Our Google Announcement

Google have recently announced that they are also entering the web-font market – with the same free, hosted model as ours.

Although we have put 100′s of hours into the design, development and readying of 150+ fonts (x4 formats = 600!), with only weeks before font-face.com was ready to go live, we have decided to bow out now. A bitter blow to the team.

Our decision has not been easy. Although we feel we would offer a better service, we would after all be competing with Google. A massive might to compete with.

The last thing we would want is to host fonts for everyone to link to, only to at some point (after google have beaten us) be forced to turn them off – destroying your website designs.

So as not do disappoint you in the future, we have decided to stop now. Have no fear though – we will be back! We are hatching a new plan for font-face.com – stay tuned!

font-face.com will still be the home of everything font-face, just not in the original way it was intended.

Thanks

The font-face.com Team x x

My first reaction was “Dang. I was so looking forward to this service. Darn Google. I have only just recently received requests from google to donate fonts to a new project Font Directory. It will probably take forever”.

The very next day, today, I discovered that Google has come out with Font Previewer that makes adding  new fonts to your site as simple as copy/pasting a few lines of code.

Google added an option to preview the fonts from the Google Font Directory. Before embedding the code, you can edit the sample text, change text size and spacing, capitalize the text, add underlines and shadows.

“The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers,” explains Google.

These two technology giants already compete to win contracts from private businesses as well as state and local governments by attracting customers who hope to cut costs by switching to Web-based software from programs installed on their own computers.

Now Google and Microsoft are vying to take over the job of providing email to the General Services Administration, the U.S. agency that oversees government procurement and manages federal property.

The contract’s size is substantial incentive enough––15,000 + employee email accounts. However, according to the Wall Street Journal who notes that the bidding is being closely watched because the GSA assists in shaping how other agencies acquire new technology. “The GSA is in a unique position as an influencer,” says Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft’s public-sector business.

Security is perhaps the biggest factor in deciding whether or not to adopt cloud mail.The cloud-based vendors, are responsible for storing and securing personal and confidential information for its users.

On Thursday the GSA certified that Google’s email and word-processing service, known as Google Apps, meets security requirements to qualify for use by the agency, a GSA spokeswoman said.

Microsoft says it is close to obtaining the same certification for a Web-based version of Exchange, a widely used program for managing email that most organizations run on their own server systems.

As an aside, the GSA now uses Lotus Notes from International Business Machines and says it  expects to award the new contract before the end of this fiscal year.it does not put a dollar amount on this contract.

More than 90% of the U.S. Federal Government uses Microsoft Exchange for email at present. One of the complaints of email users in the past has been the limited email space offered them on their company servers. The cloud solution seems, at least  at this time to offer less storage space constraint. If Goolge attains this contract it could be a coup if the GSA ‘s example influence reaches some of these govenment agencies as well.

Typically in software development, there comes a point when programmers have to turn their attention from adding the fun new technology to making sure what’s going to ship actually works. This point, called the code freeze, just happened for Chrome’s sixth “milestone.”

Google believes in continuously updating its browser, and given its steady encroachment on the turf of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox and its rapid ascension beyond Opera and Apple’s Safari, it’s hard to argue too hard with the approach. In June, Chrome climbed to 7.2 percent of worldwide browser usage from to 7.0 percent in May.

When trains leave the station frequently, you don’t have to wait as long to catch one. But you still have to wait if you miss a train, and that’s what’s happened to some Chrome features.

Printing support has been one of Chrome’s relatively weak points compared to other browsers that have been in the market for years longer, but Google’s been working to catch up. Indeed, Chrome slipped a notch when an earlier change broke one feature, the ability to print only a selected portion of text.

For Chrome users on Windows, print selection is fixed in version 6. But for Mac and Linux users, print selection was bumped back to Chrome 7 because “printing is being reworked.”

Print preview, a longstanding feature request, is getting closer. Although it was punted out of Chrome 6, work is under way…

“UX [user experience] mocks for print preview have been created and approved internally. Implementation is in progress. Will not make M6 [Chrome milestone, or version, 6]…Targeting M7 now,” according to the issue tracker.

Some features set for delivery include:

• Extensions sync, so extensions on one machine are the same as on another used by the same person.

