Google’s much admired 20 per cent time – where engineers are allowed to spend a portion of their time on their own projects instead of their day jobs – has not been eroded by the company’s explosive growth. Product manager Aparna Chennapragada, who is moving from Google Labs to work on video search at the company, insisted that the concept of engineers taking on their own side-projects for a fifth of their working week has not diminished. “The culture is still pervasive although the company has grown along with the range of people,” she told TechRadar “But it’s very much present and the 20 per cent task gives people a chance to take a break from their day jobs.” Android gesture search Although many of the projects gather big teams, like Google Goggles for instance, some or the projects arrive on Google Labs and even as final products due to a single person
Opera Mini users used the mobile browser to read one billion internet pages in a single day, a significant landmark for the Norwegian company. Opera has revealed that the billion mark was hit on July 25 2010, just over two years on from hitting the 100 million mark for the first time. “Each day is different in the fast-growing mobile Web. Every day more people around the world choose Opera Mini and view more pages through this browser,” said Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder, Opera Software.
ITV is in talks to extend the ITV Player over multiple devices, including the PS3, BlackBerrys, Apple and the forthcoming Google TV according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. Quoting a ’senior TV executive close to ITV’ the Telegraph suggests that ITV is ready to make its video on demand service and answer to the BBC iPlayer a much bigger proposition and is talking to Sony, RIM, Apple and Google. The BBC has already rolled the iPlayer across many devices – although not Microsoft’s Xbox 360 of course – but the ITV is apparently looking at a potential paid for app to raise money for the cost of the venture.
When your users spend more time deleting messages than reading email on your webmail service, you know it’s time to make email easier to deal with. “The inbox has got out of control,” Chris Jones, corporate vice president for Windows Live, told TechRadar. “Our approach is to take the common things people do and make them easier.” The changes coming to Hotmail this summer promise to unclutter your inbox, Jones claims. “It used to be if you had 19 unread messages, that was 19 mails from real people that you need to read
It’s a great month for Opera, with the company having recently hit the magic 100 million users worldwide mark , followed by the latest news that Opera’s speedy mobile browser for iPhone has finally been approved by Apple and is available for iPhone users to download from the App Store for free right now. For many, it is quite a surprise that Apple even approved the browser – with it being faster than Apple’s own Safari browser on the iPhone.