DigitMemo.com

The next evolution of labels

Back in the Paleolithic Era, the world was a very different kind of place. People were hunter-gatherers, lived in caves, and kept all their email in folders*. You can’t really blame them. Between tracking woolly mammoths, fashioning crude stone tools, and auditioning for commercials, having a highly tuned system for organizing email wasn’t their highest priority.

But people changed. We moved out of caves and into skyscrapers. We hunt for bargains at the corner grocery. And we play video games simulating ourselves playing video games.

Click for more on Coloured Labels Now Available on Gmail »

Google Plans to Bid 4.6 Billion on 700MHz Band

Google Inc was set to announce on Friday it will bid on coveted airwaves to launch a U.S. wireless network, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The Silicon Valley-based company had said several months ago it was considering bidding in the auction of 700-megahertz wireless spectrum due to begin January 24. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission deadline for companies to declare their interest in joining the airwaves bidding is December 3.

Click for more on Google ready to bid on mobile airwaves »

Google prepares to roll out its latest free service — where will the giant stop?

While Google has its critics, the company seems to be one tech firm that is constantly in tune with what the consumer wants.  In terms of service, Google generally doesn’t waste time and effort cutting back or restricting its service, rather it simply strives to give the customer more. 

Now Google is preparing to quietly launch a new service, which both legitimizes previously existing internet software and improves upon it.  The service gives users free online storage space and many are dubbing it GDisk for short.  In the past applications exploit GMail’s very high amount of free storage space and allowed you to store files on it like a hard drive (GMail currently features over 5 GB of storage).  Google’s Picasa photo service also has allowed users to store up to 1 GB of pictures and other files.

Click for more on Google to Offer Free Online Storage »

The new Google Maps with MyLocation service allows users without GPS-enabled phones to figure out their location by using nearby cell-phone towers

Google launched a location service for mobile users on Wednesday that doesn’t rely on GPS.

Google Maps with My Location, currently in beta, locates users who don’t have GPS-enabled phones based on their location to nearby cell towers. The result isn’t as accurate as GPS but works for people who lack the positioning technology in their phones.

Click for more on Google service uses cell towers to locate users »

Google’s Goal: Get Rid of Coal

Google has set its sights on decreasing global dependency on coal Tuesday with the announcement of a new project intended to produce affordable renewable energy.

The effort, dubbed “RE<C”, will initially focus its efforts on solar thermal power, wind power technologies and enhanced geothermal systems. Specifically, Google wants to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy that is cheaper than coal, said Larry Page, Google’s co-founder.

“We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades,” Page said during a Tuesday conference call. One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco, he said.

Solar power is “currently substantially more expensive than coal, depending on the type,” Page said. “It’s an ambitious goal to get it cheaper than coal, but it’s attainable.”

Google leads the way in search yet again, but Ask.com gains ground.

Google once again was the giant among search sites, as it took a 58. 5 percent share of the search market in October in the United States.

According to Internet ranking site ComScore, Google gained 1.5 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo sites ranked second with 22.9 percent, followed by Microsoft sites (9.7 percent), Ask Network (4.7 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).

Click for more on Google Wins Again »

See what sort of tone a company’s acquisitions set

The LibraryHouse blog has a nice summary of recent acquisitions (July 2006 through June 2007) by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, roughly color coded by category:

Click for more on Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Acquisitions Compared »

High-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.

Click for more on YouTube to Introduce High-Resolution Videos »

A major upgrade to Gmail is getting the thumbs down from users who complain that the new version is extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers.

Discussion forums have been flooded with complaints since Google Inc. began “upgrading” users about two weeks ago to the new version, popularly referred to in the blogosphere as Gmail 2.0.

Ironically, Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager, is designed to be faster and more stable. Gmail 2.0 is based on what a Google spokesman calls “a major structural code change” upon which new features will be launched in coming months.

Click for more on Users complain new Gmail version slow, crashes browsers »

Just like the good folks promised, the early look software development kit for Google’s soon-to-be huge phone OS has hit the streets… er, internet. From what we can tell, the OS is as comfortable on larger, VGA devices as it is on more traditional smartphone layouts. Oh yeah… and it plays Quake. Here’s what we know the software will support out of the box:

• Touchscreen
• 3G
• Webkit-based browser
• Optimized Java runtime layer (known as Dalvik Virtual Machine)
• Threaded text messaging
• MPEG-4, h.264, MP3, and AAC file formats
• Accelerated 3D graphics

Click for more on Google’s Android OS early look SDK now available »