“Waze!” a popular smartphone mapping app, has reportedly been in talks with Facebook for several weeks. The possible acquisition could mount to as much as $1 billion. According to several sources including Bloomberg, report that other large tech companies, including Google, are considering a bid for the start-up.

Sources like Bloomberg reports that Google approached Waze about a possible bid after the details of Facebook’s interest in the start-up became public. Waze is reportedly looking for an acquisition price of more than $1 billion. Neither Google nor Facebook are said to be close to sealing the deal yet, and it’s certainly possible that Waze is trying to incite a bidding war to drive up the price, or that it may simply back away from talks and use the press as leverage for more venture funding.

While Waze’s mapping technology could help Google improve its own maps, any bid for the start-up would likely be more of a defensive move to prevent a competitor like Facebook from gaining a foothold in the mapping space.

Apple had also been rumored to be weighing a bid for Waze earlier this year, presumably to improve its much-derided Maps application, but Bloomberg reports that Apple is not currently part of the acquisition talks.

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The language council considered the word for inclusion, but then Google entered into the picture and asked not to, until its meaning has been made more favourable to the company. Since Google is the world’s largest search engine and claims that nothing escapes its domain and one can find anything about anything just by simply using the search tool bar.

How can it be that something that can’t be found on the web using a search engine is “Ogooglebar” in Swedish language then? But, what the Google’s legal experts want the word to now mean is not any search engine, but Google’s search engine. Thus, it must mean something that cannot be found on the Web using Google. The trick here is in denying that there are any other search engines.

So if someone is using search engine like Yahoo!, but wants to express this idea that he or she did not find something on the web despite making a search for it online, it must be Google and none other. A bit of silly idea, but one which Google wants to promote. Hence, Google is proposing use the word “Ogooglebar” with a Google trademark so that people will know it is a trademarked company.

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Waging such legal battles is not an easy task for companies looking to move ahead from both bad publicity and from their money going into more creative investment that will make their company stronger.

Mobile companies have all been sued, much to the extent that when one says mobile market, another thing that comes to mind is patent lawsuits. Google has taken this kind of large-hearted approach in the hope that other companies will also let go of their patented cloud software and big data processing software free of any legal claims.

According to Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge there are 10 patents of Google’s MapReduce software. Google also plans to spread its patent coverage to other technologies. However, not all of these patents will be free as Google has made its data processing software free.

Cloud data is an emerging technology and much can be explored through it. However, abusing such patents will not be the right path to take because it will result in nothing but unethical conduct, loss of image and proper growth of the consumer market a brand is looking to achieve.

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The outside observers will measure the amount of data being used by technology companies and will place taxes on them accordingly. It is said that personal data of users is of utmost importance to technology companies whose main marketing campaign works online and who earn through online sources. Facebook and Google, amongst others, are working to provide such personal data, but all for free. The only thing they get in exchange are the services these companies provide.

If this French law comes into force, technology companies based in France might get a relief in their tough competition from American based companies who dominate them, but get away from paying taxes. Google has been blamed for tax evasion, whereas the company spokesperson obviously denies any such charges against its practices.

Google operates in Pakistan, but it does not get taxed here. The government of Pakistan is trying to find means to tax it as the company has no official representation in the country, but earns billions of dollars in profits annually from its 20 million internet user-base. This French law, even though not pleasant for technology companies, will surely be a better move to keep in line the practices of some American technology companies.

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This law was formed in 1986. Back in those days, emails and their data were deleted automatically after a user has downloaded the data and the concept of cloud storage was not shaped as such like now, although it is said to be first thought about in the 1960s. But the thinkers did not foreseen that the world would become such a complex place for both laws and freedom of the internet to exist together without creating challenging issues.

Google understands cloud computing and its implications for the world’s communication more than law enforcement agencies and thus in practice is rejecting this outdated law. Certainly the law needs to evolve with the changes in issues of the times.

Furthermore, the interpretation of the law is also another issue which creates such diverging viewpoints. Google is in a better position to interpret such a law that directly affects its users and their privacy as well as the company’s own privacy policies and customer trust.

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Internet security has become a real issue, especially during the past year due to a lot of hacking cases taking place on many different sites which claim to have safe security system, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. The report by IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine and Wired say that Google wants a form of password devices.

According to Google’s spokesperson, the company is trying to make authentication more secure, but easier on users for management purposes. A lot more complexities might confuse many users. As of now, this who idea is into experimentation stage with Google working on a pilot programme with USB cards called Yubikeys. This will link Google passwords to an actual device instead of be in the form of a text.

But this kind of a password device system has its own downside, like creating a problem when such a key gets left behind or gets stolen. If the computer and internet companies can think of some other secure ways to make password authentication stronger, it will be a better way to deal with the hacking situation. More work should be concentrated on this aspect too.

