Google

Just last week, Google introduced better Microsoft Word previews for the desktop version of Gmail. Today, Google also launched a similar feature for the mobile version of Google Docs, the company's online office suite. Now, Android, iPhone and iPad users can see high-fidelity previews of their Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents right in their mobile browsers.

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These previews retain almost all of the formatting from the original document, including headlines and columns, as well as footnotes and endnotes. Until now, you had to download these documents to view them on your mobile device. In the mobile previewer, you can pan and zoom within a page. On Apple's platforms, you can also use the pinch-to-zoom gesture to zoom in or out.

Sadly, the new previewer does not support Excel spreadsheets. Given that a lot of people use spreadsheets in lieu of a full-blown database to store information, it would be nice if Google allowed its users to preview these documents as well.

Docs Only: No New Previewer for Mobile Gmail (Yet)

Just a few days ago, Google also launched a new version of its document previewer for the desktop version of Gmail. This new previewer also provides users with high-fidelity previews and replaces the old "view as HTML" feature in Gmail with a far superior offering. For now, though, the mobile version of Gmail does not offer the new Google Docs previews yet, though we would be surprised if Google didn't add this feature very soon.

Online video production startup TurnHere is now the exclusive provider of video creation services for Yelp, the popular local search and business review site.

TurnHere, through its network of over 8,000 professional filmmakers, will be providing local video production for businesses that advertise on Yelp, as well as a slate of video-related services, including expanded distribution of their video(s) across the Web.

John McWeeny, COO of TurnHere, claims online businesses that have videos included in their listings experience higher numbers of clicks, calls and leads. TurnHere henceforth enables Yelp to provide their advertisers with two video options:

- Standard Video: Advertisers receive a 30-second video slideshow made from a series of photos provided by the business with music and custom voice-over narration.
- Premium Video: Advertisers receive a 30-60 second custom video shot at their place of business by a professional filmmaker from the TurnHere network.

Additionally, advertisers can choose to increase the visibility of their video through TurnHere’s video promotion package, which includes distribution to YouTube, Google Places, Facebook, Yahoo! Video and more.

You can see some samples on Yelp here and here.

All in all, it’s a big score for TurnHere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2005 that has raised $8.6 million in venture capital since its inception. The company competes with StudioNow, which was picked up by AOL earlier this year.

The Nexus One’s inability to record videos in HD has always been a bit of annoyance, but thanks to a member of the xda-developers community, 720p video recording is now a go on the one true Google Phone. To get the mod to work you’ll need to be running Cyanogen’s CM5.0.8test3 and up. This means that for the time being Froyo is not supported, but a remedy for the lack of love for 2.2 is said to be coming soon. Click on through to check out a video shot by a Nexus One running the mod and then hit up the read link to grab the patch.

[Via Android Police]

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Yahoo is doubling down on its bets on social networking, but it is doing so by effectively outsourcing its social efforts to Facebook. The web portal this week is launching enhanced Facebook integration, along with a revamped personal profile feature called Yahoo Pulse, and also recently announced the addition of new Google Buzz-style social features in the company’s email service called Yahoo Updates. The new Facebook features are the result of an agreement that Yahoo signed with the social network in December to use what was then called Facebook Connect (now known as the Open Graph protocol).

The new features integrate Facebook status updates and activity streams into the customized user pages at Yahoo, including the home page and Yahoo Mail. Users can also share content on Facebook from any of the Yahoo content sites such as its sports hub, entertainment hub, etc. In addition, the site’s personal profile pages are now known as Yahoo Pulse, and the company says they will give users more control over how and where they share their content. Yahoo has been bending over backwards to talk about its new sharing features, including its Google Buzz-style social integration for email, hoping to avoid some of the privacy pain that Facebook and Google have encountered.

While the company no doubt hopes that its new features will encourage more people who visit the site to stay longer, they are also a tacit admission that Facebook has won the social race — one that Yahoo has not really been a factor in for some time. In a similar way, Yahoo has recently outsourced many of its existing services to others, including a deal with Match.com to handle the personals business and a partnership with Nokia for mobile email, not to mention the biggest outsourcing move of all: namely, outsourcing its entire search business to Microsoft.

