Google’s ebook service will be out by Christmas

Search engine outfit Google is likely to have its own ebook service out by the end of the year.
Google Editions was announced in the middle of the year. It was expected to be available in the U.S. by the end of the month.Google spokeswoman Jeannie Hornung told CNET that Google Editions is expected to open up a new distribution
channel for digital-book publishers and give Amazon a new competitor in the digital-book market.

Google will have a  “buy anywhere, read anywhere” approach, which means customers will purchase titles exclusively through a Web browser, instead of through an online store. Google hasn’t revealed who else is getting involved in the project and the downside is that customers wouldn’t actually have their own copy of the book.

The search engine outfit has been involved with scanning scan, digitizing and making searchable the collections of five of the largest libraries in the world. It has also been hit by lawsuits and negotiations over copyright issues.

Google’s ebook service will be out by Christmas.

Read More

Google App Inventor: Now Anyone Can Create an Android App

Google is launching a new tool on Monday that lets anyone create an app for Android phones.

Google App inventor claims to enable non-coders to develop complete, working Android apps by connecting a series of “blocks.” Googlehas been testing App Inventor in schools for a year, reports The New York Times. At the time of writing, App Inventor is only available to those who apply via a form.

It’s a smart concept. Not only is the Android Market an open platform for developers (with no approval process, a la Apple’s App Store), but now we’ll likely see a vast array of specialized apps built by non-developers. This could radically increase the volume of apps in the Market versus the App Store.

The expansion may, of course, come at the cost of quality. We’ll see thousands of new Android apps, but will they be of a “cookie cutter” nature, offering very little value? There is, however, an upside in the long term: If App Inventor is so simple that schoolchildren can make apps, some those same children will soon become coders themselves and perhaps choose to develop apps for Android rather than iOS.

Google and Apple are currently in a heated battle to win the hearts and minds of developers. Google, it seems, wants to win over the non-developers too.

What do you think? Is App Inventor a winning play on Google’s part?

Read More

Sony claims 4.1 million PS Move shipments!

Sony announced today that they have shipped 4.1 million PlayStation Move units in just the two months since launch. The figure accounts for all worldwide shipments of the device, which launched in September across North America, Europe and Asia. Meanwhile the PlayStation Move has only been on sale in Japan for little under a month, but has already seen a steady sales growth since the launch.

The press release from Sony was clearly a rebuttal to the Microsoft announcement  yesterday, regarding the 2.5 million sales of Kinect for Xbox 360, which launched in November.

The two companies have been battling it out over the past year to see which device will land in consumer’s homes. Both companies are pushing their new hardware vigorously, and it can only be good news for consumers in the long run.

Microsoft does seem to have the most steam behind their hardware though, not only in early sales but also in the amount of software available for Kinect, both before and after launch. New titles have been released each week for Kinect, while the PlayStation Move has struggled to find new games for users to purchase. Most of the titles released since launch have been patched updates or small add-ons, such as those seen in the Sly Cooper remake, while major titles such as LittleBigPlanet 2 saw delays to their release.

Both the PlayStation Move and Kinect for Xbox 360 devices are available in stores now.

Read More

Acer to join WP7 bandwagon soon!

Tech giant Acer, said on monday, that the company is currently working on a Windows Phone 7 handset.

The news comes as CEO Gianfranco Lanci stated in an interview with Ina Fried that “Today we are mainly Android, but we are also working on Windows Phone 7”

When questioned about why the company didn’t make a move to the Windows Phone platform earlier, he responded “We saw a lot of limitations on Windows Phone a couple of years ago and we moved to Android because of user experience, and even the possibility to be a little more creative from a content offering and so forth is better than on the Windows phone”

There hasn’t been any specific features announced for the handset, but Lanci claims he thinks WP7 has “the same opportunity you can see on Android in terms of customization.”

In September, a Microsoft employee hinted at the possibility of an Acer WP7 device and it seems clear now that we were right to take the hint.

As this is in the early stages of development there hasn’t yet been an announcement of when the handset is planned to be released.

Read More

Facetime users facing random calls!

Many iPhone 4 users may have started receiving random FaceTime calls that were unable to connect at all hours of the night after upgrading to iOS 4.2.1. The calls are more than an annoyance as they are coming from friends and create concern when they fail to connect after this out-of-the-blue call.

The random calls have inspired a thread on Apple Discussions Message Board where 40 iPhone 4 users, all with iOS 4.2.1 have experienced this same issue. One major round of false FaceTime calls went out to the United Kingdom from 2 A.M. to 2:30 A.M, causing much unrest, annoyance, and concern, especially as all of the calls originated from someone in the contacts list of the phone.

Users in other parts of the world reported similar issues all at the same time as the UK users, who seem to have been hit the hardest by this, experienced their phantom calls. One user mapped out all of the times reported by the users who have complained. “It does seem to be the same time across the world, 6:30pm LA, 9:30pm NY, 2:30am London, 3:30am Europe. What was Apple doing?”

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any major connection between the calls other than iOS 4.2.1. The users chosen in the contact list however, seem to be at random; not the first person in the contact list or even the last person who called. Even stranger, many of the phones were turned off that supposedly “made” the calls.

FaceTime is not maintained by the mobile companies rather, but instead by Apple. There seems to have been a server blip, but with such extraneous results it isn’t clear what caused the rude awakenings. Some users speculated that it may be the desktop version, but other users have no connection to the desktop version leaving everyone scratching their heads.

The issue was not contained to that one blip at 2:30 A.M. in the UK, before that night, other users were also experiencing similar phantom FaceTime calls, most of which are related to iOS 4.2.1. If this is an issue with the update, Apple will be quick to fix it if  their response to the Apple Ipod iOS 4.2 WiFi issues holds true in all situations

Read More