Author: Clinton

Google My Business (GMB) is a service that allows businesses to highlight their business, specials or attributes of their company within Google Search results.  Launched in 2014, it is one of the best tools available for small to medium businesses to improve their search results and allow people to find them.

One of the key elements of GMB are attributes that tell people who find your business qualities.  Now Google has added two key attributes that owners can add to their business, “LGBTQ-friendly” and as a “Transgender Safe Space”.  These new attributes will allow businesses to clearly indicate they are an open part of their local community.

A fourth Chrome 68-based build of the Chrome for Android Beta app has arrived in the Google Play Store.  The new build, 68.0.3440.40, brings a number of bug fixes and stability improvements as the Chromium team continues to work on the build for public release late next month.

As you may recall from the first beta release from a couple of weeks back, there are a slew of changes coming to Chrome for Android with Chrome 68.  A new horizontal task switcher is available, a new Home screen mini bar instead of a banner has been added as well as new identifications for non-HTTPS sites that you visit.

The second Chrome 69-based build for the Chrome OS Dev Channel has arrived today.  Build 69.0.3473.0 (Platform version: 10820.0.0) is making its way out now to devices registered in the channel but you can manually check for the update by typing chrome://help in the browser bar and then tapping the Check for Update button.

As you would expect with a build in the Dev Channel, which is essentially the alpha build channel for the Chrome OS platform, this release has a significant number of bug, performance, and security fixes in it.  Google did not release a log of all the changes which isn’t uncommon in these early builds, especially in the Dev Channel.

Over the course of yesterday, many Google Home and Chromecast users reported issues with the devices.  In the case of Home, commands were not being accepted while with Chromecast devices, casting would not work.  The issue was reasonably widespread.

Late yesterday, Google’s Made By Google Twitter account posted that a fix would be rolling out over the follow six hour (i.e. overnight) to fix the issue.

We have a fix for Google Home and Chromecast. It will automatically roll out within the next 6 hours. To get back up and running now, reboot your device → https://t.co/CM4ov63F46. Thanks for sticking with us!

— Made by Google (@madebygoogle) June 27, 2018

At this point, this fix should have rolled out to everyone.

If there was any doubt that Google is planning to make Linux available on a wide range of Chromebooks, a find by XDA Developers should put them to rest.  The code snippet found in a Chromium commit has added 18 new Apollo Lake powered Chromebooks to Project Crostini, the codename for the project to add Linux to Chrome OS.

The new additions are Chromebooks from the likes of Acer, Dell, and Lenovo, offering a much broader group of devices that will be able to run Linux and, notably, not the upper end of processing power.

Google Calendar is set to pick up some handy new features over the course of the next few days that will allow for Out of Office event creation to be an easier process and to help block out your personal time on your calendar.  The updates are rolling out to all G Suite customers and, presumably, that includes the public version of Google Calendar non-G Suite users use.

A key new feature will be around the event creation pop-up that you get when you select a time or select multiple days.  Based on where you click, you will now see options to create an event, a reminder, or if you select multiple days, to select that it is an Out of Office time for you.