Opera Software releases a new browser for Windows that sports faster JavaScript and HTML5 video.

Google comes up a bit short after looking at its own search engine optimization. As a result, it’s made available a public version of the report for Webmasters to use on their own sites.

A bug in Thursday’s update to the development build of Google Chrome crashes the browser whenever Gmail is used in offline mode.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

[UPDATE: Google confirmed the deal in a blog post, which you can read below, as well as in interviews BoomTown did today with execs at DocVerse and Google.]

Continuing its acquisition spree, Google has snapped up DocVerse, a start-up that allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web, said several sources.

Sources said the price was in the $25 to $30 million range.

Founded by two ex-Microsoft (MSFT) execs in 2008, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, San Francisco-based DocVerse has raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

It’s yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow by Google (GOOG), along with a range of other digital arenas such as cloud computing and mapping.

Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs, but it struggles against the Office juggernaut. Thus, a link with Office via DocVerse is a smart move.

Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager on the Google Apps team said that while some perceive the search giant as trying to compete directly with Office (a claim I openly scoffed at during the interview), Google did hear from customers that it wanted cloud-based functionality with Office.

“We heard from customers that there is a great need for help in the cloud,” he said. “This acquisition helps users move over the to cloud and expands our product.”

DocVerse CEO Sinha said his small company–under 20 employees, who will be moving down to the Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., immediately–had been talking to Google for a while.

“We were gaining traction in the product in large enterprises…so, it made sense, because we have a vision of a world of Web-based collaboration,” he said.

While Sinha said he admired what Microsoft had done with Office, he noted there is a need for more, and a hook-up with the powerful Google will help DocVerse do that sooner.

“Microsoft is doing a lot of great things for its customers who use its stack of software,” he said. “But we see a whole other world interested in the Web-based approach that is not being served very well right now.”

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is clearly the future of Office.

In fact, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a significant statement related to cloud computing in a speech, noting, “This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we’re all in.”

In an interesting side note, this is the third company that Harrison Metal has invested in that has been acquired by Google over the last several months. Other sales have included AdMob for $750 million and Aardvark for $50 million.

There had been a post in TechCrunch back in December that the deal was nearly done, but it was apparently not completed until now.

Here is the blog post on the deal from Google:

Google Docs welcomes DocVerse

Friday, March 05, 2010 at 10:48 AM

​The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We’ve always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
​
For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

A huge “welcome” to the DocVerse team and their customers! Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what’s next. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Apps team

It took nearly a decade, but it appears that Microsoft (MSFT) finally has a worthy successor to Windows XP. Evidently, Windows 7 is proving quite the commercial success.

At the company’s annual meeting last November, CEO Steve Ballmer said Windows 7 had sold twice as many units as any operating system in a comparable timeframe, though he didn’t provide a hard number. Now, four months later, we have one: Microsoft has sold 90 million Windows 7 licenses since its October 2009 launch.

“We see continuing momentum in Windows 7 to date,” Microsoft CFO Peter Klein told attendees of the Morgan Stanley (MS) Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference in San Francisco earlier this week. “We’ve now sold 90 million copies, which is just terrific momentum….”

Looking forward, Klein added, “Heading into 2010 and 2011, we’re starting to see incredible interest from our enterprise customers to start deployments of Windows 7. The interest has been very high, and we’re now having conversations with the majority of our enterprise customers who are making plans to deploy Windows 7.”

If there was pent-up demand created by the failure of Windows Vista, Windows 7 seems to have released it.

By Jennifer Valentino-Devries, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A note left for Pedro Patricio Valdivia Olivos–one of more than 48,000 records in Google’s Person Finder–offers a clear look into the anxiety faced by many with loved ones in Chile: “Hi, Dad. It’s your daughter Alicia. I’ve been looking for you for several days. I’m very worried for you. Please can you call me on my cellular…or send me a message. I’m waiting for word from you. Hugs.”

Google (GOOG) launched its Chile-specific tool Saturday to assist people looking for information on loved ones in Chile after a massive 8.8 earthquake shook the South-American nation

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“We’ve been pushing the state-of-the-art in every facet of design….We’ve been innovating like crazy for the last few years on this and we’ve filed for over 200 patents for all of the inventions in iPhone. And we intend to protect them.”

– Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Jan. 9, 2007

Asked for his thoughts on iPhone rivals during a January 2009 earnings call, Apple COO Tim Cook said the company would not stand for having its intellectual property ripped off.

“We are watching the landscape,” Cook said. “We like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our IP, and if they do, we’re going to go after anybody that does….We think competition is good; it makes it us all better. But we’re ready to suit up and go against anyone.”

Well, looks like Apple (AAPL) is suiting up, and against a big opponent. This morning, the iPhone maker filed suit against HTC, a Taiwanese handset manufacturer that makes a number of Android smartphones, including the operating system’s marquee device, Google’s Nexus One (Read the suits in their entirety here.)

