Google Play combines Market, Books, Music and Videos

Android took a major step today as Google unified it's Google Music, Google Videos, Google Books and Android Market services into one. The new one-stop store goes by Google Play.

Google Play is Google's effort to put all of its downloadable content, be it apps, movies, music or eBooks and make it easily accessible using Cloud syncing. This would allow you to easily get any music tracks, videos and eBooks you purchase to all of your Android devices, just like with the apps from the Android Market so far.

To make the switch from Android Market to Google Play, the search giant will release an update for the Android Market app on devices running Android 2.2 or later over the coming days. So, from now on, it's officially Google Play, Google Play Music, Google Play Books and Google Play Movies.

How much music and videos, you ask? The company says that you can store up to 20,000 of your own songs plus any of the millions available for purchase in the Google Play itself. And with the app and video count growing literally by the minute, you can be sure that Google will certainly target global market dominance.

And to make sure it attracts more and more users, Google Play will be celebrating its launch by slashing prices on a ton of applications, books, music and movies. Sadly, the full power of Google Play will only be available in the United States at launch, while the rest of the world will have to have to sit on the sideline, looking enviously.

Finally, here's Google's introductory video to Google Play.

Source

View the original article here

A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Feb. 27

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle, and the previous day’s answer (in invisitext) posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

The highway that runs through Rachel, Nevada draws enthusiasts who probably enjoy what movie genre?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [half-life cesium-137] to find that it’s 30 years. Search [half-life uranium-238] to learn that it’s 4.5 billion years, which is just a bit longer.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."
Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

View the original article here

Intel unveils Xeon server chip for cloud

Intel Corp took the wraps off its newest "Xeon" server chip, seeking to capitalize on an explosion of Internet traffic sparked by Web-based cloud computing, social networking and growing smartphone and tablet computer use.

The company's "Xeon E5-2600" family of processors delivers up to 80 per cent better performance than previous platforms while consuming less energy, Diane Bryant, in charge of Intel's data center business, told reporters.

It is designed to support the servers and workstations that handle what Intel estimates will be 33 percent annual growth of data traffic through 2015.

Intel has already shipped its new platform to a host of server manufacturers. It said several - including Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc, IBM, Oracle Corp and Cisco Systems Inc - are expected to announce Xeon-based server platforms.

Smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices is also stepping up investments in enterprise processors. Last week, the perennial runner-up to Intel announced that it would buy micro-server player SeaMicro for $334 million, getting into an emergent, power-efficient server technology.

AMD has lost ground to Intel in the server market in past years but hopes SeaMicro can help its expansion into low-power solutions in massive data centers. But Intel executives said their own Xeon E5 platform can improve energy efficiency by more than 50 per cent in some cases versus the previous generation.

"We did look at SeaMicro's fabric technology. There are probably very few people they didn't come to and shop their solution to," Bryant said. "We were not impressed. We declined and very soon after our competitor acquired them."

Lagging, scrambling

Shares in Intel held steady at about $26.50 in afternoon trade, while AMD's stock was down about 3 percent at $6.86.

While Intel lags Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics in selling processors for smartphones and tablets, Intel executives have pointed to their server business as key to capitalizing on fast growth in the mobile market.

The popularity of smartphones and other mobile gadgets has increased the need for massive computer centers that store data and feed email, videos and other information to those devices.

UBS expects spending on data centers to surge 49 percent this year, driven by the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google. At Tuesday's event, Intel trotted out a variety of clients to demonstrate how its new platform might be employed.

German automaker BMW said it was using Xeon-based servers to keep its luxury cars linked to the Internet. "Soon we will have more than 10 million vehicles connected and that will lead us to 1 terabyte of data volume per day," said Mario Muller, BMW vice president of IT infrastructure.

Like This 3 | 0 Comments

View the original article here

Google Slashes Storage Prices: Still no GDrive

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage.

First, Joneja emphasizes Google's performance and scalability. Unfortunately, Google won't make with much in the way of details about its underlying infrastructure. (For example, does Google use SSD or standard drives? They won't say.)

