Better 3D for Slower Machines

To enable better 3D performance on older machines and graphics card that can't make user of modern technologies like WebGL, Google has licensed TransGaming's SwiftShader software rasterizer. This is basically a piece of software that emulates a graphics card to render 3D images. TransGaming advertises SwiftShader as being "100 times faster than traditional software renderers such as Microsoft's Direct3D® Reference Rasterizer." Google will automatically enable SwiftShader for beta users whose computers can't run content on their graphics cards.

Tweaking Chrome's 2D GPU Hardware Acceleration

2D Canvas in action

By using hardware acceleration for 2D Canvas elements on a page, Google can bring some significant speed improvements to users with more capable machines as well. Chrome has long featured some forms of hardware acceleration, but mostly in experimental form. Whether they know it or not, most Chrome users at this point already use their graphics card to draw 2D Canvas elements, but in this latest beta, the Chrome team has tweaked the code to the point where it apparently felt it needed to announce this change as it could actually break things.

Here is a nice little demo that uses 2D Canvas if you want to see it in action.

If you are currently using the stable release channel and feel like you could use a bit more adventure in your life, you can join the Chrome beta channel here. As always, keep in mind that this is beta software and could crash at any time (though Chrome's beta releases are generally very stable).

That's not to say that traditional TV is dead, though. The average American still watches an astonishing four hours and 39 minutes of TV every day. Over 90% of U.S. households currently pay for a cable subscription.

Unsurprisingly, those households that don't subscribe to cable and just use over-the-air TV and/or online streaming watch just about half of that. Overall, these households only make up about 4.5% of all U.S. households, though their number has grown 22% since last year. The stronger trend here actually seems to be towards using the right means to access video at the right time. Sometimes that's traditional TV (sports events, award shows, news etc.), and sometimes that's watching a show on Hulu on a laptop.

It's also worth noting that this doesn't mean these households that don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV don't necessarily just represent those who cut the cord by choice. Instead, this group is probably split between more affluent Internet users who have the know-how to go Internet-only and poorer households that had to make a choice between having Internet or cable at home.

What will definitely matter in the long run, though, is that younger Americans (12-34) now watch less TV per day than before. Teenagers in 2011 watched nine minutes fewer day than in 2010, for example, and young adults between 18 and 24 watch six fewer minutes per day. The only reason overall TV watching is up, according to the NYTimes' Brian Stelter, is because those over 65 are watching more TV "than ever before."

As these younger viewers grow up, traditional TV will likely never quite play the same role for today's teenagers and young adults as for their parents. Video content, after all, is video content, no matter whether you stream it to a tablet, a Boxee box or your phone. Indeed, watching live TV probably feels rather antiquated to many younger Internet users.

That's something the TV networks and traditional TV providers are still coming to grips with but that their customers now understand pretty clearly as the age of appointment TV is quickly drawing to an end.

Speed and New Features

The first thing you will likely notice when you start Tweetbot 2.0 is that it is significantly faster than previous versions. Searches, for example, now feel like they take a quarter of the time to appear on your screen.

Besides the speed, though, the app also now sports a number of new features. The updated timeline view, for example, now lets you immediately click on links and usernames. Before, you first had to select a tweet before these links became active. The timeline now also features in-line image thumbnails that let you quickly view an image with just one click.

Another nifty new feature is support for Readability as a mobilizer service. Just like Apple's Reader feature lets you see a text-only view of a website, you can now set Tweetbot to immediately see a text-only view of any link you click on (or you can toggle back and forth between the Readability view and the regular page).

Here is the full list of new features:

• Updated timeline view
  • Image thumbnails in timeline
  • Links now colored and single-tappable
  • “Retweeted by” bar now integrated and tappable
  • Cell colors adjusted for better contrast
• New direct message view.
• Redesigned “New Tweets” bar (Can be dismissed by tap and configured in Settings > Display)
• Timed auto-refresh (timeline, mentions, and DM’s will refresh every 5 minutes)
• Readability added as mobilizer service
• Much improved tweet replies view
• Links in user’s bio now tappable
• “Huge” font size option in Settings > Display
• Improved scrolling performance

Prerendering

The prerendering works by trying to divine whether the URL you started to type is likely to be the one you will visit as well. Whenever Chrome is pretty sure that this is the case, it will start rendering the page before you even get to hit enter. Often, it will almost appear as if the page rendered instantly when you finally hit enter.

Safer Downloads

As Google noted when it introduced its download scanner to the beta channel in January, "malicious downloads are especially tricky to detect since they’re often posted on rapidly changing URLs and are even “re-packed” to fool anti-virus programs." To safeguard its users, Chrome checks every download against a known database of safe files and publishers. If a file isn't from a known source, it will try to figure out if the host is trustworthy or if the file is likely to be malware.

Though Search Engine Land's Matt McGee broke this story earlier this morning, it looks like Google already registered the domain screenwisepanel.com, which features a bilingual English/Spanish version of this offer, in November 2011. The earliest reference I found to it so far, though, was this Google+ post from January 25th. Overall, then, we simply know very little about this program. We have obviously contacted Google for a statement and will update this post once/if we hear more.

Update: We just received the following statement from a Google spokesperson: "Like many other web and media companies, we do panel research to help better serve our users by learning more about people's media use, on the web and elsewhere. This panel is one such small project that started near the beginning of the year. Of course, this is completely optional to join. People can choose to participate if it's of interest (or if the gift appeals) and everyone who does participate has complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel. People can stay on the panel as long as they'd like, or leave at any time."

