Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

Search / web app giant Google announced yesterday on the Google Blog that they have just acquired human-verification system reCAPTCHA, which aside from preventing bots from registering for web sites, also helps digitize books by confirming words that a computerized optical character recognition (OCR) system was not able to recognize. This is being used to … Read more

Several Google Apps Lose “Beta” Tag

Google announced today that Google Apps is finally out of beta. “Yes, really.” “Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. ‘Beta’ will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not … Read more

Google and Sony Partner for 500k eBooks Deal

In an effort to squash competition from Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation), Google and Sony have struck up a deal to put over 500,000 eBooks on Sony Connect eBook store for FREE. Granted, all of these books are public domain, but they’ve been specially formatted for Sony Reader. Ars Technica weighs … Read more

Same Browser Wars, Different Day

In the European Union, Opera is in the process of bringing a suit against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. Microsoft is slated to include Internet Explorer 8 in its latest operating system, Windows 7. Recently, Mozilla foundation threw its hat in the ring with Opera to go up against Microsoft, and … Read more

Google Reverse Engineered Vista Code to Write Chrome

It’s no big surprise that Google makes a superior web product for a lot of our day-to-day needs. Recently, Google announced their new web browser called Google Chrome. It’s code is based on Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Web Kit used in Safari (on Mac, PC, and iPhone). There are several suspicious lines in the code, … Read more

Add iGoogle Widgets to Active Desktop

Website ThirdError.com has a great post on how to add widgets from Google Homepage, or iGoogle, onto your Windows XP desktop using oft-forgotten Windows feature Active Desktop. Active Desktop is the feature in Windows that lets you put offline web pages embedded into your desktop wallpaper. Some people found the item useful, but for the … Read more