.0 update enhancements include:
Microsoft PowerPoint File Support: A Slideshow To Go component allows creating, viewing and editing of PowerPoint presentations. With support for the latest file formats, including Microsoft Office 2007, review notes.
Adobe PDF File Support: The PDF To Go component allows you to view Adobe PDF files with options for page view, word warp, select and copy text, word warp, auto-rotate, multiple zoom levels, bookmarks, search and support for password-protected files.
Enhancements for Microsoft Word & Excel File Support: Viewing and editing new and legacy Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) and Microsoft Excel (.xls, xlsx) files, including capabilities for find and replace, word count, number formatting, sheet formatting, contextual menus, improved selection modes and scrolling, optimizations for touch, and a 'Live Folder' for instant access to recently used documents.
A free, non-expiring version of Documents To Go 2.0 that provides all Android-based device users with the ability to view Microsoft Word and Excel files and attachments. (The full feature set can be unlocked with a key.)
Documents To Go 2.0 is available through the Android Market for free in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The 'Full Version Key' costs $29.99, and customers who previously purchased Documents To Go version 1.0 ma receive the full 2.0 version at no charge. In similar news, ThinkFree also announced on Tuesday ThinkFree Mobile for Android, which includes PowerPoint, PDF, document and spreadsheet support for the Android platform. The package is planned for device manufacturers, OEMs, ODMs and telcos, and inquiries can be placed on ThinkFree's website.
This past June, Google invited fans to take the Google Chrome icon and reconstruct it in an inventive way. The end design created and eventually launched by Google needed to stand out on the desktop, look steady yet dynamic, and use color to show some Google branding. Through the design process, another quality that became significant to the team was to make the icon feel like a real, tangible object so that clicking on it would be like pressing a real button.
As one might expect, user capitulation were good-looking inventive - some admirers submitted videos of how they approached the challenge, using materials like even clothing, dominoes and LEGO. Others submitted their own digital interpretations. While Google eventually went with their own design, the challenge invited fans of the Google brand and of Chrome to partake in the process, experiment with the brand image and share their ideas. This experimentation and continued novelty is another example of what constructs Google our Top "Good" Brand in 2009.
Jumplists are one part of the new Windows 7. The jumplists basically give access to program related options. This can be the latest documents of Microsoft Word the most recent visited websites in Internet Explorer but also options to create a task like opening a new web browser window or sending an email.
The latest dev build of Google Chrome is now offering jumplist support in Windows 7. To open the jumplist just right-clicking the Google Chrome icon in the Windows taskbar. In Google Chromejumplist is divided into four parts of which three are visible and one only if the user has added at least one item to it.
The Google Browser will show the most visited websites, the recently closed tab and tasks in the jumplist. The most visited and recent websites are directly taken from the web browser’s history while the task allows the user to open a new tab page.
The fourth group only becomes obtainable if the user pins an element in the jumplist. This is for example exceptional for fast accessing favorite websites from the Window 7 jumplist. The latest version of Google Chrome can be downloaded from the dev channel page. It is interesting to see that the Google Chrome progress team has added jumplist support while the Mozilla Firefox team has not shown any signs that they intend to support that feature in the near future.
As FeedDemon closes in on finalizing the code for version 3, FeedDemon 3 RC 4 discards its proprietary online harmonization at newsgator.com. The fourth liberate applicant syncs only with Google Reader, as FeedDemon's maker Nick Bradbury announced it would last week.
When compare with FeedDemon RC 3, the 3 RC 4 syncs with Google Reader faster and more plainly, but users with high unread counts will still misplace most unread feeds.
Bradbury has affirmed in blog posts and forum messages that he trusts this will open FeedDemon to wider spectators, but the way to prepare FeedDemon for Google Reader has not been a smooth one. Many devotees of the program have articulated irritation with the loss of features such as real feeds and synced clippings.
The synchronization scripts in FeedDemon 3 RC 4 have been re-written to be faster and more precise, and those changes show when compared to the third release applicant. The fourth RC used only 42 MB of RAM, as well. However, the translation process won't be able to handle huge numbers of unread posts, and limits the unread count to 10 per RSS feed. This is because Google Reader is restricted to allowing for only 10 feeds unread from the past 30 days when subscribing.
Most of the other developments in this liberate applicant are geared towards streamlining the translation process to Google Reader. There's a link to create a Google Account from the Google Account window, and there's a new startup option to convert NewsGator subscriptions to Google Reader. Tags have gained eminence over clippings in the new version. Clippings will exist only if grandfathered in from a previous version.
Opera Mobile 9.7 is already available on Windows Mobile and Symbian, and is a pretty nice browsing platform, but so distant it hasn't been available on other smart phone platforms. Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner, told in an interview with PCMag.com today, that the browser might come to Google Android - though he didn't say when.
"Yes, we are currently working on an Android version," von Tetzchner said.
Opera Mobile is a matured browser that gives HTML pages on your device and supports widgets that dwell on your phone. Android and BlackBerry users right now are restricted to Opera Mini, a lighter-weight browser that reformats Web pages through Opera's servers to present them in a "mobile-friendly" format.
Android's own browser, based on WebKit, is very nice. Opera Mobile has a download manager, supple bookmark management, and is known to be fast. It'll be fascinating to see how it does against Google Android's browser.
Slowly but certainly, Google Map s is satisfying up with more and more places. If you search in a main city, you are probable to find landmarks, museums, restaurants and famous stores labeled right on the map even if you did not specially search for them.
If you drag up a map of midtown Manhattan , for example, you'll see museums like MOMA and the American Folk Art Museum, with tourist attractions like the "Tree at Rockefeller Center." And some of the famous buildings are also marked, like the Trump Tower, the Sony Building, and the CBS building. Churches and chocolate stores exhibit up as well.
You can also see High-end stores like Harry Winston and Takashimaya on the map, as are more common ones such as the Gap. Some famous restaurants are also highlighted. La Cote Basque, an pricey French restaurant on 55th Street is on there, but so is Sapporo, a great Japanese noodle house on 49th.
When you click on a labeled building or landmark, an information window pops open with the accurate address, phone number, description, and link to a Wikipedia book if available. And as you zoom in extra places become visible. At some point the map could improve category of crowded, Google hopefully is looking at search history and click behavior to surface the most essential places. In map, each place becomes a visual search result. I like the direction this is going.
Apple dissatisfied Google's exertion to release Latitude which allows your control-freak friends to know where you are at all times-as an iPhone request. You can only update it yourself using a web page, which makes it not-so-useful. Until now. Developer Nat Friedman thoughts the same as you did (somewhat along the lines of "f*cking stupid Apple morons"), and I spent this weekend writing a script called playnice. From the MobileMe the script will get the iPhone's location information, and then sends it to Google's Latitude. Obviously, you need a MobileMe user for this to work, making it less useful for the rest of the mortals who are not ready to pay more dollars to Steve and his minions.
A few months ago we announced the search options are a set of features that allow you to filter your web searches on Google. For example while searching you might these options to see for the stories that are published in the past 24 hours or past week etc. These search options are sometimes fairly useful for refining the search. Now Google added some set of features to the Google Images section.
To access just click on show options link on top of the search results, the options will show in a left side navigation bar. This new feature offers quick access to existing tools, including search by image and color type. The search option for image contains any size, Medium, Large, Icon, or you can specify a particular size like 1024x768. You could also use type of image options, such as a Photo, Clip art, Line drawing or Face. All of these features are available in the advanced search pages, but now with the important search options line they become more visible and fairly useful for refining the search.
