Google News & Articles

This might be an especially scary Halloween for creators of news and social readers such as Flipboard and Pulse. In the next month, they are going to have to battle two giants. Good luck with that.

Most users (and many businesses) think of Google as an endless source of great free stuff, but that may be coming to an end as the company starts charging for heavy usage of its Maps API service.

This week in Google Land we talked about some easy ways to engage with your audience via Plus, as well as Chrome's significant growth and a nifty Blogger integration. 

Google's Chrome browser has now hit 30% share of web browser usage and as it continues to rise, new and improved features keep appearing, the latest being a revamp of the app store.

Want to step up your customer engagement game with Google+? Good news! It's a cakewalk. 

In an attempt to attract a wider range of businesses and educational establishments, Google has adjusted its Chromebook subscription model to include an annual payment option. 

This week in the Google-verse we got an accidental sneak peak at the new look of Gmail, handy new visual features in Analytics, and a goodbye letter from dear ol' Buzz. 

With its 40 million users to date, Google+ is a whopping social networking success for the company. Today Google announced it will be launching new services like integration of Google Apps accounts and is working on ways to let businesses and organizations have branded pages within Google+. 

Characterizing it as a “Fall Sweep,” Google said it is shuttering Google Buzz, the controversial social networking service and application program interface (API) toolset that works with Gmail, and focus instead on Google+.

Google proved its staying power even further this week with an unexpected rise in quarterly earnings. On the product side, the giant took on Amazon with the release of Google Cloud SQL, and added some Twitter-like search features to the family. 

October seems to be the month when all the action happens for smartphones, as the mobile players get ready for the next set of device and operating system hostilities.

Having just had Google+ inadvertently slated in public by one of its own, Google's developers are still pushing out new features to the fledgling social service while Larry Page discussed it at length in a Google call.

The DAM Lowdown is back with: Henry Stewart Publications Calls for Articles, The Real Story Group Updates Its DAM/MAM Report, Amazon Announces Server-Side S3 REST Encryption, DAM Best Practices Everywhere, Google Adds Native Client to Chrome Beta, DAM Stew and the Return of the Twitter Shout-out of the Week.

Yesterday we discussed the leaders of The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q4 2011, a report that highlights who's who in the market. This time around we're here with a review of the strong performers and contenders: Google, AT Internet and Yahoo. 

Google has made several announcements that could increase the pressure on other enterprise cloud vendors. New service level agreements, lower cloud storage pricing and a new relational database service might give Google the momentum to move from the developer ranks to true enterprise class.