It’s official, Google has purchased Waze

Waze, a social network based, mobile navigational app system has been garnering quite a bit of attention from suitors such as Facebook, Apple and Google. For some time, it was reported that Facebook was in serious negotiations to purchase it. Facebook’s enormous social networking capabilities coupled with Waze’s interactive navigational app could have squeezed Google’s lead in the mapping business, seriously harming its “Streetmap” app, into which it has invested quite a bit of money. Ultimately, though, Facebook’s purchase offer, plus its demand that Waze move from Israel, made Google the preferred partner and the deal was finalized.

Waze sealed a very good deal with Google. About $1 billion will be paid in cash, not stock, available immediately to the founders, investors and employees.

The Waze family

Waze is the dream of Ehud Shabtai, a software engineer and graduate of Tel Aviv University. The idea came to him that while drivers certainly benefit from GPS-generated navigational tools, the information received was static and not up-to-date with current developments on the ground. Together with co-founders Amir & Gili Shinar, Uri Levine and Arie Gillon, Shabtai took his concept of real-time, interactive navigational information and grew it into a unique app that is used by more than 50 million drivers in more than 100 countries.

The Waze technology

Today, just about everyone has a smart-phone. Waze is a free app that can be used on iPhone and Adroid devices. It is unique in that its users do not just download static, satellite generated navigation information, but they upload the most current road information, even gas prices and speed traps. Waze engineers, using satellite signals from users’ smart-phones, generate the most accurate maps and traffic information possible. Waze is the wave of the future in mobile mapping.

The Better Bet, Bing or Google? New Study Published on Search Engine Safety

So, who gets the bragging rights, Google or Bing? The search engine that you use may have an impact on your safe surfing experience. A new study by AV-Test shows that Bing retrieves five times as many malicious websites as Google. So if Google is the clear winner, now what? Apparently, the answer is not all that much. We're talking about a tiny percentage of search returns. Sure, Bing can't claim Google's near immaculate rate of 0.00025 percent infected results. But search engines like Google and Bing typically process search requests on the order of billions per day. In other words, they are largely immune to your everyday malware virus - not that cautious surfing should throw common sense out the window!

Bing shouldn't sigh in relief just yet. They will need to close the gap with Google if they want the same customer loyalty and brand trustworthiness. Bing is moving in the right direction when it comes to making the user experience more fun and friendly. They just recently partnered with Pinterest to introduce a "pin it" feature to their image search. Smart move. Still, fun and friendly can't be at the expense of safety or the reputation of working to be the best in that department.

The next phase of Internet threats may not be so easy to detect. The proliferation of scams that target human error, not the code, is probably where the future of threat detection is heading. Security that can somehow guard against those annoying attempts to trick you into downloading trojans or accessing your password might be the next frontier. And here the bragging rights have yet to be decided.

Say Hello to Google Chrome 25

Google has just released an updated version of the Chrome OS browser. Chrome 25 includes a whole host of new features and fixes which is certainly an improvement from Chrome 24.

As Google Chrome 24 was all but just a stability release to iron out a few minor bug fixes, Chrome 25 boasts super fast browsing and improved security for web extensions and apps.

Google Chrome 25 also includes voice recognition integration in the form of Web Speech API. This basically means that developers can ‘translate’ voice into text, which is useful as voice search and commands are now an integral part of many mobile devices.

This follows a similar strategy to what Google has been doing with Android, and Chrome 25 is the first indication that it intends to do the same thing with its web browser. Watch this space!

In fact, voice recognition, particularly in relation to a web browser searching is something that Google has been experimenting with for a while, and is a feature that is also included in Google Maps too.

Google obviously hopes that Web Speech API will be popular as it recently announced that its new Chromebook will also include the same technology.

Google Chrome 25 also includes a number of security updates, with user approval now required for all third part extension installations. Chrome 25’s omnibox search has also been encrypted using HTTPS, meaning that users can now benefit from much safer and secure web browsing.

Despite suffering some very occasional glitches in the form of site incompatibility, Chrome 25 offers users excellent hardware acceleration and security with instant site prediction and loading. The bottom line is that Google Chrome is now arguably the best web browser available with improvement in terms of speed, support and new features, in addition to app and widget integration.