Google unveils Nexus 7 tablet computers

Google unveiled its first tablet computer Nexus 7 at the developer’s conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Priced at $199, the 7 inch tablet is powered by the latest generation of Android software. Google made Nexus 7 in collaboration with Asus and has optimized the tablet for Google Play.

“We wanted to design a best-of Google experience optimized around the content available at Google Play,” said Hugo Barra, Google’s director of product management.

Google Nexus 7 Tablet

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How Social Media helps in boosting search engine rankings of your Blog?

The search engine ranking of your website plays an important role in attracting more visitors to the site, and helping your brand gain more visibility online. One way of making your website more search-engine friendly, is by ensuring that the website content is SEO optimized.

A new infographic by TastyPlacement, however, points out that ranking high on Google, is not just about SEO, it’s about social media too.

TastyPlacement created six websites in six similarly-sized UScities, to conduct a study to analyze the relationship between a certain social media activity and the organic search engine rankings.

The study involved carrying a particular social media marketing activity and measuring the average change in the search engine ranking position, for five of the sites, after a period of one month. The sixth site was left as-is for a control test.

From the study results, social media marketing was found to help boost the search engine rankings in the following ways:

When a target website was promoted via social media connections, and 100 followers were secured to a linked Google+ business page, the website’s search engine position rose by 14.63

When a target website was promoted via social media connections, and 300 Google +1 votes were secured to that target website, its search engine position rose by 9.44

When a target website was promoted via social media connections, and 70 Facebook shares were secured for the target website, and Facebook “likes” to a linked Facebook business pagewere increased by 50, the search engine position of the target website rose by 6.9.

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Android 5.0 will reportedly launch in the fall on five phones

While many of us are still waiting for Android 4.0, Google is already firming up plans to launch version 5.0.

Also known as Jelly Bean, Android 5.0 is a huge enigma that nobody really knows anything about.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, it will be fully up and running later this year, and it will debut on no fewer than five different phones.

And get this - according to the Journal, those five phones will all be branded as Nexus products. The "Nexus" name has been associated largely with only one active phone at a time, and it's the phone that Google has an active hand in developing.

Android 5.0

But it's expected that the Nexus brand will intensify over the coming months, especially as Google is assumed to be working on a Nexus-labeled tablet device. Of course, all this talk about Android 5.0 cannot help but lead some to think about the fact that Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, barely has a 5% penetration rate. And the rollout is still underway.

Many phones aren't even expected to get an update to Ice Cream Sandwich until later this year, but now it seems like by then it will already be outdated.

Google promised that Ice Cream Sandwich would be like a big reboot button for Android, aiming to solve the problem with device fragmentation.

But if Android 5.0 is already starting to launch on some devices by the time ICS gets fully deployed, it seems that strategy might be for naught.

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Now, Google brings instant answers to search results

Google will now give instant answers to your queries right on its search results page. The Internet search giant has built up an 'encyclopedia' of 200 million people, places and products, and will deliver that information through Search.

For example, type in 'Mona Lisa', and a biography appears right on the page (on the right hand side), type in 'Leonardo DiCaprio' and you get a list of the Titanic star's films, and suggested related searches.

 According to The Daily Mail, Google, and the Microsoft-ran competitor Bing, have both previously answered results in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) before, such as when searching for 'weather' or for football results.
But this is the most graphical and fully-fledged attempt by Google yet to place answers on the search engine, the report said.
Google has quietly collected information on 200 million 'entities' - people, places, products.
The new version of search will feed users information about the 'entity' they are searching for. 

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Google's driverless car now can be seen in Nevada

The Google car that can drive on it own is now eligible to ride on the streets of American State Nevada.

Technically speaking, what this means is that the car - yes, the car itself - has been issued its own driver license. In other words, the state of Nevada feels the inner workings of Google's smart vehicle contain the same capacity of driving ability and human judgment as any physical person sitting behind the wheel.

The car in question is a Prius, and has been loaded with a very special software package originally designed by Google for use in and around the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

But it is in Nevada where Google has been spending most of its time with the contraption as of late, since that's the state that it has been able to sweet talk into actually making it legal to take on the streets.

The software within the car uses all sorts of tools, ranging from a set of short-range radar sensors and video cameras to a persistent Internet connection that constantly scans Google Maps for road and traffic updates.

While obviously it is still a highly focused and experimental project, it could be the beginning of a ripple effect on the entire automotive industry.

Of course, Google hasn't really put the car through its full paces just yet. When it goes for a test drive, the car always has trained employees inside, who are able to override the autopilot mechanism at a moment's notice.

Interestingly enough, though, the only time that the driverless car has been in an accident is when it was being driven in manual override mode. It has never shown any safety problems when in its driverless state.

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