The big argument for Google's offering, says Joneja, is what you can do with data when you've got it in Google Cloud Storage. Developers using Google Cloud Storage can tap into Google's App Engine and Google Big Query as well.

The pricing changes, says Joneja, should drop pricing by as much as 15% – depending on how much storage is used. Like Amazon S3, Google has a tiered pricing model that includes three dimensions, how much data is stored, amount of transfer, and the requests.

The request and data transfer pricing aren't changing, but they've shaved the cost of storage. Previously the first tier, up to 1TB, was priced at $0.13 per GB. Now it's at $0.12 up to 1TB. The next 9TB was priced at $0.12 per GB, but is now $0.105 per GB.

The partnering companies Google announced today are Gladinet, Panzura, Storsimple, TwinStrata and Zmanda. So far, most of the solutions that Google is announcing don't seem to be using Cloud Storage in conjunction with other Google services, but perhaps we'll be seeing a few more offerings that combine App Engine or Big Query and storage.

Google Cloud Storage is available in two regions. Joneja says customers can choose from two containers, either in the U.S. or Europe. Currently, Google does not offer a region in Asia.

With the staggering growth of Amazon S3, it should be interesting to see if Google is able to cut in on Amazon's action significantly.

No doubt quite a bit of S3's growth owes to Dropbox, which uses Amazon S3. I did ask Joneja if the slew of partnerships announced today meant that Google preferred to let customers build solutions rather than offering is own (fabled) GDrive. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Google is still not commenting on when or if we'll be seeing GDrive.

Like This | 0 Comments

View the original article here

Android 4.0 ICS update is now seeding for Samsung Galaxy S II

Yes, yes - we know you've heard this a few times too many in the past couple of weeks, but this time it is for real, folks. Samsung Mobile's official Facebook page broke the news that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has officially made its way to Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II.

As you can notice in the screenshot above, the update is currently seeding to devices in Europe, as well as Korea. The rest of the world will follow in the nearest future.

Samsung Galaxy Note, Galaxy S II LTE, and Galaxy Tab Tab 8.9 and 10.1 are noted as next in line for the major update. The older members of the Galaxy family on the other hand, will receive updates to their Gingerbread firmware, which will bring some ICS functionality to it.

In case you have already updated your I9100, drop us a line with your impressions of the new firmware in the comments section below. We will be sure to tell you about our own shortly.

Source

View the original article here

Google to Amazon: You're not the only price chopper around

Amazon isn’t the only cloud provider slicing storage prices. Google on Tuesday cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move, and the naming of five new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for the enterprise storage business from which it has been largely absent.

In that arena it will square off with — you got it — Amazon Web Services, which last month cut its S3 storage prices, and on Monday discounted Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. Standard Google Cloud Storage now costs a tad less than Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure storage. Generally, the price of cloud storage is broken out into different per-GB fees for data stored; plus network charges for data flowing into and out of the cloud, and the cost of certain requests.

Like This | 0 Comments

View the original article here

Windows Phone or MeeGo Which One Should I Buy?

A lot of Nokia fans are back and forth and back and forth. MeeGo or Windows Phones, there are people who can afford to buy both but they are few and far in between.

I am lucky enough to own an N9 plus luck enough to have a Lumia 710 demo in my house, so I made a little video side by side with both phones to try to help you out.  I did two, the first one was forty minutes!   Yeah no one is going to watch that it’s just too long. So I made the video below with plans on uploading the forty minute on later.

What I ended up doing ultimately is the short side by side video and video review of both phones!

Here is the  Side by Side Video:

Than here is the N9/MeeGo hands on:

The Lumia 710/Windows Phone Hand On:

If anyone has any questions on either device please leave them in the comment or feel free to send me Tweet.

Kevin Everett
Proud Nokia Geek since 1997 who loves to collect old Nokia phones (owns everything from the 1992's Nokia 100 up to the very latest Nokia N9) and is very happy to share his knowledge with you. He is a writer for Daily Mobile and Nokia Innovations. Enjoy his Nokia nerd knowledge and feel free to follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/#!/NokiaKnowings
http://www.nokiainnovation.com/

View the original article here