• A bug fix to speed up display of some Scalable Vector Graphics, an older graphics format seeing new life with efforts to improve Web standards.

• A consolidated menu button that merges Chrome’s two earlier tool and page buttons into a single button.

• Synchronization of browsing history across multiple browsers so that, for example, Web pages visited once can be more easily revisited.

• Background image resampling to take better advantage of multicore processors and speed up page rendering when resizing images.

What’s not inside Chrome 6?

Also on many wish lists is the ability to put tabs along the side of the browser rather than across the top. This interface style devotes more vertical real estate to the job of showing a Web page while using the relatively abundant horizontal space of wide-screen displays.

But “side tabs” were pushed back to Chrome’s 7. Again, though, the feature is under development. “You can try out side tabs on Windows by way of–enable-vertical-tabs [an extra command option that must be invoked when Chrome is launched], right-click on a tab and choose ‘Use side tabs.’ On Chrome OS go into the experimental menu,” the issue tracker said.

Next on the list of bumped features slipping from version 6 to 7 is support for full-screen HTML5 video. The headline feature of the new version of Hypertext Markup Language is video that’s built into Web pages themselves rather than relying on a plug-in such as Adobe Systems’ Flash, and Google hopes to break the HTML5 video logjam with its WebM technology.

But Chrome can’t yet play HTML5 video in a full-screen mode, a popular option for immersive entertainment. One complication with the user interface: avoiding something that enable password-stealing interface. Here work has begun, but “there are many, many more patches” to be applied to Chrome before it’s done, according to the tracker.

One of Google’s most ambitious efforts to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications is a project called Native Client that lets programs downloaded from the Web run securely and fast on a computer. Key to Native Client, or NaCl for short, is a process called sandboxing that restricts executing programs to a walled-off region of memory.

But Native Client apparently won’t make Chrome 6 unless people specifically enable it with the present “–enable-nacl” launch option. One issue is making sure the sandbox works well not just on Mac OS X 10.6, but the older 10.5 as well.

“The new code allows for removal of the hole in the sandbox on Mac OS X 10.6. However, the hole is still required on 10.5. I am currently in the process of debugging everything on 10.5,” according to an issue tracker post Tuesday. “I believe the decision was made to keep Native Client behind the –enable-nacl flag for M6. Since the M6 deadline was yesterday, I’m moving this issue out to M7.”

Google Voice is now available for everyone (provided you have a U.S. phone number).

The service, which started life out as GrandCentral, acts as a unified phone number. It can be used to make free calls to the U.S. and Canada, to send free text messages and more. Its voicemail system can even be checked by e-mail.

Now, after more than fifteen months of testing with invite-only accounts, Google Voice is ready for the masses.

As great as the service is, it hasn’t existed without controversy. Last summer, Apple was criticized when the company barred the Google Voice iPhone app from its App Store (App Store). The battle over Google Voice was arguably the first shot in the current Apple-Google (Google) war.

And earlier today, Business Week reported that Frontier Communications is suing Google over alleged patent violations within the Google Voice service.

For many users however, Google Voice is a wonderful solution to the increasingly complex web of communication profiles. Instead of having to try to maintain separate phone numbers, users can just have one central number forwarded to different devices based on time of day or location.

What do you think of Google Voice?

In a blog post, the company said it has parked its Street View cars and stopped collecting data after it realized that it has been inadvertently collecting data about people’s online activities from unsecured Wi-Fi networks over the past four years. The disclosure could not come at a worse time for Google, following criticism over its Google Buzz launch from privacy experts and a growing concern among users regarding the amount of data it collects.

Google had apparently told German authorities last month that it had been collecting “publicly broadcast SSID information (the Wi-Fi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a Wi-Fi router) using Street View cars.” But it said that it did not collect information sent over the network.

Google now says that information was incorrect.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research, wrote in the blog post.

Google said that it recently discovered it has about 600 gigabytes of data transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. Google said that it has not used the data and none of the information has appeared in Google’s search engine or other services.

Google explained that it had been collecting only fragments of data since cars were on the move and could only get information when they passed places where an unsecured Wi-Fi network was being used.

“In short, let me just say it: we screwed up,” Brin said in response to a question on Wednesday. “I’m not going to make any excuses about it.”

