Here it is the HTC T-Mobile Google Android.

After being an unconditional fan from Internet Explorer all along last week I made the switch to Google Chrome. What Firefox never could; Chrome did in a weeks. Why I changed, well quite simple it runs much quicker than IE, when you click on a link it immediately pops up, you don’t have to wait a second. Yes it does have less features and functionalities but for me it does everything I expect from a browser. Let’s see what the next version of IE brings and maybe …

After the whole Chrome launch from Google there was around the same period another launch which I was expecting for quite some time, namely the launch of Picasa 3 and the new Picasa Web Album.

First I installed the Picasa Web Album which had many new features but one seems special at first sight, the picture preview which runs smooth as hell and looks good.

Other features like the print screen, the movies and other stuff are more updates but still usefully.

Much more impressive are the name tags, on your web album you can easily tag all the persons that are on your pictures. You just activate the feature, it scans trough all your pictures and everybody is almost immediately recognized, one last check and tagging and it’s done. You can now browse trough your pictures with just a name and when you hover over a picture you can see the nick names on the picture. Again really impressive work from Google Labs, they keep on surprising me …

One thing I can say, if you got lots of pictures and you want an easy way of looking at them, categorizing them and even create a web album, I can only say one thing. Just install it and you’ll see you won’t be able to work without it anymore.

If you want to see a video instead of a comic book you can have a look at the following explanation about Google Chrome.

I’m still using it but didn’t put it as my preferred browser all though I’m close to doing so as I think everything is really fluent and It’s just what I need as functionality, nothing more … nothing less.

After I guess what was "a well deserved" holiday, back to business and what a start Google launched a browser, Google Chrome and of course I had to install this immediately to see that I liked what I saw.

The install on my Vista system had a little glitch, when I tried to click on "Accept and Install" button in my IE 7 I had ... nothing except an error, anyway I started everything over on my Mozilla Firefox browser it went all really fluently and all my settings where immediately imported from IE.

After the install, the usability here again I like what I got there, the navigation, the buttons, the few menu items, everything is really clean and smooth, I also like the fact that you got an immediate preview of the last sites you visited. I'll be most definitely be using it the next few days and I'll give you my thoughts about it as now I didn't experience it completely I just ran a little test that was quite satisfactory but ... let's see. The big question is will I put Google Chrome as my default browser?

If you want to know more about the birth, philosophy and technology of Google Chrome you can have a look at their comic book.

Google launched a Second Live clone/revival called Lively (it's released in Beta phase), the nice thing about it is that you can integrate it about everywhere and you don't need an incredible install and update procedure, it's all extremely light.

I wondered around in some worlds and at the moment the only thing I can say is that it takes a lot of time to load but once you're in it isn't that difficult and quite user friendly. I can imagine that you can easily use this for marketing purposes as an added possibility to communicate with your audience. The great thing about this (as you may see below if you installed the plugin) is that you can just copy your room and put it on your site.

Again a nice piece of technology and skill from the Google House but we'll see if it's one that will last or will just go the same way as it's predecessor.

Since a few days I noticed that the Google favorites icon has changed; what's that all about. Personally I think the previous one looked much better, it's a gray/blue 'g' and it's seems as if a first year student created the icon cause it's not even clear.

Why did they do this, why did they change the Icon? Do they want to create some buzz, ...

Personally, I just miss the old one and think they should really go back to it cause the new looks really crappy.

Google launched an attack on one of the core products from Microsoft Office SharePoint, you can read the full story in "The New York Times". Below you'll find a movie explaining the basic product and features or you can immediately visit http://sites.google.com/.

About a week ago we where looking for a free collaborative space for one of our clients and stumbled upon http://www.basecamphq.com/ although we never came to testing it out it seemed nice. Now Google launched just what we needed Google Apps Team Edition it really seems to have everything we where looking for, a place to share or create docs, share a calendar, integrated chat and share any other kind of information. It's all well explained in the movie below.

What Happens When Google's Parents Leave Town for the Weekend?

Via: Blogologie

Google became yesterday the Site of the year in Belgium followed by kinepolis and ebay. The blog of the year went to http://onnozelheidmag.wordpress.com/, which was I guess the biggest surprise. Less of a surprise was the group blog award which went to http://gent.blogt.be/.

One thing is for sure the site that won't receive this award is the site of the election itself, when I wanted to have a look this morning at the site http://www.sitevanhetjaar.be/, the only thing I saw was this:

I really don't understand such a big errors. When you organize such an election and the day after when everybody wants to see the results .... the site is down. Such a pity, but maybe it's because I was a programmer that I find these errors so important. I sure hope they get it fixed quickly!!!!!

UPDATE 10:14,
I guess they saw the mistake cause the site is back online.

I know a colleague of mine (Big Google fan) was really looking forward to see this demo. So here it is the demo from Android the new open source operating system for mobile phones. It's long but it gives you a clear view on all the possibilities of Android.

After Microsoft won the battle for the investment in the social networking site Facebook against Google and Yahoo the first unofficial counterattack from Google already sees the world the name of this attack is "Maka-Maka". Last week Microsoft invested $240 Million dollar for a stake in Facebook now Google counterattacks with the plans to develop their own Social networking tool. The power of this tool will be that it would be integrated in all their applications going from Google reader, Gmail to Google Maps and this could well be their power. Another big thing is that they would open their API from Orkut (the social networking site from Google) to developers to make it easy to build applications around this shell and again attracting more users to their network. Although everything is not official yet it will surely be a topic to watch closely.

You can read the full story on TechCrunch.

I've been playing around with Google earth and I was really impressed by some new features. I guess by now you've all eared about it but the new Sky option is just so impressive, at starts you think, mmmmm nothing really impressive but once you start to zoom in it's just so impressive.
It has also been a while since I last used Google earth but the way they integrated the pictures from Panoramio and integrated the Wikipedia articles is just also great.
Technorati tags: Google Earth, Sky, Panoramio, Wikipedia

Plain and simple question what's the Web 3.0 according to Google.

Technorati tags: Web 3.0, Eric Schmidt, Google

Google is inviting Gmail users to imagine how an email message travels around the world and takes a creative video clip.



Google will select the best video clips and edit them together into one final video. The final video will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.

Submit your clip here ;-)
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/gmail_video.html

* Funny thing why do they use "YouTube" instead of Google Video?

Following my previous post I had naturally a look at the next big bike race "Parijs - Roubaix" and what I saw was that they left out the integration with Google maps BUT I didn't see any integration with MSN maps so I guess at the moment this isn't possible in MSN maps. Let's hope that on the next race we'll see a brand new MSN Maps application.

Yesterday my attention was caught by a news alert from my messenger concerning the bike race Gent-Wevelgem. I'm not that interested in sports but anyway I wanted to see what the life coverage was. So I clicked and to my surprise I saw a co-branded campaign between Msn, Google and Nieuwsblad.be!!! Why co-branded cause it seemed that they were using Google maps to show the progress of the bikers. The tool was very clear and nice but still it seemed weird to see the integration of Google maps when we know that Msn has exactly the same kind of tool Msn maps. Anyway, maybe the integration with Msn maps was too difficult or simply not possible?

After spreadsheets, documents , Google pages, Blogger, Analytics an agenda, ... You can now have an online photo album, it's all nicely integrated with Picasa the only downside of the whole thing is that you are only allowed to have 250 MB and that's not a lot to put pictures online, but for 25 $ you have 6.25 GB and that's also not really a lot to pay for a lot of space.

An article form the search engine expert Mike Grehan, if you’re interested in SEO this is a really good article.
http://www.itcommercie.nl/ (nl)