Gavin O'Malley, Feb 22, 2012, 12:00 PM
Google Releases Display Glasses The New York Times

Gimmick or game changer, Google appears to be moving full speed ahead with the release of heads-up display glasses.

“People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time,” reports The New York Times.

As sources tell NYT, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year, and cost “around the price of current smartphones.”

As CNet recalls, rumors that the HUD Google Glasses were in the works have been brewing for the past couple of months. “After accounts that Google was finishing up the prototype in December, tech news site 9to5Google reported that a tipster actually saw the glasses.”

Suggests The Next Web: “Such a concept would allow you to check into a location -- as you can now do on Latitude’s iPhone app and now on Google+ -- using the glasses, while services like Google Maps search would show locations that are around the wearer in real time.”

“Privacy, however, is believed to be a concern for Google, as the company is looking to provide a way for others to know if they are being recorded by a user wearing the glasses,” writes AppleInsider.“I could imagine scenarios where the goggles become a huge hit (with mostly males) and a necessary piece of ‘Geek Chic,’” writes Greg Sterling in Search Engine Land. “But I can equally imagine that they’d be ridiculed and satirized in an ‘SNL’ skit.”

Adds The Verge: “Whether these will take off depends on a wide variety of factors: usability, style, and fleshing out exactly what such a product does -- but naturally, we're as excited as anyone to try them. More on this as it develops.”

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  • Gavin O'Malley, Feb 22, 2012, 1:33 PM
  • Facebook Planning Big, New Ad Platform GigaOm Eying bigger ad revenues, Facebook reportedly plans to introduce a new advertising format before the end of the month. According to leaked documents published by GigaOm, Facebook plans to upgrade its premium ads on Feb. 29. “The company expects the new ads to perform 40 to 80 percent better than its previous product,” Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs, writes in GigaOm.  “As the owner of a social creative agency, and as a rapacious buyer of Facebook ads for clients and for marketing my own company, I live for this kind of news,” Corbett writes. “In an age of over-sharing, these documents landed in my inbox with a splash. I am sharing them in the format I received them.”  The Facebook presentation document describes a new type of premium ad as a “larger-format ad,” that make the site’s current ads -- which appear in the margins of users’ profiles -- look puny by comparison. In the document, Facebook promises that brands that buy the larger and more “interactive” ads will see a 16% increase in their “fan rate.”  
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  • Flickr Planning Pinterest-Like Upgrades mashable Keeping users on their toes, Flickr a planning a number of new changes in the coming months, including a new photo stream design, dubbed “Justified View,” and a new uploading feature, named “Uploadr.” With the new tools, Flickr is mainly after increased user engagement, as Markus Spiering, head of product at the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site, tells Mashable. Set to go live at the end of the month, Justified View trades Flickr’s current white space-filled layout “for something that looks a lot more like Pinterest (as has become the trend in Web design),” Mashable reports. “The new photo stream will first go live with your contacts (the people you follow),” and showcases bigger photos. Meanwhile, the new upload feature, Uploadr, is expected to go live in late March, and let users drag and drop photos from their computer onto the site. Spiering says Uploadr is more like an app than a Web site. As such, photos are instantly viewed as thumbnail images, allowing users to add tags as you upload. More to the point, Spiering tells Mashable that this will likely increase engagement, as Flickr continues to build the Internet’s largest collection of geo-tagged photos -- currently numbering at about 270 million. Moving broadly, Spiering says Flickr stands behinds Yahoo’s “mobile first” strategy.  
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  • Microsoft Files EU Complaint Against Motorola/Google The Seattle Times Microsoft has filed a competition complaint against Motorola Mobility and Google with the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union. In a (once revised) blog post, Dave Heiner, a Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel, said the step was necessary “because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products.” As The Seattle Times explains: “Microsoft's complaint is the latest move in an ongoing, global battle among tech companies over patents,” adding: “Apple, too, has filed a complaint against Motorola Mobility over the same issue.” The move, however, is more salient in the context of Google winning approval from the EU and United States in its bid to acquire Motorola Mobility. Both Microsoft and Apple are arguing that Motorola is not adhering to agreements to license its patents under reasonable terms, as The Seattle Times notes. “The central issue,” it writes, “is over something called ‘standard essential patents’ (SEP) -- patents owned by private companies that involve technologies that have become standard use in the industry.” Companies that hold such patents agree, as part of joining international standards groups, to license them under "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms.  
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