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Week in review: China and Google, Facebook and privacy

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last six days:

Chinese entrepreneurs, investors on Google: ‘Just quit. We don’t care.‘ — What does the Chinese tech community think of Google’s controversial plan to uncensor search and possibly leave the country? We talked to several Chinese entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who were part of a delegation that coincidentally visited the Googleplex this week.

Google’s Nexus One sells a mere 20,000 in its first week — Although Google’s Nexus One received a lot of buzz as Google’s own entry into the Android phone business, its initial sales number isn’t that impressive. The Nexus One sold an estimated 20,000 units in its first week, according to market analytics firm Flurry.

Our picks for the best of the Consumer Electronics Show — VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi picked out the 10 coolest products he saw on the show floor, press conferences, and parties.

Google Earth, GeoEye bring satellite photos of Haiti’s devastation — The partnership between the search giant and image specialist GeoEye allows users to download a markup that shows satellite photos of Haiti taken after this week’s earthquake.

The top trends at the consumer electronics show — Dean and I describe the big ideas we saw at CES this year. That includes the prominent ones, like 3-D and tablet computers, and a few that were slightly less obvious.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking or fun:

Facebook and privacy: Trying to be everything to everyone is a minefield — Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on the future of privacy created a firestorm, but VentureBeat writer Kim-Mai Cutler argues that Zuckerberg’s position is reasonable.

Venture capitalists are bullish on the future of game funding — Game investing is still going through, even though it did take a hit due to the recession. We talked to four game-savvy venture capitalists about where the industry is going.

Upload features turns Google Docs into my new hard drive — Googlers predicted that 2010 will be the year of Google Docs, as new features in the online word processor make it a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. Here’s the first new feature of the new year: The ability to upload any file into Google Docs, transforming the application into a file storage system.

A123 back on the map with Fisker battery supply deal — A123Systems, the advanced battery maker best known for its surprisingly lucrative IPO in September of last year, just inked a deal to supply Fisker Automotive with batteries for its highly-anticipated plug-in hybrid. Before this, the company had been fairly quiet since its public sale, reporting deep quarterly losses and paring down its major supply deal with Chrysler.

Will Apple become the next home energy management giant? — Apple seems interested, since it just patented its own home power management panel.

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Brief: Week in review: New Year edition

Happy New Year! Let’s start January off by recapping the top stories from the past week.

AT&T blocked customers in the New York area from ordering an iPhone online, with AT&T customer service reps saying that the network can’t “handle” the iPhone. AT&T’s PR people, for their part, aren’t doing much to help explain the issue.

A security researcher is in the process of building a table that will enable the cracking of GSM encryption, assuming that a parallel effort to crack its frequency hopping algorithm succeeds.

E-readers will be one of the major stories of 2010, and the party gets started next week in Vegas at CES 2010. Here’s a quick run-down of three products that will debut at CES and that could make waves in the e-reader space next year.

Two Ars staffers recently moved to new homes. Taking their broadband connections and e-mail with them turned out to be the worst part of the relocation.

The developers behind the XBMC project have released a new version of the popular open source media player. It comes with an impressive new user interface theme.

What better way to celebrate the impending new year than to read about evolutionary adaptations to duck rape and coot nest parasites. Fortunately, Weird Science comes equipped with hangover advice: stick to vodka.

The California Science Center has been slapped with a lawsuit by a group that hoped to show an anti-evolution film there.

Google wins domain name disputes almost every time, and it suffered its second loss ever on Christmas Eve. How “Groovle.com” avoided a one-way transfer to the Googleplex.

It may not push the genre forward in any strong directions, but Alien Breed Evolution remakes a classic top-down experience and adds online co-op. The mechanics are solid, the pace is measured, and the graphics are strong. What else do you need for $10?

NVIDIA’s next-generation, supercomputer-oriented “Fermi” GPU may be delayed until March.

What is a “Brief” post?”

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There Are Already 500 Chrome Extensions. They’ll Work On Mac Chrome By Week’s End.

Tonight at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Google held an event to formally unveil and showcase the new Google Chrome Extensions. The browser add-ons, which launched just yesterday are already proving to be quite popular among both users and maybe more importantly, developers. Tonight Google announced that while they launched with around 300 extensions yesterday, that number has already grown to 480, and will hit 500 tonight.

And it’s easy to see why after tonight’s presentation. Two software engineers on the Chrome team, Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay built a working in extension live from scratch in front of the audience in about five minutes. And it wasn’t just a demo “Hello World” extension, it was a useful one that can pop-up a Gmail message window populated with a link to the page you’re on.

The reason they’re so easy to build is because they use the same technology that any web developer will already be familiar with. “Extensions are just web pages,” Kay noted.

Another thing of note said tonight was that Chrome extensions will be working on the new Chrome for Mac by the end of the week, Google expects. To be clear, this will be on the dev channel (which you can find on this page) and not the beta channel just yet. Full support (and the first actual release of Chrome for Mac) is expected by early 2010.

This dev channel Mac support of extensions shouldn’t surprise users of Chromium, the open-source browser that Chrome is built-off of. Extensions are currently working in the latest Mac builds of Chromium, but Google accidentally shut off the ability to install them (you can learn how to easily turn them back on here). And with the beta channel now out for Mac, the dev channel versions of Chrome will be built directly off of newer Chromium builds.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Giant Android eclair delivered to Google by even bigger nerds (video)

By now you should be familiar with Google’s confectionary codenames for its Google Android OS: version 1.5 (Cupcake), 1.6 (Donut), 2.0 (Eclair) and version x.x (Flan). What you probably didn’t know is that Google honors each release by dropping a steaming hot foam facsimile onto its front lawn. Historically, the arrival of the giant Donut at the GooglePlex was followed by the 1.6 developer release of Android just a few days later. Don’t get too excited though, last we heard Eclair wouldn’t arrive until Q2 of 2010 for consumers. Video and another view of the nerds “gone wild” just after the break.

[Via TechCrunch]

Continue reading Giant Android eclair delivered to Google by even bigger nerds (video)

Filed under: Cellphones

Giant Android eclair delivered to Google by even bigger nerds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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