India Magazine

Google CEO Eric Schmidt yesterday said that as per Google’s data there are around 2 lakh android based devices sold every day worldwide.

Android is an operating system developed by Google based on the Linux Kernel – used it mobile phones, tablet computers and netbooks. Open Handset Alliance – a business alliance of 65 companies including Google is now handing development works in Android platform.

In March Google launched 7th version of Android code named Froyo or Android 2.2 and now handset manufacturers are releasing devices based on that.

Eighth version of Android (3.0) code named Gingerbread is expected by end of this year.

"The number was about 1 lakh a day about two months ago," Schmidt said.

In the second quarter of 2010 Android based devices topped US smartphone market with a 33% share, followed by Blackberry OS (28%) and Apple’s iOS (22%)

Even though Google doesn’t get revenue from Android itself, Schmidt said Google loves the success of Android because it means more people have phones capable of doing lots of Web searches for which it does get paid.

Google Wave

Google also announced on Wednesday that it is halting development on Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool aiming to combine various forms of online communication.

Gadgets, Software Android, Froyo, Google

After lots of rumors finally Google officially launched its smartphone Google Nexus One, manufactures by Taiwan based High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC).

First version of Nexus one is based on Qualcomm QSD 8250 1 GHz processor running open source mobile operating system Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 (Eclair).

With Nexus One Google is targeting other popular smartphones like Apple iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and Motorola Droid.

Display : 3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 800 x 480 pixels and 100,000:1 typical contrast ratio.

Camera : Compared to the 3 Megapixel camera in iPhone 3GS, Nexus One comes with 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, led flash, 2x digital zoom, geo tagging and can capture videos at 720×480 at 20 frames per second.

Connectivity : Nexus One is a 3G supported phone (HSDPA 7.2Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps) with Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11b/g) , Bluetooth 2.1and Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP).

Memory : Google Nexus One is equipped with 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash for storage. 4GB additional memory also included (microSD) expandable up to 32GB.

This is a major difference as both iPhone 3GS and Motorola Droid comes with 15GB.

Battery : Nexus One is powered with 1400 mAH battery which gives up to 7 hours of talk time (3G), and 5 hours of internet usage (3G) and an approximate 20 hours of audio playback.

Size : Height : 119mm, Width : 59.8mm, Depth : 11.5mm, Weight : 130 grams

Google currently offers it for use on the T-Mobile network in the United States. It may take some time to reach the Indian market.

Gadgets, Technology, mobile phone Android, Google, Google Nexus One, Google Phone

Is Google the most preferred Internet brand in India ? It seems like that as Google services are dominating in India by more percentage compared to its worldwide levels.

Google is the undisputed leader in Search Engine world but in India Google’s market share is more compared to other major countries.

Similarly in Social Networking Indians prefer Orkut, but internationally it is dominated by Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc.

Now the latest trend is Google Chrome (google’s own browser) is gaining popularity among Indians.

As per the statistics by statcounter.com 11.32% of its users from India used Google chrome to browse the web in December 2009, compared to 5.3% worldwide.

Both in India and worldwide Internet Explorer is still the leader in Browser Space but it lost  17.8% market share in last 12 months.

Firefox is still growing in India and Internationally and registered a 27% year to year growth.

Source: StatCounterStats – Browser Market Share in India

Google Chrome reported massive growth last year – 338% growth worldwide and 189% in India.

Another major change happened in Dec 09 in browser space is Firefox 3.5 surpassed all major browser versions including long dominated IE versions and reached World’s Most Popular Browser position, a major achievement for Firefox and Mozilla.

In operating system section still Windows XP leads with 65% market share, but down 11 points in 1 year period.

In last 2 months Windows 7 doubled its market share and gaining momentum.

In Mobile Browser section Opera Browser is leading followed by iPhone Browser and Nokia Browser, obviously due to the popularity of Apple iPhone and smarphones from Nokia.

In the Mobie Operating System space SymbionOS and iPhone OS are far ahead compared to RIM, Sony Ericsson and other mobile operating systems.

For full details about Operating System, Browser, Mobile OS, Mobile Browser, Search engine, Mobile Search and Mobile/Desktop Comparison visit http://gs.statcounter.com/

Internet Browser, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer

As per the latest comScore report the Social media giant Facebook reached a major milestone in November 2009 by surpassing 10 crore US visitors/month limit.

This is a major achievement for Facebook because it is the first time a Social Networking site crossing this limit. In November 2009 Facebook displaced AOL and reached the fourth position. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites are in the first 3 positions respectively.

Facebook almost doubled it’s US visitors in last one year and now facebook accounts for 5.5% of all time spent online in the US (last year it was 2.5%).

More details available comScore Site

Internet, Social Media comScore, facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Finally yesterday Google confirmed about its own mobile handset called Nexus One which is going to hit market by 2010. For past many weeks rumors were spreading about a possible handset from Google.

Nexus One being manufactured by HTC for Google and based on Android 2.1 with all latest Smartphone features.

As per some reports Google has already handed over some Nexus One phones to employees for testing.

With the launch of Nexus One Google is entering the Smartphone market dominated by Apple’s iPhone and Nokia.

Google is planning to sell the Nexus One in the open market like a normal phone with SIM card so that customer can change the operator any time by inserting a new SIM.

In US Apple iPhone comes with long term service contracts from service providers like AT & T. So the customer cannot change the provider till the contact ends. But this helps Apple to sell iPhone at subsidized rate.

Technology, Telecom, mobile phone Google, Google Nexus One, Google Smartphone, HTC, iPhone, Nokia, smartphone

Finally search engines realized the power of real time web and partnered with twitter to display real time searches.

All major three search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing are now equipped with real time search integration with data from Twitter and similar sites.

Google launched its real time search last week and it is fully live now. In Google when you search for a hot news topics like Andhra or Telangana you will get a search results with real time updates blended with other results.

This real time results keep on updating and there is pause link in case if you want to pause updating.

Google includes results from Twitter and other partner sites like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. In addition to that Google also displays data from newly updated web pages.

Displaying a real time result is easy but the main challenge in real time search is picking up the relevant and useful content. Millions of pages are getting updated every minute and most of these pages are either too personal or not good enough to show in search engine result or may not satisfy the visitor.

For eg when you search for "India” in twitter you will get so many tweets with keyword India but they wont  fully reflect the actual happenings in India at that moment.

The basic idea of real time search is to display happenings at that moment for that keyword.

In real time search with its own algorithm Google is picking up the most relevant pages from Twitter and newly updates sites.

Yahoo embedded Twitter as a separate tab in the search result with news, photos and videos tabs. When you click on the Twitter tab Yahoo will display some recent and relevant tweets with that keyword.

Microsoft’s Bing created a new section for twitter : http://www.bing.com/twitter with a list of hottest topics on twitter like a tag cloud.

When you search for a keyword in Bing+Twitter, it shows two separate results

* Most recent tweets about that keyword.

* Top links shared in tweets about that keyword.

It is a really tough to sort out the most recent and relevant data from billions of pages available online today but with amazing technological enhancements in both software and hardware we can expect more friendly and useful real time searches in near future as most probably 2010 is going to be year of real Real Time Search.

Internet, Social Media, Technology bing, facebook, Google, real time, real time search, search engine, Twitter, Yahoo