Googling

You never knew you had so many reasons to love Windows Mobile 7, but you'll find out a few of them today. Also, Amazon offers on-demand movie and TV streaming (on PCs and Macs both!), Microsoft explains the weird Halo no-show at E3...and the explanation is typical, baffling and infuriating. So, good work, Microsoft, as usual. Oh, and that asteroid that was going to kill us and then wasn't going to kill us? It's probably going to kill us, but we won't know for sure because we can't afford a subscription to New Scientist … Read more

Google increased its share of money spent on search ads to 77.4 percent in the second quarter, up 2 percentage points from the year-earlier period, according to new data that doubtless will interest those gauging the antitrust implications of the search leader's new advertising partnership with Yahoo.

According to the statistics from search marketing firm Efficient Frontier, which bases its conclusions on data from a specific set of large-scale search advertisers, Yahoo dropped nearly 2 percentage points to 17.8 percent of spending and Microsoft stayed level at about 4.8 percent.

Search ads are shown next to … Read more

The ongoing epistolary smackdown between Yahoo and Carl Icahn reached a new low on Thursday, with the latest missive sent by the company to its shareholders.

The letter seeks to convince holders of Yahoo stock that the company is in good hands, and management is wise and deliberate and looking out for its best interest.

There's a great line in the film The Untouchables, when Sean Connery bluntly informs an under-armed assailant that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. It looks as if the mild-mannered Yahooers finally picked up on that bit of folk wisdom.

Here … Read more

Users of Google Docs, the online applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, now have a wide range of templates from which to choose.

Google on Thursday announced the templates, which were created by Google and a number of companies with experience in the business. They can be browsed and opened through a template gallery that currently has 294 to choose from.

Among the options: wedding planners, business cards, cover letters, screenplays with proper formatting, invoices, loan amortization schedulers, fantasy basketball standings predictor, wedding photo albums, and party invitations.

I personally was excited to see the Sudoku template, was initially … Read more

If you've accumulated hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds in your favorite reader you might be looking for a way to sort through them all. Of many solutions out there, Google Reader offers just a few ways to weed out lame feeds either by tracking inactivity or integrating tags for the sake or sorting. These tools are helpful, but far from a solution to save you from having to go through all your content to get to the good stuff.

Enter AidRSS, a ridiculously simple story sorter that uses PostRank, a rating system that measures how good a post … Read more

I've been extremely tough on YouTube lately. About one month ago, I called for its head if Google doesn't turn things around quickly and I've also said that it's the garbage bin of the Internet. And while I still believe the second point, I'm starting to think Google is doing just what I said it should -- start working with major players and turn things around.

After it announced that YouTube would be working with Seth Macfarlane and feature his own channel, two big announcements from the YouTube camp have me changing my tune and thinking that Google may be on to something big here.

First, YouTube is coming to TiVo Series3 and HD boxes. At first glance, this deal may seem like a big deal, but in reality it's nothing more than a way for YouTube to expand its horizons and hopefully make it such a valuable attribute of set-top boxes (it's already on the Apple TV) that companies will be willing to enter sweetheart deals to have it included in their own boxes. In other words, it could have some long-term effects, but right now, it's not going to have any impact on the service's losses.

But in a far more important announcement that will have an impact on the entire service and probably have lasting effects, Google also announced that it has struck a deal with Lionsgate that will see the independent film studio enjoy a revenue-share agreement with YouTube and get a branded video channel to broadcast movie clips.… Read more

Update 10:12 a.m. PDT: I changed the headline; Thierry was a long-time, senior programmer but said he wasn't high-ranking.

The programmer who for years helped develop the Google Earth software package has left the search and advertising company.

"I've cut the Google ship loose. Yesterday was my last day at Google," said Wes Thierry on his blog on Thursday. Thierry was a senior engineer for the client software portion of Google Earth, which also taps into data stored on Google servers.

Thierry worked on the project for six years, first at Keyhole then at … Read more

Google doesn't deny that it's working on bringing offline access to two major Web applications, Gmail and Calendar, but a sign emerged Thursday that the feature--which would be a major expansion of the applications' utility and competitive threat--is due soon.

"Gears on Gmail and Calendar in approximately 6 weeks. Just had a preview at Google offices. Not sure if it is Google Enterprise only," said Andrew Fogg, chief marketing and strategy officer for Web 2.0 consultancy Kusiri, in a Twitter post Thursday.

Gears, formerly called Google Gears, is an open-source extension for Firefox and Internet … Read more

Digital video recorder TiVo is set to release a software upgrade that will let users access YouTube videos on their televisions, the company announced Thursday. The deal with the Google video-sharing site, originally announced in March, is scheduled to start rolling out in a few weeks.

TiVo owners will need a Series 3 or TiVo HD box to be eligible for the software upgrade, which will be further extended in the near future to allow them to log into their own YouTube accounts to access playlists and the like.

It's not terribly revolutionary. The Apple TV box has given owners access to YouTube … Read more