Archive for September, 2008
September 24th, 2008 | 
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The first phone that harnesses Google Inc.’s ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.
T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, a phone that, like Apple Inc.’s iPhone, has a large touch screen. But it also packs a trackball, a slide-out keyboard and easy access to Google’s e-mail and mapping programs.
T-Mobile said it will begin selling the G1 for $179 with a two-year contract. The device hits U.S. stores Oct. 22 and heads to Britain in November and other European countries early next year.
The phone will be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third-generation wireless data network. By launch, that will be 21 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami…
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That song especially comes to mind with Google’s OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It’s designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work seamlessly with other social networks using the platform. (Some argue it’s also designed to compete with Facebook’s developer platform.)
And if companies aren’t comfortable with the OpenSocial premise–for fear that it’s just an anticompetitive ploy–they now have a nonprofit foundation that will help ease their mind.
“This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity,” wrote Dan Peterson on the OpenSocial Foundation blog.
Specifically, the foundation will provide operational guidelines about the technology and details on intellectual property as the platform changes and grows…
Quote: On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers…
