Mashable has a report of a patent that just issued (6-1/2 years after filing) — apparently Google now has a lock on location-based advertising. It’s not clear that the search company intends to assert the patent against any other companies (such as emerging rival Apple), but it’s useful as leverage. Here is the patent.

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Kelson writes “Have you noticed that there haven’t been many updates to Gears in a while? That’s because Google has decided to focus instead on similar capabilities in the emerging HTML5 standard: local storage, database, workers and location cover similar functionality, but natively in the web browser. Of course, since Gears and HTML APIs aren’t exactly the same, it’s not a simple drop-in replacement, so they’ll continue supporting the current version (more…)

My colleague Molly Wood called it a privacy nightmare, but to many, Google’s new social-networking tool Buzz is at its root an unwanted, unasked for pest. We didn’t opt in to some newfangled Twitter system and we don’t particularly want to see updates from contacts we never asked to follow creep up in our Buzz in-box.

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When you’ve got thousands of the world’s most brilliant engineers spending 20% of their time on whatever takes their fancy, you get some cool software.

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The major advantage Firefox users have claimed over Google Chrome is the ability to customize their browser by choosing from a vast library of extensions. But that advantage falls away with the introduction of extension support in Google Chrome 4.0.

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How Apple’s new device raises the stakes for that other disruptor. BURLINGAME, Calif. — Apple’s new iPad aims to remake a market touched on by laptops, tablet computers, netbooks and even the iPod–portable devices for the creation and consumption of media, largely text and video. That also hits its increasingly active competitor Google.

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snydeq writes “Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5’s functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision (more…)

ezabi writes “According to a post on the official Google blog, in the coming weeks Google Docs will offer to host all file types with a limit of 250 MB, which as they say is larger than the current limit for email attachments. This will have its consequences: paid file sharing will die, more shared pirated material, newer vulnerabilities and malware distribution channels…”

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wkurzius writes “Engadget has gotten their hands a Nexus One, and have put the first impressions up for the world to see, including whether or not they think it’s the ‘be-all-end-all Android phone / iPhone eviscerator.’ Their opinion? ‘Not really.’”

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While many of these extensions are next to pointless, there are a few gems that can make your Chrome browsing experience a bit more useful.

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