Google Wins Over Oracle

James Gosling, one of the most notable programmer who founded Java at Sun, has joined Google, a company locked in a lawsuit over how the technology is used in Android.

Gosling announced his new Google employment on Monday on his blog. "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon," he said.

Although when Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, Gosling decided not to join.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011

The Grand Finale of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 was held on March 20 at Sydney Opera House. It was live-streamed to the world on YouTube during this week-long festival leading up to the finale. For the first time, 101 musicians from 33 countries joined together in new cultural experiences, musical mentorship and performances in one of the world’s most iconic symbols of the arts.

While this three-and-a-half hour Grand Finale was being live-streamed, people in different timezones awoke to re-broadcasts. This event was streamed 33 million times around the world to 189 countries, which included a whopping 2.8 million mobile live-streams, making it one of the biggest streaming events till date, on mobile and desktop. That means the event was streamed to nearly one-and-a-half times the entire population of Australia, where the event took place.

Disco Mesenger : The Google Group Text App

Google joins a growing number of companies which offers group chat capabilities through the help of text messages on smartphones with the release of Disco Messenger. The Disco Messenger app, which is available only on the iPhone, was created by Slide, a company Google purchased last August.

The Disco Messenger group texting service is also available on the Web and as expected, Google bought that too.

Signing up is pretty easy, you need to mention your First and Last Name and your US Phone number and you are good to go. You can even connect to Facebook to let friends know and create groups faster!

YouTube Trends - The Real Time Video Site

First it was news updates in real time, now its turn for videos. YouTube has launched YouTube Trends, a real time video search site with its own YouTube Trends Dashboard, which you can use to explore about what's happening on YouTube and around the world, from pop culture to breaking news, through daily blog posts about the latest video phenomena and new content feeds like Most Shared, Trending Videos, and Trending Topics. Also at 4am ET and 4pm ET, YouTube Trends highlight four videos receiving buzz around the web.

Using the new YouTube Trends Dashboard you can drill down video data across demographics in different corners of the world. You can find out the Most Shared or Most Viewed videos by location, age group and gender. You can even compare three different sets of videos.

OAuth 2.0 Support for Google Apps APIs

Noticed the hoopla over the announcement last week about OAuth 2.0 coming to Google APIs. What it means in Earth-terms is that it would be much easier for web, mobile, and desktop applications to securely access user data.

But there's more to it than just this. You would be surprised to know that OAuth 2.0 already works with many of the Google Apps APIs like contacts, calendar and docs. But just because the spec is still under development, OAuth 2.0 support is considered experimental until the spec is stabilized. In the mean time, if you’re interested in learning more about it you can give it a try with some of the APIs you’re already familiar with.

Google Rolls out New Home Page for New Adsense Interface

Google has rolled out the new home page for the new Adsense interface. You will now be able to see your earnings for today, yesterday, this month so far, and last month as well as any unpaid finalized earnings and most recent payment information. Important alerts will appear in a bar at the top to make sure you don’t miss anything critical.

From a quick glance it looks pretty helpful and mush easily accessible from the previous interface. But do send your feedback on the new interface by joining the conversation in the Google forum or through the 'Report issue' link in the upper corner of your account.

HTML 5 Let's You Talk to Your Computer

With the new updates in the Chrome beta channel, Google has added a couple of new capabilities, especially for web developers. Google, along with the HTML Speech Incubator Group, has added support for the HTML5 speech input API.

What it means for the developers is that, with this API they can create web apps with the ability to transcribe voice to text. A web page using this feature allows you to turn the words spoken through a computer's microphone into readable text. You simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer’s microphone, the recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription after which the text is typed out for you.

You can try it out yourself in this little demo. Today’s beta release also offers a sneak peek of GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, which allows developers to apply slick 3D effects to web page content using CSS.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 Grand Finale (Video)

Switching to Gmail becomes Easier

Jason Toff, the Product Marketing Manager for Gmail, today announced that the feature in Gmail, using which one could import mail and contacts from other providers, such as AOL or Hotmail is about to get better.

They have added a total of fourteen more international domains to their list of supported email providers, which are:

aol.com.br
hotmail.es
hotmail.it
hotmail.co.jp
Kimo.com
live.jp
yahoo.es
yahoo.cn
yahoo.com.cn
yahoo.com.hk
yahoo.com.sg
yahoo.com.tw
yahoo.co.jp
yahoo.it

A Happy 5th Birthday to Google Finance

Today Google Finance is celebrating its fifth birthday. It started of on March 21, 2006 with pricing data from the NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, Amex and Euronext. Their most innovative feature at that time was the interactive chart, which we are quite familiar with now a days, that seamlessly scrolled, zoomed, and showed a timeline of news coverage for each company. Later that year they added the ability to track investments in a portfolio.

In 2007 Google launched their first mobile application and iGoogle gadget. To add to it, they added the GoogleFinance functions which allow easily incorporation of financial information into a Google Spreadsheets.