Google acquiring Slide emerge

Bangalore: Search engine giant Google has reportedly acquired online entertainment company Slide. Slide is a San-Francisco based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Orkut.

Sources suggest Google made a payment of $228 million to seal the deal. However, the companies have not yet made any comments on the deal. According to TechCrunch, a confirmation of the deal from the companies' end may come by Friday.


Slide was founded by Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal. Some of the apps developed by Slide include SuperPoke Pets, Top Fish, SPP Range and SuperPocus Academy of Magic.

If this deal is confirmed, Google will take another step toward its foray into social gaming. Google, last month, had invested an amount of $150 million in Zynga, the social gaming giant, renowned for the creation of popular games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Now it remains to be seen whether all these acquisitions will lead to the creation of the rumored Google social network, Google Me.

Google plans superfast internet

San Francisco: Google plans to build a fibre optic broadband network that will connect customers to the internet at speeds 100 times faster than most existing broadband connections in the US, the company announced on its corporate blog.

"Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make internet access better and faster for everyone," two Google product managers, Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, wrote in the blog post Wednesday.

They said that Google plans to build and test the network in trial communities around the country starting later this year and that the tests could encompass as many as 500,000 people. They cited 3-dimensional medical imaging and quick, high-definition film downloads among the applications of such high-speed internet access.

Now, a software to translate as you speak on phone

Bangalore: Internet giant Google, which has also made an entry in the mobile world with its own phone Nexus One, is working on a software which will interpret foreign languages as a person speak. The translation is done almost instantly and Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years, reports Chris Gourlay of Sunday Times.

Google has already developed an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being polished by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week.

Recently Google also launched a feature where a user can search on the search engine by saying the key words instead of typing. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller's voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language. The phone would analyse "packages" of speech, listening to the speaker until it understands the full meaning of words and phrases, before attempting translation. "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time," said Franz Och, Google's Head of Translation Services.

Google shows off Chrome OS tablet ideas

Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple's iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS.

On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google's Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, "Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed."

The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS.

"While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power," according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product.

It's possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition.

Google proposes geo-smart Internet speedup

Google and other companies interested in the Internet's addressing system have proposed a technology they hope will get Net users to nearby servers more quickly.

The technology in question is called the Domain Name System, which resolves alphabetical Net addresses such as CNET.com to the numeric addresses actually used to reach the appropriate server. Google's interest in DNS is so strong the company launched its own service in an effort to lower some of the delays that can result when the network equipment most proximate to a Net user doesn't have the numeric address for a particular server immediately on hand.

The move is interesting not just because it has the potential to speed up a very common chore--DNS resolution queries take place many times a day as a person surfs the Web, sends e-mail, and performs other tasks on the Internet. It's also intriguing because it shows Google's desire to gradually re-engineer the Internet, not just provide its own services. The company also is active in developing and promoting a variety of Web standards.

The process of finding the correct numeric address is called DNS resolution, and it can involve a request hopping several steps from server to server trying to find the right answer. The problem is that sometimes by the time the answer is retrieved, it comes from the far side of the planet and gives a geographically inappropriate answer. In general, the farther away a server is, the slower communications with it are.

Think of it as looking up an item's price in Auckland and getting the answer in U.S. dollars instead of New Zealand dollars. Sure, you can do the math to get the local answer, but it's an extra step.

This is where Google and Neustar UltraDNS come in. They proposed a DNS extension Wednesday to try to build some geographic smarts into the system.

Specifically, the proposed extension, called Client IP information in DNS requests, would send along the first three quarters of a user's Internet Protocol (IP) address with the DNS request. The last quarter would be lopped off to preserve some privacy, but the first part should be enough to geographically target the answer in some cases. As designed, it would for example return the address for Google's Dutch server, not Google's California server, to a person in the Netherlands who needs to reach it.

Next up: evaluation of the proposal. "We plan to continue working with all interested parties on implementing this solution and are looking forward to a healthy discussion on the dnsext mailing list," said Google Public DNS team members Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli in a blog post about the proposal.