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French Culture Minister, Aurelie Filippetti agrees with this notion and hence is in its favour. Google France is of the view that even French newspaper sites benefits from the Google search engine results when it redirects around four billion clicks to different French media pages on a monthly basis. This in Google’s view equals the profits from whole online traffic.

Print versions of the newspapers are already facing a hard time to keep up with the online news consumerism that is growing. Recently, Newsweek has declared that it will close down its print version altogether. In order to deal with such a situation, the French government had earlier decided on imposing a tax on online advertisement revenues, but later backed out on such taxation because it might harm small local companies and will not affect the giant internet companies like Google.

However, the French government is known for strongly supporting its media when it comes to the profit earning and they will find a way round this Google problem too. The threat from Google hardly seems likely to realize, because it earns a lot from French news sites too.

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Within 14 years Google have managed to capture the biggest search engine market in the world and have become a household name!

We would like to take the opportunity to congratulate Google, Larry and Sergy with the 14th Birthday of Google! May the search engine grow from strength to strength in the years to come!

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The more astonishing thing about this report is that Google admits complying with more than half of these requests. There had been a total of 1007 requests from different governments around the world. The increase has been especially seen from the U.S. government, which flaunts around as the sole champion of freedom of expression, especially when it comes to countries like China, Pakistan and the region of the Middle East. But according to Google, the U.S. government has alone requested more than 6,000 times to give users’ private data.

Despite rise in such requests, the cyber crimes still persist and government agencies own computer networks have been hacked. However, the reason is that the requests have been mostly about taking down content rather than for catching the criminals. So much for the freedom of expression and freedom of information!

This hypocritical act is not exclusive to the U.S. alone as many of the European democracies have presented Google with the same content take down requests especially concerning political and public figures. Other requests by the U.S. government has also been about revealing user’s IP addresses, which are used for tracking down criminals.

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This is an outcome of the program announced by ICANN in 2008 where they wanted to expand the number of generic TLD. Given this expansion process, Google submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories:

• Domains related to google’s core business, like .docs
• Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
• Domains that are interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

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Google has proven to be selfish at this while not thinking about the right of people to maintain privacy. It has been sued time and again by many for invading into their homes and also catching them in various acts that they otherwise would have faced no trouble with had Street View cars not been there.

The open Wi-Fi networks of Street View cars have been collecting private data for more than two years. Google called it a mistake of a programmer and asked to repair things. But that has not happened. It means that Google was deliberately involved in such an act and this could mean a re-investigation into Google’s own privacy policies. The experts are clearly unhappy and moreover saddened by Google outright lying.

According to the chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, Jacob Kohlstamm:

“But apparently, it wasn’t a mistake at all. In a political sense, that would be considered contempt of Parliament and would mean the end of the career for the person responsible.”

If Google does not patch itself together one final time on its privacy issues and breaking into other’s privacy matters, it could really mean the end of its name and image.

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Currently, Google Docs provides 1GB of free storage and allows users to purchase more storage individually. Allowing an administrator to purchase storage for multiple employees will make using Google storage much easier for organizations.

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The idea is very interesting and useful. If taken into account a user’s search history, it could even be faster to generate search results for a query. This is something that Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Stephen Wolfram also believes in. He wants the word ‘instant’ to have a literal meaning and application when it comes to search results generation. He is terming his concept as “preemptive delivery of information” and his data company is working toward it.

Wolfram has found in his own personal experience that his personal analytics online has outlined data that he keeps track of in his life. He wants to come up with a computational history that will work as a human memory for a user who does not has to recollect everything at the time it is needed. But rather, a user would be informed about anything he or she wants to know, especially something that a person has been through already searching online.

Wolfram Alpha’s computational search engine will deliver not just a list of links according to search queries, but would actually deliver complete reports about them. It is still to be seen what becomes of this idea.

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Just as Apple is expecting much fanfare with its next iPad, Google has started churning on its own rumour mill about the Google Nexus tablet to create and increase the anticipation in potential customers. The new 7-inch tablet could launch in just two months from now in May.

In order to compete better with Amazon’s Kindle Fire device at the sales, which is priced at $199, Google has decided to make the cost of this new tablet as low as $149 according to a senior employee at a supply chain company located in the United States.

Google has not received much success with social networking, but its Android Market is going strong. It might do well at tablets too. Google has also reportedly dropped the price of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and made it between $149 and $199.

Apple however is still a lot safe in this area according to the experts, but Amazon might have to double check about its price tags. Since now the rumour has been started, it better be impressive or else potential customers would now be more disappointed than they otherwise would have been if it does not turn out to be $149 or around that.

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