Google is happy to announce today that they have signed an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company based in San Mateo, CA. AdMob is a great Silicon Valley story — founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui when he couldn’t find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site. Over the past few years, Omar and his talented team have built a thriving company with great mobile advertising products, and we are looking forward to having them join the Google team and work with us on the future of mobile advertising.

Google’ve written in the past about how mobile phones are becoming an increasingly indispensable part of our daily lives, and continue to see how great devices with full Internet browsers and vibrant app marketplaces are driving an explosion of usage. In fact:

* iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google’s 5x mobile search growth over the past two years
* And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]

Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. Google believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That’s what has excited about this deal.

According to ViziSense, an online audience measurement and analytics provider platform, Gmail, Google’s free e-mail service is now India’s largest free e-mail service provider with more than 18 million users. Yahoo Mail, which held the top spot until the previous month has now been relegated to the second spot.

Yahoo Mail boasts of 16.8 million unique users and has seen its usage dip 8 percent since August this year. This, coupled with Gmail’s continued growth which averaged 3 percent since August, has ensured that Gmail surpassed the number of Yahoo users in early October. Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail too is seeing a surge in its userbase with it managing a very impressive 8 percent growth in India since August. Rediff Mail is at number three with 6.25 million users.

However, on the global scale, it might be a while till Gmail usurps the throne from Yahoo to be the world’s largest e-mail provider. Besides, it also has another adversary to counter, Windows Live Mail from Microsoft which is right up there at number 2. As seen in a recent ComScore report, Gmail has been growing pretty fast in U.S. as well– and unless Yahoo and Windows Mail don’t do something drastic, Gmail, in its current form, will eclipse the “traditional” webmail providers in the years to come.

Incidentally, it was just last week that Yahoo carried a full front page ad across leading national dailies in India. Was this an attempt to woo its once loyal users who have started migrating to Gmail?

source: techtree.com

Google has officially celebrated the bar code with it’s new logo (for today). The barcode was invented in … well that’s the problem with Google’s logo.. there is no clear “date” it was invented. Hence it’s somewhat of a puzzle on why Google is celebrating the bar code today, when it’s not really defined as it’s “birthday”

According to Wikipedia, “In 1932 business student Wallace Flint of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration wrote a thesis promoting an “automated grocery store” using punch cards, which customers would hand to a clerk, who would load them into a reader, causing flow racks to deliver the desired products, after which an itemized bill would automatically be produced. In spite of its promise, punch card systems were expensive, and the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, and the idea was never implemented.”

Then this shows up:

“In 1948 Bernard Silver (1924–62), a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friends Norman Joseph Woodland (1921-) and Jordin Johanson about the request, and the three started working on a variety of systems. Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but this proved to fade and was fairly expensive.”

So exactly when was the bar code made?

for more information visit: http://www.tribbleagency.com

Google has collaborated with artists around the globe to provide themes for the Chrome browser

Google today unveiled a set of themes for its Google Chrome web browser, providing users with customisable looks as they navigate the web. Google teamed up with artists, architects, musicians, illustrators, filmmakers and fashion and interior designers from around the globe to produce a set of more than 100 unique themes for internet users to choose from.

Google worked with Vivienne Westwood, Porsche Design, Dolce and Gabbana and Chloe, among others, to produce the designs. “We’ve found that people like to customize their web experience,” said Tom Stocky, Director of Products at Google. “These themes provide a fun, attractive way to dress up your browser.”

for more information visit :http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/9882.html

Google brought Push Mail support to its Gmail service using Google Sync for iPhone platform, Symbain and Windows Mobile based devices. Earlier this year, Google had introduced Google Sync to synchronize Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with S60 devices, Windows Mobile and iPhone. It’s Google who brought Push Gmail to the iPhone platform. Note that iPhone or iPod Touch need to have iPhone OS 3.0 version or higher running on the device.

Google Sync is a service that allows users to synchronize their Google Contacts, Gmail and Calendar to mobile devices using Google Account. By setting up Google Sync on iPhone, iPod Touch or Windows Mobile phones, users can get Gmail messages pushed directly to respective devices. This means that the user’s Inbox on iPhone/Windows Mobile phone is always up to date. Also, address book can be accessed anytime.

Take note of two things before jumping to setup Google Sync. Firstly, Google Sync uses Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Protocol for setting up Google Sync on the device. Also, ActiveSync supports only one profile so if you have one account activated on Microsoft Exchange on your phone, second one can’t be added.

Backup the existing data for it’s likely that it might be wiped out. Secondly, Push technology is known for being power intensive and enabling Push notifications on iPhone may reduce its battery life.

To activate Google Sync service on iPhone/iPod Touch, check the setup instructions here and Windows Mobile users can check here.

In this cold war between Google and Apple, the former has just scored a brownie point by releasing the feature that Apple promised year ago.

Rajeev Motwani, Google mentor and Stanford Professor who died early this year has been selected for the first PAN IIT Lifetime Achievement Award, while, Pradeep Khosla, Dean of the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University has been chosen for the Academic Excellence Award.