Google's Fast Flip

Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web. According to Google, fast Flip lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, which can significantly slow the rendering of articles, especially if they have multimedia content.Google's announcement and More about the Fast flip

Google closing Google Video, Catalog Search, Notebook, Dodgeball, Jaiku and Mashup Editor

Google’s announced they’re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor.

Ending uploads to Google Video because YouTube was the leading property for this; Closing Notebook because it offers other services that allow for notetaking, such as Google SearchWiki, Google Docs and Google Bookmarks; Dodgeball was designed to allow people to easily connect with others near them via their cell phones; Jaiku is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter that never got out of the invite-only stage. Read more on closures of these google products/services, click here

Google releases Picasa for Mac

I am not a big Mac user, I did use Picasa Web Albums a little bit though. Mac users should be excited about Google's announcement on Picasa for Mac. "Today (Jan. 5), we're releasing Picasa for Mac. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the 'it-slices-and-dices' feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages."

Everything you want to know about Google...

Here is the very interesting 34-slide presentation on Google prepared by FaberNovel, a french consulting firm. It is hard to realize the real nature of this just 10 years old giant given the number of services it has continuously released, updated (and sometimes shut down) or acquired.This presentation gives a great overview of the company’s overall strategy and the reasons it has become what it is today. By Ouriel Ohayon from TechCruch

Google will make available millions of images from the Life Magazine photo archive

TimeWarner and Google announced on Nov. 18 that Google will make available millions of images from the Life Magazine photo archive. These are hard-copy photographs that have been or are being scanned by Google. They will show up in Google.com and Google Image search results.The images will be free to use for “personal and research purposes” but will be digitally watermarked to prevent unauthorized or unlicensed commercial uses. There are links to appropriate contacts for those who want to use the images commercially.