Google has some bad news for Microsoft; the days of the PC are coming to an end. This is according to the Google VP for Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy. Speaking at the Digital Landscapes Conference, which is taking place in Ireland, Herlihy claimed that the days of the desktop PC were coming to an end and that people would be using mobile computing and browsers for all of their PC based tasks.

Herlihy stated that desktop computers, as we know them, have around three years left. Just enough time for Microsoft to put a stable release of Windows 7!

Herlihy commented:

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is (more…)

You can never accuse Google of not splashing its cash around when it needs to invest in new technology, especially after the $1.65 billion it spent on YouTube a few years ago. Now Google is at it again, but for probably a lot smaller investment. This time the search giant is buying the photo editing website Picnik, which represents the third purchase by Google in as many weeks.

Perhaps Google is buying up the Internet one website at a time?

Picnik has only been running for five years, and was started in Seattle in the USA. Picnik’s team of developers will get to work on the Google Picasa system, making it every bit as good as Picnik itself has become known for.

Previous acquisitions from Google include a search engine called (more…)

There’s good news for those people who have been caught on Google’s Street View images in places they shouldn’t have been (as has happened more than you’d think). Google has revealed that it plans to update the images on an annual basis in order to cope with the changes found in towns in cities.

Now you can expect to have your latest extension to your home, or your new car in your driveway, proudly captured on Google Street View.

The timing of Google announcing this could have been better however as it’s coming under close scrutiny by EU regulators who are (more…)

Students are well known for their pranks, but usually the average student joke extends no further than the ‘commandeering’ of alcohol or the ‘relocation’ of road signs and police cones. Chinese students however could well have gone a few stages further with their pranks, as they’re having the finger pointed at them for the hack on Google that saw email boxes for known activists being accessed.

The ‘finger’ in question belongs to US computer security experts, who believe they have traced the origin of the hack into Google’s infrastructure all the way to the Jiaotong University, in Shanghai and Shandong Province’s Lanxiang Vocational School.

Jiaotong University is well known within China for having the best computer science programmes – the sort of establishment where individuals with the ability to hack into computer systems would be (more…)