Category: Google

Google has been busy this week supporting their customers in India and this morning, it just got a little better.  Now if you are in India you can use the Google Play Music service to upload your music and purchase music through the service.  It comes after months of rumors of the service coming to the country but nothing ever materialized until today.  The music catalog available appears to be equal to that of the one in the United States plus there is a significant number of Bollywood songs & albums in the catalog.

As for pricing, individual songs equate to about .23 Cents while complete albums will start at $1.05 and go up from there.

On their official YouTube channel, Google has released another series of short videos highlighting a service of the company.  This new series is titled Meet Data and the seven videos show you how the company uses data to help you.  Using examples of how search works to how Google Maps helps you find that location you are looking for, the videos outline how Google uses big data to help you in that process.  Each video also points out that data security and privacy is important.

With the release of Google Allo earlier this week, Google also released an increadbly powerful feature inside the app.  Google Assistant, as the name suggests, aims to give you information, weather and even play games (and tell a joke or two) all within Allo.  Indeed, with Allo itself still needing some fleshing out, Google Assistant is by far the killer feature of the app and gives us a glimpse as to what we can expect as the company starts rolling this out to other devices like Google Home.

One of the great feature of Assistant is the ability to sign up for news, weather and other information in a subscription that is delivered to you daily.  It is a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest information on a topic of your choice.  In this How To I’ll show you how to subscribe and manage your subscriptions within Assistant.

Happy Birthday Android!  Back on September 23, 2008, Android 1.o made its debut with T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream making it commercially available for the first time.  As we who love the platform know, it has grown exponentially in features, performance and functionality over the past 8 years and it is exciting to think of what the next 8 years hold in store for it.

To be fair, there is a lot of confusion on the Interwebs on the exact birthday of Android but it seems to come down to two dates.  The first, September 23, 2008 as I mentioned before being the commercially available date.  There is also the date of November 5, 2007.  That is the day that the beta of Android 1.0 was made available.  It seems pretty clear in Google’s mind however that the September 23rd date is the one of record and clearly is the one they are celebrating.

There are a lot of travel apps in the Play Store but the newest one, Google Trips, is mighty impressive.  The app launched earlier this week and aims to be the one app you go to for information about your trip and to help you plan it.  Best of all (besides being free) is that it can work completely offline, saving you data usage while you are traveling internationally.  The leverages travel reservations received in Gmail to determine where you are going on a trip and stores that information in the Reservations section of the app.  There you can see your car, hotel and air travel all in one place.  There are other sections too such as Things to Do.  This gives you recommendations on things around where you will be traveling that you can do to get to explore the city you are visiting.  Once you find something you like, tap the star icon for that things and it will be added to your Saved places so you can keep track of them and plan them into your trip.

The stage is set for the world to finally see Google’s new messaging app, Google Allo, this week.  Wednesday in fact if you take in consideration the leak from Evan Blass over the weekend and Google’s own words.  On Saturday, Evan Blass tweeted that we would likely see the new messaging app this week.

Hello, Allo (launches this week).

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) September 18, 2016

Given Blass’ outstanding recording when it comes to such things, it is hardly for me to question that this will happen even if it is a leak-meets-rumor.  But for me, my money is on Wednesday of this week.  Why?  Google’s own words.