In the final blow for Yahoo, a recent ranking of most-visited sites by Google showed Facebook the clear winner with 540 million monthly unique visitors, and Yahoo at number two with 490 million. Whether integrating Facebook sharing and activity streams will improve Yahoo’s position or simply accelerate the current downward trend for the site remains to be seen. The company appears to want to become a portal for the social web in the same sense that it used to be a portal for Web 1.0. — but half a billion users seem to have decided that they already have a portal for the social web, and it’s called Facebook.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Futurehttp://pro.gigaom.com/2010/03/why-newnet-companies-must-shoulder-more-responsibility

Last week, Steve Jobs promised that his iPhone and iPads would be open to outside ad networks. Yesterday Apple made good on his promise, by changing the terms of its developer agreement. But he may not have opened the door all the way.

Backstory: Apple’s original license agreement, released in April, appeared to effectively ban third-party ad networks from selling “in-app” ads on its gadgets, by crippling their ability to track user data. In the absence of any clarification from Apple, it seemed to me (and others) that Apple was set on locking up its platform from advertising competition.

But last week at the D8 conference, Jobs either changed his stance or spelled it out, depending on your persepecctive: Apple wasn’t interested in banning rivals to its iAd platform, he said — it just wanted to cripple third-party analytics companies like Flurry.

And yesterday, Apple changed its legal language to reflect Jobs’ words. Here’s the revised language for section 3.3.9 of Apple’s developer agreement, concerning the use of data collection:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent,
You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

- The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving
mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other
than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.

If you compare and contrast with Apple’s earlier version, you’ll see the message is clear: It’s OK to collect user data to help sell ads — though you will need to get their permission to do so.

UPDATE: One important caveat here: It appears as if Apple may still be limiting its biggest potential rival — Google’s AdMob. Note the language about only allowing “independent” ad serving companies to collect data: “For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent.”

Google (GOOG) certainly qualifies as a developer/distributor of mobile operating systems, right? The language also appears to disqualify potential rivals — if, for instance, Microsoft (MSFT) tried entering the mobile display market. I’ve asked Apple for comment, but I’m not expecting any.

Meantime, Apple’s language does appear to be good news for smaller competitors like Greystripe, Millenial Media and Medialets — though it may make them less attractive to potential acquirers

Here’s Jobs’ own words on the topic, last week at the D8 conference.

23andMe does relatively cheap analysis of your genetic information. Google had invested in the company before, and its co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who previously mentioned the company in his blog (“As a customer of 23andMe, I have always been excited about the product. I have found what pieces of DNA I share with various relatives ... I explored my various gene journals”). Now, the company mixed up customer samples, sending out the wrong information to 96 people, as they say.

This error meant that some people got back the wrong gender, for instance, an error easily spotted. But one customer reports of what the mix up meant for him:

Still upset I checked family inheritance and noticed my daughter shared with me, and then I checked my son’s. He was not a match for any of us. I checked his haplogroup’s and they were different from ours. I started screaming. A month before my son was born two local hospitals had baby switches. I panicked and I checked over and over. My kid’s were sitting at the computer because we all wanted to see the results. My son laughed but he looked upset. I called my sister in tears.

23andMe in a blog post says the mix-up was caused “by human error and the incorrect placement of a single 96-well plate used in processing samples." They company claims they are “adding new procedures to prevent this from happening again.”

[Via Spiegel.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: 23andMe Mixes Up Customer DNA Data | Comments]

Most of a year ago we asked "Will Google's Caffeine Update Really Change Search Results?" At that time, Google had announced a beta launch of a new indexing system for their search results. It took a while to roll that launch all the way out. It took until today.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

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To refresh the old system Google re-analyzed the entirety of its cache. This created a lag in the results. With Caffeine, they say, they now analyze the web continuously in small portions, updating the search index as they go.

Whether the speed and relevancy claims that Google is making will be born out now that Caffeine is fully in effect remains, still, to be seen. Whether it is provable quantitatively or not, the Web remains for its users more of a process or relationship than a thing. So user taste with the new system will be the proof of the pudding.