Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Android’s ascent in China might not elevate Google

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Google’s Linux-based Android mobile platform is rapidly gaining traction around the world. Recent reports suggest that it is on a trajectory to become the dominant mobile operating system in China, a region with a large population of mobile Internet users and enormous growth potential.

Although this may seem like an unambiguous victory for Google on the surface, the implications are actually not that clear. It’s important to understand that the Chinese mobile ecosystem is producing its own variant of Android, called OPhone. It’s a fork of the platform that largely cuts out Google as the middleman. The fork offers Chinese handset makers and mobile carriers considerable autonomy, because it allows them to circumvent the licensing policies and technical mechanisms that Google has traditionally used to exercise control over the platform.

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Google releases command line tool for accessing Web services

Posted on June 19th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Google has announced the availability of a new tool called GoogleCL that will allow users to interact with the company’s popular Web services directly from the command line.

GoogleCL was developed in Python on top of the gdata-python-client library. It’s an open-source software project that’s hosted on Google Code and distributed under the Apache license. Users who want to contribute fixes and improvements can submit patches through the project’s issue tracker.

Although modern desktop computing is increasingly dominated by graphical user interfaces, command line tools are still extremely useful for rapid interaction, simple programmatic automation, and remote system management. GoogleCL will make Google-hosted data more accessible to common command-line workflows. The GoogleCL tool offers an easy way to pipe your GMail contact list into sed and awk, or use a shell glob to specify which photos and movies to batch upload to Picasa and YouTube. It also supports Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google docs.

The tool can be downloaded from its project page on the Google Code Web site. Google is making available a tarball with the source code and an installable DEB package. I tested it from the DEB package on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop computer. The first time that you access each individual service, it will prompt you for your username and then it will supply an OAuth link that you can copy and paste into a Web browser to complete the authentication process. After initial account configuration, the tool can be used in pipelines and other non-interactive command line workflows.

I tested several of the features, particularly the GMail contact list support. It worked well with a Google Apps account that I use with one of my own domains. The supported services and operations are documented in the project’s user manual. An assortment of sample uses can be found on the project’s wiki.

Some of the features in GoogleCL, such as Google Docs editing, require at least version 2.0 of the gdata-python-client library. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repositories only have version 1.2.4. The tool will work with the older version of the library, but will display an error message when the user tries to use a feature that isn’t supported.

For more information about the tool, you can refer to the release announcement that was published this morning in Google’s open source blog.

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Google StreetView cars grabbed traffic from open WiFi networks

Posted on May 15th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Google has admitted that it has been “mistakenly” collecting payload data from open WiFi networks as its Street View cars drove around taking pictures. The company said that it never used any information about who was using those networks and what sites they were visiting, but the company has nonetheless decided to completely stop collecting WiFi data from its Street View cars.

Google put up a blog post last month detailing exactly what kind of data its Street View cars collected in response to an inquiry from German lawmakers. At the time, Google said that it collects SSID information as well as the MAC addresses of WiFi routers it encounters along the Street View route. This is for use in Google’s location-based services, like Skyhook Wireless‘ services that are widely used on mobile devices without GPS.

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Conan O’Brien Visits Google

Posted on May 8th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Recently while Conan O’Brien was in the Bay Area he paid a visit to the Google headquarters in Mountain View. Andy Richter made a surprise guest appearance.
He had a lot of fun giving Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra a hard time.
via SF Weekly
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