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Think of Google TV as the second season of Project Android: open-source software, backed by industry partners, created in hopes of unlocking a potentially huge new repository of Internet searches.

In 2005, when Google first acquired the team that would develop Android, smartphone users were browsing the Web, but the quality of the experience was pretty poor, until 2007, when Apple released the iPhone. Android, released a little more than a year later, aimed to provide the same level of quality as Apple's iOS software but to spread it across different hardware makers and wireless carriers in hopes of … Read more

Google fired back at Oracle yesterday in their dispute over Java, claiming that Oracle had once criticized the licensing policies it now seeks to uphold.

The formal answer to Oracle's complaint over Google's alleged infringement of patents related to Java made its way into the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late yesterday evening. Oracle, wielding patents it acquired along with Sun Microsystems in 2009, claimed in August that Google's implementation of the Dalvik virtual machine in Android--among other things--violated as many as seven patents.

Google responded by denying Oracle's claims of … Read more

Google shed a little more light on Google TV today, launching a preview site ahead of launch events over the next two weeks.

There hadn't been a whole lot more said about Google's plans for the small screen since it first revealed the product in May at Google I/O, but there are a lot more visual clues at how Google TV will look and feel when it arrives this month on the new site. Google also used the occasion to announce content partners who have decided to optimize their Web sites for the software, including Turner Broadcasting, … Read more

Google's Android might be the most successful thing the company has ever done that fails to completely live up to one of its original principles.

Lots of companies have mission statements, core values, or publicly stated ideals that are supposed to put a pretty bow around the fact that they're mostly in it for the money. Google, of course, made quite the splash in 2004 with its famous declaration that you can make money without being evil.

The first item on its philosophical list of "ten things we know to be true" is "focus on … Read more

Google's URL shortening service is now open to the world through a new Web site.

In an age of 140-character communication and mobile devices, URL shorteners are a godsend. However, the most popular third-party ones, such as Bit.ly and TinyURL, are run by smaller companies that aren't guaranteed to stick around for the long run: Google's Matt Cutts said today the company needed to develop its own "goo.gl" URL shortener "for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn't go away."

So last December, Google started making goo.gl URLs … Read more

Google is addressing one of the biggest complaints new Gmail users have about the service: it's giving users a way to turn off threaded messages.

The company plans to start letting users toggle between Gmail's threaded "conversation" view--which groups messages with the same subject in the in-box--and an old-school in-box style in which incoming e-mails are displayed in the order they were received. The option will be provided to both regular Gmail users and corporate Google Apps users, the company plans to announce today.

Google's Wiltse Carpenter compared the frustration with threaded Gmail to the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google CEO Eric Schmidt illustrated very neatly today why people have polarized opinions of his company.

Schmidt, a keynote speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, spent about 20 minutes outlining his vision of the future before taking questions from the audience here. None of it was particularly new to those who track Schmidt's public statements closely: mobile devices are becoming more important than desktop PCs, software delivered through cloud computing offers a lot of advantages, and computers can improve the quality of life.

But it's often not what you say, it's how you say it. Schmidt described … Read more

AOL has added another blog to its stable, snapping up Michael Arrington's TechCrunch for an undisclosed fee today.

Tim Armstrong, AOL's CEO, made the announcement on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 along with TechCrunch founder and co-editor Arrington and TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. They actually signed the deal before the conference audience, although they did not say anything about valuation during a conference focused almost exclusively on start-ups, venture funding, and exit strategies.

TechCrunch will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary and Armstrong promised Arrington that he would have complete editorial freedom over content posted on TechCrunch. AOL operates … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Hewlett-Packard is going through a lot of changes as it searches for a new CEO and digests Palm's Web OS, but don't expect it to follow Apple's lead.

"Emulating Apple is not part of our strategy," said HP's Todd Bradley, executive vice president in charge of the company's consumer products division, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010. Bradley was being asked about whether or not its purchase of Palm's WebOS earlier this year was done in hopes of creating a portfolio of portable devices with unique packages of hardware and software, much like … Read more