Here is what we know, though:

• Google is working together with Knowledge Networks/GfK Custom Research. The company, through its Knowledgepanel, has a reputation for doing online research.
• Google is testing at least 3 different landing pages for the offer.
• There is also a version that promises a chance to win $3000 in cash every month, as well as travel and other rewards. This one actually makes the whole thing look more like an online scam that a Google research product.
• the offer has been making the rounds on various deals sites for the last few days.

Overall, the sign-up sites for the Screenwise panel look more like they were put together in a few minutes by a marketing company (or maybe Knowledge Networks) than by Google. The basic stock images of happy people surfing the web don't have a strong Google branding, after all.

I can't help but wonder if Google planned to roll this panel out officially a while back but then shied away from it when it was suddenly faced with the bad PR around Search Plus Your World and its updated privacy policies. To officially launch a product like this right now, which basically pays you for giving up your online privacy, just doesn't sound like something Google would do at this point in time.

Currently, the use of drones outside of the military is mostly restricted to hobbyists. Getting permission to fly a commercial drone mission is virtually impossible.

The bill also requires the FAA to establish six test zones for a pilot project to test how to integrate drones "into the national airspace system." It's worth noting that the FAA is already working on new regulations that would loosen the rules that currently govern the use of drones.

Drones Over Your City

Currently, drone flights are mostly restricted to military airspace and areas away from urban centers and at relatively low altitudes. The U.S. government also uses these unmanned planes to patrol its borders.

Once commercial drone activities are possible, companies like Google or Microsoft could buy their own drones and use them to collect images for their mapping products, for example (and update those images far more often than they currently can).

Safety and Privacy Concerns

There are obviously safety concerns when it comes to letting drones fly in the same airspace as commercial and private planes. Drones, at least in their current form, tend to crash more often than other planes, for example.

In addition, the ACLU is also worried about the privacy implications of potentially having an army of flying robots perform commercial aerial surveillance "without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected."

Image credit: U.S. Air Force

Sparklines in Google Docs

In addition to the new customizable styles, the spreadsheet application now also features support for sparklines, an increasingly popular way of presenting data in a glanceable visual format. Other new options for spreadsheets in Google Docs include the ability to create more sophisticated charts "including different Y-axes on either side of the chart, formatting options for the axis and title text, and all sorts of other customization for how your lines, bars, or pies are displayed."

Sharing Forms

Google already featured Google+ sharing in Google Docs, but with today's update, it also lets you share right from the form editor.

But there's more…

In an interesting move that becoming more common among Google products, the Google Docs team has also decided to bundle new feature announcements instead of writing a new blog post and announcement for each small update. Here then are the other updates Google made to Docs over the last month:

• Adding images to your docs from a high quality stock photo gallery. Simply go to Insert > Image, select Stock photos, and then search for the images that you want.
• A more streamlined format for document discussion notifications that batches multiple discussions into a single email.
• Quickly opening and selecting items from specific menus with keyboard accelerators. For example, when using Google Chrome, Ctrl+Option+E on a Mac and Alt+E on Windows or Linux will open the Edit menu.
• Copying and pasting via the context (right click) menu in documents when you have the Chrome App installed.
• Easily adding Google drawings or Google Groups discussions to a Google Site from the Insert menu.

The vast majority of Android users, of course, doesn't have access to the Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0 update yet – indeed, just about 1% of current Android devices currently run the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. 

Just like the desktop version, Chrome for Android was built with a focus on speed and simplicity. It features Google's omnibus for both search and navigation, lets you swipe between an unlimited number of open tabs so there is no 8-tab limit like on Apple's Safari and you can sync your bookmarks and open tabs between your desktop and mobile browser.

If you are stuck on an older version of Android, of course, you still have a wide variety of browsers to choose from. Opera, Firefox and numerous other vendors offer viable alternatives to the built-in browser and unlike iOS, Android makes it easy to set any browser you like as your default choice.

About Time

It's always been a bit of an oddity that Google didn't use Chrome as its default browser for Android. Chrome, after all, is a runaway hit on the desktop and is currently one of the most popular browsers on the market. Android, however, always features a relatively sub-par browser that couldn't really compete with Apple's Safari.

What's the Best Time to Tweet?

The idea here is that the company's algorithms will figure out when a specific message is most likely to reach an audience that will engage with it. For brands and their agencies, of course, this is somewhat of a holy grail, given that retweets, likes and @replies are some of the few reliable metrics they can use to gauge the success of their social media campaigns.

SocialFlow has full access to Twitter's firehouse and can also analyze Facebook data streams for you, giving it an unusually high degree of access to data. This allows it to gain a better understanding of a publishers audience, the topics they write about and the topics their followers interact with and when they are most likely to see a tweet. Instead of just randomly tweeting away, SocialFlow helps its users to fine-tune their message and then tweets it out for them at the optimal time.

Useful for News Brands?

This whole concept probably works best for the kind of brand messages most companies send out on Twitter, though I doubt it is very useful for news brands. News, after all, is a perishable good and getting a message out fast is generally more useful than having an algorithm decide when to post it for you.

If you want to give the service is a try, you can sign up for the $1 trial here.

In its announcement today, Amazon notes that "there's been a lot written lately about storage availability and prices." One of the benefits of Amazon's scale as a cloud provider is, in its own words, its ability to "lower prices again now." Amazon also points out that one advantage it has over on-site storage (which can often be cheaper), is that its price drops don't just apply to new data but to all the existing storage its users have on the service.

Just a week ago, Amazon announced that it now stores over 762 billion different object on S3 – up from 262 billion objects a year ago.