The Motorola Conundrum

Recently, in the most puzzling of sales, Google sold Motorola Mobility, that it had bought last year for $12.5 Billions, to Lenovo for under $3 Billion. It may seem that Google is undoing its misguided Motorola purchase — the unit doesn't fit with the rest of Google’s businesses and even clashes with its efforts to convince other companies to make Android phones and tablets. But there are some lingering questions around the deal.

Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion and they’re selling it for $3 billion. Why would they be incurring a loss of  $9.5 Billion?

Streetview : Locating Awesomeness

Street View is a feature available in Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile that allows users to explore the world through 360-degree panoramic street-level imagery. Usually, Google uses a car to collect Street View imagery, but often few places are not accessible with a car. For such places and smaller paths and unique terrain, they use three specially designed imagery collection platforms: the Trike, the Trolley, and the Snowmobile.

Acquisitions That Have Changed The Landscape Of Google

Long back, Google buying out companies was a rare proposition. However, the fall of the 21st century has changed all that. Since 2001, Google Inc. has acquired well over 100 companies. Most purchases were within the price range of $10M to $100M, with the odd exception of a multi-billion dollar deal. While most were aimed to gobble up budding competition and ensure patents, there are some that stand out having changed the complete landscape of Google and how we know it to be. Let's look at those.

AdSense : A Blogger's Friend

Google AdSense is a program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to site content and audience. You can use AdSense to place ads wherever you want on your blog, website, YouTube channels and many other sources. Based on your site traffic and number of direct clicks on the ads, Google pays you an amount of money, that may eventually build up to be a regular source of income if your blogs and channels are popular enough.

Google Glass : A Privacy Invasion Or A Massive Aid ?

Google Glass is a wearable computer that can be worn similarly to eyeglasses. Google Glasses have a transparent heads-up or head-mounted display that allows users to see a computer screen while still seeing the world through the screen. Though it has not yet been put on public sale, nearly 10,000 people are trying it out, as victors of a Google contest. Among the people testing thiss wearable computer are teachers, dentists, doctors, radio disc jockeys, hair stylists, architects, athletes and even a zookeeper in America.

Chrome OS And Chromebook

Image Courtesy : Wikipedia

Following Google's strides in smartphone technologies is Chrome OS, Google's minimalist Linux-based operating system to work primarily with web applications. While calling Chrome OS a mainstream OS wouldn't be justice to Windows and Linux, it is mainly an on-the-go server based lightweight OS. Borne out of Google's open source Chromium OS project, it went on sale featuring in Chromebooks first sold by Samsung and Acer in 2011. Chromebooks are basically lightly spec-ed personal computers that take immense care of portability, offering a small range of apps offline, as it's intended mode of usage is with an internet connection. Data storage is done mainly on the cloud, so that even if you're using a different system, the data is still there.

Is Google Nexus Taking Over The Smartphone Market?

Google is slowly inching it's way towards the business end of smartphone sales with it's shrewd and value for money phone and tablet releases. Since the release and subsequent success of it's Nexus phones and tablets, there's only one way for Google smartphone sales - UP ! Nexus 7, Google's 7" tablet was such a massive success that they have released an upgrade over it this past year. Meanwhile the handier 4.7" Nexus 4 was the lowest priced smartphone from any recognized manufacturer that could boast of a whopping 2GB RAM. The initial stocks of both Nexus 4 and 7 were sold out within minutes of going on sale, underlining it's popularity and general appreciaiton.