Brin addressed criticism that Google’s famously laid-back culture isn’t designed to prevent problems such as the current one. “First, we do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously, they didn’t prevent this error from occurring. We are putting more internal controls in place,” Brin said.

“Trust is very important to us, Brin said. “We’re going to do everything we can to preserve that trust.”

Google Wave is now open to the public.

Google Wave, a Web-based tool to let people chat and collaborate in real time, is now open to the public.

“It’s clear from the invaluable feedback we've received that Wave is a great place to get work done, in particular for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion and close coordination,” Google Wave product manager Stephanie Hannon said Wednesday in a blog post. “If you tried Google Wave out a while ago and found it not quite ready for real use, now is a good time to come back for a second try.”

Google is making Wave freely available to Google Apps users, too. “Google Wave is about getting work done,” said Lars Rasmussen, a Wave leader.

We at the Cosmic Networks are already using Wave on our domain, and like it a lot.  And hey, it’s free!  Check it out right now at http://wave.google.com

Google added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. When you’re zoomed into a city, click on the “More” button at the top of the map to turn on the “Bicycling” layer. You’ll see three types of lines appear on the map:

Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

I tried it out and it worked very well. Of course remember as the warning says when you submit your destinations:

Google has said repeatedly that it expects YouTube to actually be profitable this year. It’s hard to believe that any service with YouTube’s traffic still isn’t making money, but Google (and YouTube’s competitors) have struggled to monetize video services. How, for example, do you sell ads to companies gunshy about selling their products next to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video? And how do agencies, individuals and organizations who build their brands around and with their YouTube channels respond to ads on their pages?

Will the fifth year be YouTube’s year?  Now that YouTube channels are gaining popularity and YouTube is automatically handling voice recognition on uploaded video, keyword ad targeting may get a lot easier, but YouTube still faces significant challenges in the context of Google’s traditional ad-based revenue scheme.

On the other hand, YouTube is largely unsullied by any of Google’s privacy concerns and is so dominant in the industry that it has few real competitors (at least in the consumer upload and YouTube channel spaces). There is a reason that Google spent 1.65 billion on the property three and half years ago. The potential to make money on this platform is so extraordinary, that one has to wonder how much Google’s other businesses (aside from straight search) will even matter long term.

As Google continues to clean up copyrighted material in the videos on YouTube and negotiates content deals with studios and content producers to take on Hulu, Netflix, and Blockbuster, monetization outside of search and ads becomes even easier.

Google Apps faces an uphill battle. Google Books is mired in legal wrangling. Google keeps stepping in privacy landmines with StreetView, Buzz, and even search history. YouTube, however, is a potential cash cow nearly at the tipping point of online media dominance. 2 billion quick hits a day is only scratching the surface of what it will be, assuming Google can aggressively address copyright and DRM issues.

See a cool video summarizing YouTube’s first 5 years created by the YouTube Devs:

Google has recently announced big changes to their smartphone, the Nexus One, saying that they are closing their online cell phone store and will not sell the Nexus One online to consumers any longer. The Vice President of Engineering at Google posted on the company blog “While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not,… It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from.” Google opened the online store in January, and said that there would be more to come rather than just the Nexus One.  Verizon and Sprint recently made plans to support the phone, but they were ended shortly after. Analysts claimed that Google was moving ahead in the competition with smartphone makers Apple and Research In Motion, and this effort to make the Nexus One even more well known is very likely to have an impact. The Nexus One will now be sold in stores across the nation, due mainly to the fact that users wanted an interactive, hands-on experience with the phone rather than seeing it on a web page.

“What do we think the next big wave of opportunities are?” Mr. McAdam said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We’re working on tablets together, for example. We’re looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience.”

Mr. McAdam further acknowledged that Verizon has some catching up to do in the field. Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle and the new iPad presently use AT&T as host.

“They were able to get out of the box faster,” Mr. McAdam said. Verizon has been handicapped by its CDMA network technology, less common ( and despite what they say less dynamic) than AT&T’s GSM, but the executive said his company will have devices ready to show early next year once its new network is in place.