In a lawsuit filed concurrently with the U.S. International Trade Commission and U.S. District Court in Delaware, Apple alleges that HTC infringed some 20 patents related to the iPhone’s graphical user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. The company is asking for a permanent injunction barring HTC from importing or selling infringing phones in the U.S., along with triple damages and maximum interest.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release announcing the action. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

HTC appears to have been totally blindsided by the suit. As of this writing, it hasn’t even been served.

“We only learned of Apple’s actions based on Apple’s press release,” the company said in a statement. “We have not been served any papers yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years.”

It’s not yet clear whether Google (GOOG) is implicated here. But it certainly seems possible. After all, HTC manufactures a number of Android devices, and while Google insisted at the Nexus One launch that it didn’t design the device, the search giant clearly played a role in its development.

Of course, it could be that Apple is suing HTC because it can’t, for some reason, sue Google. More details to follow once I’ve read through the suits.

Further Reading:

• Apple Sues HTC [Complete Court Filings]
• Why HTC, Apple? And Why Now?
• Apple vs. Google: Game On

Yes, most of us want Windows Phone 7 to be very different from Windows Mobile. And Microsoft promised that it will, indeed, be different — closer to the latest generation of Zunes than to a Windows Mobile 6.x phone. But it comes with a price: Chances are owners of Windows Mobile 6.x devices won’t be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7 software.

Up until recently, it looked as though there was a chance of upgrading; as Microsoft’s UK Mobile Business Group Director Alex Reeve said, it’s up to their “hardware partners to think about.”

But now, news comes out that owners of HTC HD2, a new Windows Mobile 6.5 device that seems more than capable of running the new software, won’t be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7 software. Furthermore, according to APC, Microsoft’s general manager for mobile communications business in the Asia-Pacific region, Natasha Kwan, none of the current phones have what it takes.

“Because we have very specific requirements for Windows Phone 7 Series the current phones we have right now will not be upgradable,” she said.

This doesn’t mean that Windows Mobile 6.x owners will be left with dead-end devices, as Microsoft is supposed to continue support for them under the name Windows Phone Classic. But if you’re interested in upgrading to Windows Phone 7, you’re treading on unstable ground, no matter which Windows Mobile device you own.

Tags: microsoft, windows mobile, windows phone 7

Earlier today, in writing about Google buying the photo-editing service Picnik, we noted that the most interesting thing about the buy may be that Picnik is currently Flickr’s default photo editor. Upon hearing the news, we reached out to both Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) to see what it means for the future of the partnership. The responses were interesting.

Google, for its part, says that it will allow third-party sites (including Flickr) to continue to integrate with it. Here’s the statement they sent us:

We believe that openness is always the best approach and will allow third-party sites to continue to integrate with Picnik.  People should be able to pull photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits with Picnik and save to whatever site they choose.

That sounds good, right? Well, it doesn’t sound like anyone bothered to tell Yahoo. Here’s their statement (from OutCast Communications, which does Yahoo’s PR):

Thanks for getting in touch. At this point we don’t have a comment on the acquisition, but will let you know when and if we have information to share.

If Yahoo was going to continue the Picnik relationship, don’t you think they’d come out and say so. Or at least say something like, “at this time, we see the relationship continuing.” Instead, it looks like they may be weighing their options. Or maybe they just don’t really know how the acquisition will affect things yet.

The problem is that Picnik is currently the only way to do that majority of edits on Flickr. Without it, the product as a whole becomes less valuable. So will Yahoo have to build its own photo-editor (which they obviously were against before, or they would have done it rather than partner with Picnik)? Or will they partner with someone else — maybe Aviary?

Regardless, Google has a history of acquiring companies and then letting their products wither (Dodgeball, Jaiku, etc). Let’s hope that’s not the case here, and that Picnik is at the very least integrated into Picasa (Google’s online photo service), because it’s a solid service.

According to the latest update from Paypal, from March 3rd, Indian entities will have only to fill out a ‘Purpose Code’ which defines the purpose of the payment made to them. It appears that the RBI will still not know who is making the payment, only get an indication of the purpose of the payment from the receiver under the laws of India in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. What is not clear, and we’ve requested Paypal for info on this, is whether businesses will not require an Importer Exporter Code (IEC), which they had mentioned earlier.

So you can go ahead and pay the Indian mafia extortion money under Purpose Code “P1006″ (management services), and nobody will ever know? Perhaps not: Paypal does say that “based on the value of withdrawal and the purpose code in your declaration, your bank may require you to provide documentary proofs such as invoices / goods receipt forms as applicable to reconcile with your withdrawal.” Technoholik rightly points out that “the onus of verifying whether the services rendered fall into the categories listed, falls back on the financial/government agency that choses to investigate someone whose bank accounts are showing suspicious amounts of foreign money coming in via PayPal.”

Paypal expects the full amount of the original withdrawals to be restored in the accounts by the end of the week.

For personal payments, though, transfers are still not kosher. Users will have to complete their withdrawals by cheque.

Purpose Codes:

Related

– Updated: eBay’s PayPal Disallows P2P Payments, Transfers To Local Banks
– PayPal To Resume India Payments By 3rd March; Export Code Needed