Steve Bryant

LG announced it will pre-install Google mobile apps, including Maps and Gmail, on milions of LG phones starting in 2Q 2007. The phones will be sold in North America, Europe and Asia. This is Google’s second partnership with a handset maker this year; the search giant partnered with Samsung in January. Google also has several […]

YouTube will publicly launch a version of its site for mobile users just as soon as its exclusive contract with Verizon expires, reports Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm. The new site is an experiment to understand user response, and will offer about 800 preselected clips. YouTube partnered with Verizon Wireless in November of last year and […]

Google may be all about automation, but it understands the benefits of user-created data. Hence, the new polls functionality in Orkut. Google has now made it possible for Orkut users to post and respond to poll questions posted by other users. Danny Sullivan wonders if this is a roundabout way of reintroducing Google Answers, which […]

NewTeeVee contributor Robert Young wrote an interesting post yesterday positing that News Corp./NBC’s video distribution plan could potentially disrupt Google’s efficacy as a search engine. If such a plan comes to fruition and media is distributed across Yahoo, MSN, MySpace and AOL, Young argues, then “Google would have no choice but to accept the demands […]

Viacom published on the Washington Post op-ed page on Saturday their case against YouTube. Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, argues that while the DMCA fosters innovation by allowing Web companies (such as e-mail providers and file storage sites) to host data without fear of prosecution, YouTube abuses that privilege to create an entertainment destination that […]

NBC and News Corp.’s newly-announced video distribution network is a good idea in theory and will succeed in putting pressure on Google. But even though the network will reach 96 percent of Internet users, the user experience won’t be that great. Google’s goal with YouTube is to incentivize media companies to provide content. Google does […]

A Belgian court handed a victory to Google this week, declaring that the search engine was not liable for helping hackers find tools to break into software. A lawsuit filed by ServersCheck BVBA, based in Leuven, Belgium, charged that Google’s Suggest feature could drive users who were interested in their network monitoring software to pirated […]

A Google executive implied yesterday that Google had no plans to manufacture a phone. “At this point in time, we are very focused on the software, not the phone,” The Australian Financial Review today quoted Google’s Southeast Asia managing director of sales and operations, Richard Kimber, as saying during his speech at the Search Engine […]

Who’s running the Yahoo e-mail store? Yahoo is being sued in a California class action lawsuit for misrepresenting the terms of its paid premium e-mail service, Google Watch has learned. The suit comes in the same month that the company is being sued for $20 million for illegal use of an image in its e-mail […]

The short film credited with inspiring “Sims” creator Will Wright to develop the much-anticipated video game “Spore” is the subject of the latest subpoena against YouTube, Google Watch has learned. The Eames Office applied for a subpoena against YouTube on Tuesday to have copies of the short film “Powers of Ten” removed from YouTube. The […]