McAdam says that Verizon promises much higher speeds for transferring video, for example, in their new network which it says will be running in 25 to 30 cities by the end of the year. (That’s not a very big coverage map.)And sadly enough, according to McAdam as he spoke to The Wall Street Journal:

The new network will likely bring a shift from current unlimited-use pricing plans.
The old model of one price plan per device is going to fall away,..carriers to take an approach that targets a bucket of megabytes.With multiple devices, customers are likely to end up paying more for connecting their gadgets to the next-generation network than they do today. It’s not out of the question.

Little is known about the Google tablet, although it has been reported by many news journalists. Earlier this year Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that a Google PC was in development.
According to the New York Times, Schmidt “told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system.”

What do you think about Google getting into the tablet and PC business?

Google has been making references to its plan to start it’s own bookstore for years  now but has never defined its strategy. The new service, called Google Editions, will let users buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service but will also let book retailers of all sizes sell Google Editions on their own sites, keeping most of the revenue. When it launches, Google Editions is expected to have around 500,000 titles. There are no details about participating publishers or pricing, however. The company seems to be debating whether or not  it will follow the model where publishers set the retail price or whether Google sets the price.

Google Editions users would be able to read books from a web browser so the type of e-reader device wouldn’t matter. It would be expected then that software that could be run on an iPad or Kindle etc…would be in the offing.

The fact that Google would allow even the smallest of vendors to participate, have access to such a variety of sources  and gain revenue from Google Editions could belay the worries of such vendors that they would be squeezed out of the e-book frenzy. Publishers would not have to woory about creating device-based content. Any consumer that has a Google account would have access to the content.

Google is not known for its retailing prowess. The Nexus One was a slow seller many believe to Google’s inexperience with actually having to advertise its products. Since then it has a marginally successful Android app store and does market business software. Also remember Google’s attempt to distribute millions of books now out-of-print. A U.S. District Court will soon make judgement on the case of Google vs. various authors and publishers. Google Editions retains Google’s entrepreneurial goals as well ast its altruistic ones and does not infringe on  but helps others as long as they get the word out.

According to Google on their blog, the two NextEra Energy Resources wind farms now produce 169.5 Megawatts of power which is enough to generate power for over 55,00 homes. Google’s Green Business Operations Manager Rick Needham says that Google decided to go with this company because it

…uses some of the latest wind turbine technology and control systems to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of renewable energy to the local grid. The turbines can continuously adjust the individual blade pitch angles to achieve optimal efficiency and use larger blades with 15 percent more swept area than earlier generations, allowing capture of even more wind energy for each turbine. The control systems for these wind farms are also advanced and dynamic, allowing for remote 24/7 monitoring and operation to ensure maximum turbine up-time and power production.

Paving the way for this, In February, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Google’s move into the energy market, enabling the company to sell energy, capacity and ancillary services. Google Energy intends to act as a power marketer by purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers.

Google also recently released its new PowerMeter API, aimed at manufacturers of electrical devices, from refrigerators and washing machines to other appliances that have built-in energy monitoring technology. It is adding more appliances and devices on a seemingly regular basis.

Jamie Yood, a Google spokesman, told the New York Times that the investment is a “tax equity investment,” allowing the company to earn a return based on the tax credits awarded by the government for renewable energy projects. He also said the energy from the wind farms will not be used to power Google’s data centers.

Google has acquired Bump Technologies, the maker of a 3D desktop called BumpTop, Bump announced Sunday.

“Today, we have a big announcement to make: we’re excited to announce that we’ve been acquired by Google!,” a note posted to the company’s Web site said. In typical Google fashion, Google has shut the acquisition down.  “This means that BumpTop (for both Windows and Mac) will no longer be available for sale. Additionally, no updates to the products are planned.”

Financial details were not disclosed, but the company said it would keep its software available for download for one week. A Google representative confirmed the acquisition but declined to discuss specifics of the deal.

BumpTop debuted in April 2009, three years after a video demo of the freeware replacement desktop captivated YouTube viewers. The software, which runs on top of Windows and Mac OS X, allows files to be thrown into loose piles, tidied into neat stacks, or fanned out like a deck of cards.

The acquisition has many people buzzing.  Is this technology going to become part of the upcoming Chrome OS that Google is developing?  We will have to wait and see.  For now, we have snagged a copy of the final version of BumpTop and uploaded it to the Cosmic Networks so that everyone can enjoy BumpTop’s goodness even though it’s now shut down.

