Earlier this year, I wondered when Google+ would be integrated with Google Places. That's as logical of a local business booster as you can get. Take Google's social network and pair it with the company's local business search service. Google is indeed hard at work in this effort. The company accidentally posted help documentation that talks of check-in offers triggered via Google+. As TechCrunch and Mike Blumenthal noted,

J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz had a sit down with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Openheimer, from whom he gathered that they were not at all concerned by Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. If they had said that before the Kindle Fire was launched Nov. 15, I'd call them arrogant. Having played with the custom Android slate with a 7-inch display for over two weeks, I can see their logic, and that of Moskowitz, who wrote Dec.

An interesting meme has popped up over whether Mozilla's Firefox browser is sustainable given the fact that Google's Chrome browser is rapidly gaining on its rival and that Google accounted for 84 percent of revenue last year. That licensing deal, in which Firefox shuttles users to Google's search engine, supposedly ran out in November, Ed Bott noted first Dec. 2 .

Google released the first fruits of its ITA Software Flight Search data back in September, providing users with flight schedules and prices to compare several travel options. Users could access Flight Search via the Flights section on the left-hand navigation rail of search results pages, or heading straight to Google.com Flights . That's not nearly as direct as simply searching for the same flights via Google.com.

ReadWriteWeb's Joe Brockmeier published a provacative post about Chrome Operating System Wednesday. The premise? Google, which behind new-old CEO Larry Page has been trimming a lot of dark matter projects, may want to clip Chrome OS now rather than invest any more money in it or the Chromebooks in the market. The reason? People aren't buying them, partly because they're not as aggressively marketed as other Google products,

Google Maps for Android 6.0 is a significant refresh, adding indoor layouts for some malls, department stores such as Ikea, Bloomingdale's and Macy's, as well as several airports in the U.S. and Japan. The search engine provider already commands much of the online mapping market for outdoor geographic footage all over the world. With these app tools, Google has signaled its intent to corner the indoor market Microsoft's Bing and others are trying to feast on.

Google's top search engineers, including Google Fellows Amit Singhal and Ben Gomes, run through a video snapshot of the company's search engine evolution over the last 13 years. None of it is secret, though some of it may seem to have been resurrected from obscurity. Check it out for yourself: Where search came from doesn't interest me. Search as it is today doesn't thrill me. It's a tool, gets the job done. Where search is going promises to be more interesting. Singhal,

Jean-Louis Gassée has penned a cogent analysis answering many industry watchers' question of: Why should Facebook product a smartphone? Facebook is a social network company that has been intensely focused on improving the tools that keep the social connections humming. Well, mobile is a necessary adjacent portal. Some would say it's going to replace the desktop as the vehicle for Web interactions. For many users, it already has.

Samsung has made its mobile attack on Apple personal, poking fun at iPhone fanboys and fangirls in a clever ad for its Samsung Galaxy S II. Samsung's self described "aggressive" campaign, called "The Next Big Thing is Already Here," is a TV and online campaign began running on Facebook Nov. 23. Normally when Apple and Samsung engage in competitive jousts, they attack each other's speeds and feeds. This time,

In a plot worthy of one of campiest, long-running teen TV series ever, Facebook reportedly assembled a top-secret team of top talent to build a Facebook Phone. What happened? The effort, initially code-named "Slayer," a hybrid of "Social Layer, and renamed to the more cute and safe "Buffy," FAILED the first time Facebook tried it. That's the great scoop from AllThingsD's Liz Gannes. I'm thrilled for her because, after breaking the news Monday ,

Yesterday I wrote about how Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" is being well received by most folks who have tested it. Today, I write about someone who doesn't like ICS. Farhad Manhoo is a man whose writing is always well thought out and I find myself agreeing with him 99 percent of the time. This post, which is short and bittersweet, has to do with the other 1 percent. Manhoo tested ICS on the GSM version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. While he acknowledged some improvements,

Google's Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" has hit the streets, at least in the U.K., where Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone launched last week. Google seeded some gadget Websites with the GSM version of the handset. I'm waiting on Verizon Wireless' version. In the meantime, here is what people are saying about the shiny new OS and handset. AnandTech said the browser is fast, beating the Motorola Droid Razr - which I have tested and found to be super fast -, Apple's iPhone 4S,

Google launched the full-flavored version of its Google Music product Nov. 16, adding a streaming music to the existing storage locker from last May. I've been poking around on it and found it pretty easy to use. Here's the new music store in the Android Market : I took Google up on the invite to download "free music" from the Market and was shocked to find not just singles, but a whole live album by one of my all-time favorite bands, Pearl Jam. This live album,

Google has begun personalizing Google Maps by incorporating ratings that users have made in the My Places tabs directly into Maps results. Launched in June, My Places replaced the My Maps tab Google Maps .

Netflix, which only made its Android application available for Android tablets, has rolled out an improvement to its app to boost discovery of its content on slates such as the newly available Kindle Fire and Nook tablets. Zal Bilimoria, formerly a product manager at Google and Microsoft who manages mobile products at Netflix, said the new interface displays twice as many movies and TV shows as before. "Also, we've taken greater advantage of the tablet's unique features,

The New York Times provided the best glimpse yet into the work that Google Co-founder Sergey Brin and other crack engineers have been working on for the last several months. There exists in the secret Google X lab over 100 experiments that Brin said last month at the Web 2.0 Summit were "farther afield" projects . As the Times noted : It's a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low.

Google has started giving away 7 Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones as part of its Google Nexus Challenge, according to the company's @googlenexus Twitter account. It's a daily puzzle contest, with Google giving away a phone a day to the winner, starting on Nov. 12 and ending on Nov. 21, a Monday. That could point to its availability date to the broader public. Or not. Verizon, which is offering the Galaxy Nexus this year, likes to launch phones on Thursdays or Fridays.

I'll admit that when Google unveiled the +1 button back in March of this year I was dissappointed. Where was the rest of it, I wondered. What about the Emerald Sea social network I'd heard so much about? Obviously, that came to pass in June, but for nearly 4 months before that, all I had were these crappy +1 buttons that didn't make sense to me. Sure, I got the idea. Click +1 on search results or ads we approved of to "recommend" them to users, but without context, who cares?

You have to have guts or a crystal ball to proclaim the death of a multi-million-dollar software project undertaken by one of the world's premier Internet companies. Give credit where credit is due to Farhad Manhoo, who does just that in his column in Slate. Never bullish on Google+ from the get-go, Manhoo blasts the balloon of hot air that Google+ has been riding since its limited field test launch June 28, following onto its glorious public beta launch,

The Verve had a nice little scoop about some newfangled Motorola Mobility device that no one had heard of but apparently is far enough along that it has its own marketing box. The Motorola Corvair - sounds like a car - is a tablet-style TV remote control with a 6-inch touchscreen powered by Google's Android 2.3 operating system: This device, which is allegedly in testing at cable companies, struck me as having the potential to be a new kind of remote control for Google TV.