Google will offer a 8000 sq ft (2400 sqm) headquarters for bloggers covering the Democratic and Republican convention, complete with food, massage facilties, internet access and even room for a nap.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the two story “Big Tent” facility will cost $100 per head for access, however with a wealth of features […]

NBC Universal is now backing HourTown, a year-and-a-half old startup focused on online scheduling for small businesses.
HourTown announced the $1 million in new funding today, from NBC along with Baseline Ventures, Hatch Ventures and a handful of Silicon Valley angel investors — some of the same companies, HourTown’s founder points out, that initially got behind […]

Google is putting more than $10 million toward geothermal technology, the company has just announced.
Google’s “.org” branch is investing the cash in Enhanced Geothermal Systems — tools that generate electricity by fracturing hot rocks and circulating water into the openings, thereby recreating geothermal conditions found in nature.
Some of the funding, Google says, will be used […]

Google has announced the launch of Power Readers in Politics, a political news aggregation site where journalists and political campaigns share stores via Google Reader.
Included in the aggregation mix along with both the McCain and Obama campaigns are leading political journalists including Mark Halperin and Adrianna Huffington.
Google is pitching the site as:
We’re reading a lot […]

After months of developer agony, Google has finally released its beta version of the Android SDK — the same day its first Android phone was formally approved by the FCC.
The SDK, 0.9 beta, builds on the “early look” releases made public in November. Google says although the full 1.0 release is unfinished, APIs will […]

AOL’s acquisition of lifestreaming service Socialthing has been confirmed, reports Mashable. Financials have not been revealed.
According to their QBase entry, “Simplifying the management of sites and services that you already use like blogs and social networks, socialthing! synchronizes your personal information, content, and friendships so that you can post this information across the social […]

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere today about the role of PR in the modern tech world. Well, here’s a case where a company may need it — albeit, in a very different sense.
A Google Street View driver snapped a shot of a drunken man passed out in the street in […]

Google blurring out high security sites in Google Maps isn’t new, but photoshopping such sites poorly is definitely new.
This location is Holland has a bad case of Photoshop Blues, complete with 2007 Google remnants on the copy:

Photoshop Disasters suggests it’s an Alien Landing site. What ever it is, it needed to be covered up fast […]

July has set a 2008 record for virus-laden e-mail, according to tracking information released by Google’s Apps Security & Compliance Team this afternoon.
The data shows more malicious messages sent in July than in any other month so far this year. The worst was on July 24, when 10 million infected e-mails went out around […]

Google has responded to the Gmail outage this afternoon (hereby known as the Great Gmail outage of 08) with a post to the Google blog stating that Google is both sorry about the downtime, and is addressing the issues:
We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that […]

Everyone uses Google, but most people search Google by entering the term or word they are looking for without ever using any of Google’s built in features. Google is great as it is, but as the web gets bigger even Google, once famed for its great results, is delivering poorer results for basic search terms. […]

Allen Stern suggested yesterday on Centernetworks that the time is approaching that somebody will sue Alexa due to its poor web metric tracking. That it hasn’t happened yet is perhaps a mystery, and I don’t disagree that it might one day happen, but it presumes one thing: that we take any Alexa type service seriously.
Web […]

Google has just introduced a new open source cryptography utility called KeyCzar.
The toolkit provides “encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms,” explains Google’s Steve Weis. KeyCzar offers the ability to rotate keys without having to change the code itself — something Weis hopes can eliminate common problems in cryptography.
The software is now […]