Download BumpTop for Mac

Download BumpTop for Windows

Last December, Google joined the myriad of other companies that offer link shortening services with the launch of Goo.gl, the official Google URL Shortener. Today, it’s gotten a nifty new feature: add “.qr” to the end of any shortened link, and Google will generate a QR code for it. For example, the link http://goo.gl/J4rO would become http://goo.gl/J4rO.qr. The new trick was tweeted about earlier today by Google’s chief spam fighter Matt Cutts.

Google has made it clear that it’s a big proponent of QR codes, despite the fact that few people in the United States have used them (I’ve never felt compelled to use one myself, but they’re huge in Japan). QR codes are currently the only effective way to link to an app on Android Market, and Google has mailed QR code stickers to thousands of local businesses across the country (it lets customers quickly look the business up on Google’s business directory). Facebook is also experimenting with QR codes for its location services.

For those looking to try out the new feature, the Goo.gl homepage still says that the service is “currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use”, but it’s plenty easy to start using it yourself. It’s officially available through Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, and you can also find various bookmarklets and browser extensions that let you generate a Goo.gl link.

Google blog post on the partnership tells us  what we can expect. One of the key benefits to Chrome users will be that they receive automatic updates of new versions of Flash without a separate download.

Google goes on to say that “improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines.”

This is quite a coup for Adobe for as we know, it has been shunned by  iPhone and iPad  when it used to have quite a partnership with Apple.

Starting today, another version of the Nexus One is available from the Google web store that is compatible with AT&T’s 3G network. This new model can be purchased as an unlocked device without a service plan. In addition to AT&T’s 3G network, this device will also run on Rogers Wireless in Canada. And like the first version of the Nexus One, it can be used with most GSM operators globally.

The one caveat is the cost, remember, we told you it is $529 for this unlocked version. For other issues we reported before you are off to the Google Store check out out Google Nexus Perlexes-Not Quite in the Game posted on January 26. Hopefully they are making strides to correct all of these things.

Immediately, hundreds of cities began making pitches to attract Google’s attention, some earnest, some crazy.

Topeka, Kansas unofficially renamed itself “Google” for the month; Sarasota, Florida re-named its City Island “Google Island”; Duluth, Minnesota's mayor Don Ness jumped into a 35 degree Lake Superior as a dual-purpose media event for Google Fiber and the Special Olympics; and 1,000 Morgantown, West Virginia residents last week held up signs saying “We Want a Gig” at the WVU-Georgetown basketball game.

The majority of the cities interested in getting Google Fiber haven't resorted to cheap publicity stunts though, and are hoping that their answers to Google’s Request for Information will be much more convincing.

“I think we’re going to draw the line at silly stunts,” Madison, Wisconsin alderman Mark Clear said today. City officials there are hosting a public meeting to gather ideas for their pitch and show the community’s interest in the project.

Juneau, Alaska has made the case that its isolated, mountainous location will serve as an ideal testing ground since it is both environmentally challenging and populous.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley reminded us of Baltimore’s historical significance as “that place from which our nation’s railroads emanated, and the place that was the source of the first telegraph message ever sent.”

Kalamazoo, Michigan is using health care as its wager. The Kalamazoo Gazette's Editorial board argues that its modern health care facilities and its major medical corporations Pfizer and Stryker could benefit greatly from the fiber network.

March 26 is the last day Google will accept submissions for its fiber optic trial, and will announce which it has chosen shortly after.

The feature unveiled Thursday expands upon speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using to make captions available on a limited number of videos late last year.

YouTube’s audience will be able to request captions at the press of a button. Video producers will also be able to download the automated captions and improve upon them.

For now, YouTube’s captioning tool will only work on videos with English audio, although there are plans to include more languages. The English audio, however, can be translated into 50 different languages. YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web’s most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day.

Of course, the speech recognition technology is not perfect, and will get better over time.  This same technology is currently in use with Google Voice, a reincarnation of GrandCentral.

See a sample video below where the captions have been machine transcribed:

As you can see, I was speaking very clearly and slowly and the technology still was not that great. This has a long way to go, but it is definitely something to stay tuned to.