It’s like watching a race between two glaciers.
Yahoo and Google are undeniably the two biggest powers on the Internet, each with a vast number of features and users. Each is trying to remake itself during a time when faster-moving start-ups show how hard it is for a massive site to transform itself.
But change is indeed in the works, and given the companies’ scale, it’s profound for both companies and for millions of people using the Internet.
On Tuesday, Yahoo in effect released version 1.0 of its Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), providing public access to programming interfaces that will let developers build applications on top of Yahoo sites and build Yahoo information in to their own. The beleaguered Internet pioneer is betting on strategy to increase the activity of existing Yahoo users and draw new users to the site.
The same day, Google added a new option to its Gmail service that can show a user’s calendar, list the user’s online Google Docs files, and add small Web applications called gadgets. It’s a modest move, but it’s a new indicator that Google is serious about expanding beyond its core search operation into an all-purpose Internet tool.
Yahoo and Google are undeniably the two biggest powers on the Internet, each with a vast number of features and users. Each is trying to remake itself during a time when faster-moving start-ups show how hard it is for a massive site to transform itself.
But change is indeed in the works, and given the companies’ scale, it’s profound for both companies and for millions of people using the Internet.
On Tuesday, Yahoo in effect released version 1.0 of its Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), providing public access to programming interfaces that will let developers build applications on top of Yahoo sites and build Yahoo information in to their own. The beleaguered Internet pioneer is betting on strategy to increase the activity of existing Yahoo users and draw new users to the site.
The same day, Google added a new option to its Gmail service that can show a user’s calendar, list the user’s online Google Docs files, and add small Web applications called gadgets. It’s a modest move, but it’s a new indicator that Google is serious about expanding beyond its core search operation into an all-purpose Internet tool.
Motorola to call on Google in cell overhaul
Motorola is expected to place a heavy bet that Android phones with Google’s mobile operating system can turn around its struggling cell phone division.
Sanjay Jha, the company’s co-chief executive and head of mobile devices, is expected to focus on Google’s operating system in an overhaul of the cell phone division that includes additional job cuts and the elimination of four platforms, according to a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. Jha is expected to detail his plans as early as Thursday when the company announces its earnings.
Motorola is expected to trim the number of operating systems it uses to three: Android for its midtier devices, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and its own platform, P2K.
Business Week reported earlier this week that Motorola was prepping a social-networking smartphone based on Android that will debut in the second quarter of next year. Motorola’s Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a touchscreen similar to Apple’s popular iPhone, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that allows people to connect to such social-networking sites as MySpace and Facebook. It is unclear how similar it will be to T-Mobile USA’s newly released G1 phone, manufactured by HTC, which also uses Android.
Motorola tapped Jha in August to be co-chief executive and head of the mobile devices business after announcing earlier that it will separate the mobile devices from the rest of the company. Jha, 45, spent the past 14 years at cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm, where he most recently ran the company’s CDMA division.
Tyrannosaurus rex noses out dinosaur competition
Scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, compared the size of their olfactory bulbs—the part of the brain regulating the sense of smell—in a wide range of carnivorous dinosaurs. The researchers performed CT scans and measured fossilized skulls of meat-eating dinosaurs, known as theropods, including huge predators, smaller raptors and ostrich-like dinosaurs. They also looked at the primitive bird Archaeopteryx. Tyrannosaurus, the scourge of North America at the end of the age of dinosaurs, was the undisputed king. Its olfactory capabilities surpassed that of the other huge predators the researchers examined, including South American giant Giganotosaurus and African killer Carcharodontosaurus. ”T. rex had a very good sense of smell,” Francois Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. “Probably that’s how they located prey and patrolled a large territory.” The researchers were not the first to describe T. rex’s strong sense of smell, but were the first to rate the beast in comparison to other meat-eating dinosaurs. Other experts have pointed to T. rex’s stellar smeller as evidence that it must have been more of a scavenger than an active hunter. Therrien disagreed. ”It has been suggested that the very good sense of smell of T. rex indicated that it was a scavenger because it would have used its sense of smell to locate putrefying carcasses on the landscape,” said Therrien, whose findings were published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. ”But when we look at modern animals, we see that’s not the case. Scavengers don’t necessarily have a better sense of smell. You have some like the turkey vultures that have a good sense of smell. But you have other scavengers like the Old World vultures that actually have a typical sense of smell because they use sight instead of smell to locate prey.” Vicious little Velociraptor and its raptor relatives also had an excellent sense of smell, the researchers said. But the ostrich-like dinosaurs like speedy Ornithomimus and the toothless Oviraptor apparently had very poor senses of smell. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird with fossils dating to 150 million years ago, turned out to have a good sense of smell in line with that of the small meat-eating dinosaurs from which paleontologists believe birds evolved, they said.
Sanjay Jha, the company’s co-chief executive and head of mobile devices, is expected to focus on Google’s operating system in an overhaul of the cell phone division that includes additional job cuts and the elimination of four platforms, according to a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. Jha is expected to detail his plans as early as Thursday when the company announces its earnings.
Motorola is expected to trim the number of operating systems it uses to three: Android for its midtier devices, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and its own platform, P2K.
Business Week reported earlier this week that Motorola was prepping a social-networking smartphone based on Android that will debut in the second quarter of next year. Motorola’s Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a touchscreen similar to Apple’s popular iPhone, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that allows people to connect to such social-networking sites as MySpace and Facebook. It is unclear how similar it will be to T-Mobile USA’s newly released G1 phone, manufactured by HTC, which also uses Android.
Motorola tapped Jha in August to be co-chief executive and head of the mobile devices business after announcing earlier that it will separate the mobile devices from the rest of the company. Jha, 45, spent the past 14 years at cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm, where he most recently ran the company’s CDMA division.
Tyrannosaurus rex noses out dinosaur competition
Scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, compared the size of their olfactory bulbs—the part of the brain regulating the sense of smell—in a wide range of carnivorous dinosaurs. The researchers performed CT scans and measured fossilized skulls of meat-eating dinosaurs, known as theropods, including huge predators, smaller raptors and ostrich-like dinosaurs. They also looked at the primitive bird Archaeopteryx. Tyrannosaurus, the scourge of North America at the end of the age of dinosaurs, was the undisputed king. Its olfactory capabilities surpassed that of the other huge predators the researchers examined, including South American giant Giganotosaurus and African killer Carcharodontosaurus. ”T. rex had a very good sense of smell,” Francois Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. “Probably that’s how they located prey and patrolled a large territory.” The researchers were not the first to describe T. rex’s strong sense of smell, but were the first to rate the beast in comparison to other meat-eating dinosaurs. Other experts have pointed to T. rex’s stellar smeller as evidence that it must have been more of a scavenger than an active hunter. Therrien disagreed. ”It has been suggested that the very good sense of smell of T. rex indicated that it was a scavenger because it would have used its sense of smell to locate putrefying carcasses on the landscape,” said Therrien, whose findings were published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. ”But when we look at modern animals, we see that’s not the case. Scavengers don’t necessarily have a better sense of smell. You have some like the turkey vultures that have a good sense of smell. But you have other scavengers like the Old World vultures that actually have a typical sense of smell because they use sight instead of smell to locate prey.” Vicious little Velociraptor and its raptor relatives also had an excellent sense of smell, the researchers said. But the ostrich-like dinosaurs like speedy Ornithomimus and the toothless Oviraptor apparently had very poor senses of smell. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird with fossils dating to 150 million years ago, turned out to have a good sense of smell in line with that of the small meat-eating dinosaurs from which paleontologists believe birds evolved, they said.
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