“PC era is vanishing, cloud computing rising -- Google and IBM are “ramping up” their efforts to dominate cloud computing, it has been suggested -- watch out, Microsoft?”

Los Angeles -- While Microsoft and Yahoo in an frosty stalemate over a proposed merger, rivals IBM and Google are ramping up their efforts to together dominate what they believe will be the dominant software delivery model in the 21st century -- so called cloud computing.

Among the many collections that Google has had on its plate over the past two years, and now -- The good news for some enthusiastic Bloggers, Google has quietly moved up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool: “Google Analytics for Blogger” has officially entered private beta.

And the discouraging news for Measure Map bloggers: existing analytics data from the original Measure Map cannot be transferred into the Google Analytics / Measure Map platform.

Search engine giant Google is attempting to move beyond its core search business and beyond the web in general have put a post on their adwords blog publicizing their latest Pay Per Click (PPC) innovation.

Google on Thursday announced that it is introducing “Google TV Ads” to all U.S. AdWords advertisers, an all-digital system that allows you to put your ads into TV program through the AdWords interface.

“A Google TV ad is a digital television based system available in the US and working on the CPM model.”

According to Google, the program has been available as a trial mode to a limited number of beta testers since last June, makes managing a TV ad campaign more accountable and measurable and is now open to the public.

Starting today, locating your way around town will be easier than ever: Google on Tuesday has reinforced the driving directions feature of its Maps service by adding photographic images of intersections and other key points along the route.

“By merging the features, Google said users can now obtain a better picture of their route alongside turn by turn information.”

Ever since its introduction in May of last year Google’s Street View maps have significantly extended from the original 5 cities to 44 regions. Driving directions and Street View are two distinct features of the search engine’s Google Maps site.

“Google makes spreadsheets and presentations applications program work offline, rivaling Microsoft Office and SharePoint.”

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced that it would use its open-source Google Gears platform to support offline editing and viewing of Google Docs content. And now, Google’s online PowerPoint program, called Presentations, recently added some great new -- and much needed -- features.

Just weeks after the availability of Google Apps to users to view and edit word processing documents offline, now spreadsheets and presentations can also be edited offline. So, users will now be able to see an “offline” link at the upper right hand corner of “Google Docs”.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, how important is the capability to find the just the right image of an object from the entire Web?”

Search engine leader Google Inc., which already has a very successful “PageRank” technology for sifting web pages, the company has now taken a step further by unveiling a cutting-edge image ranking technology for ranking similar images at the International World Wide Web Conference, according to media reports Tuesday.

San Francisco -- Google Inc. said on Wednesday it is shaping out its portion of the mobile advertising market, has unveiled brand-image ads for mobile phones, in a bid to extend beyond the computer-based Web market, joining Yahoo, AOL, MSN and a host of niche players scrambling toward the next frontier in interactive advertising on phones.

While mobile advertising is nothing new, Google’s main center of attention on this latest platform for display ads is building up excitement in some circles. A complement to Google’s existing mobile text ads that it sells through its cost-per-click AdSense program, which it is now growing enormously to offer contextually targeted graphical banners, formatted to fit within the constraints of the mobile browser.

New York -- Google got struck with a lawsuit filed Tuesday by an advertiser in federal court accusing the company of deceiving him and charged for ads displayed on third-party Web sites, even though he left blank an “optional” box that seemed to address the issue.

The conflict is over Google’s popular AdSense program, which targets ads to keywords in articles and other content at participating sites. The program complements the conventional AdWords program, which runs targeted ads alongside Google’s search results. Ads under both programs generate the bulk of Google’s revenues.

“Google aspires to become the search market leader in China within the next five years and it is hiring the workforce to back up that desire.”

Google Inc., chasing China-based search engine Baidu.com Inc., which holds 60% of the search engine market in that country, expects to process more local Web queries through mobile phones than computers by 2011, aided by an alliance with the nation’s largest wireless carrier.

“The search engine giant beats Microsoft and Apple.”

New York -- It is no surprise that once again for the third year in a row, Google Inc. has attained its top spot as the world’s most powerful brands among the list of 100, according to a report released today by market research firm Millward Brown’s annual ranking of top international brands.

San Francisco -- Investors appear ready to embrace tech giant Google Inc. again after weeks of hand wringing amid concerns over the company’s ability whether the company’s ascent would be slowed by a weakened U.S. economy.

“Google’s earnings climbed up 31 percent to $1.31 billion and revenue swelled up 42 percent to $5.19 billion compared with the same period last year.”

Shortly a week after Microsoft released updates to Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D, Google on Wednesday unveiled an update to its 3D geospatial viewing application Google Earth, that aims to offer a more persuasive viewing experience including a number of features that fans and observers have been waiting for.

“The much awaited update is the addition of Street View, previously available on Google Maps.”

San Francisco -- Search engine heavyweight Google on Wednesday announced a major upgrade to version 6 of its “Urchin” Web Analytics Software has eventually comes out of beta after a delay of about three-and-a-half years.

Google purchased Urchin Software in March 2005 through an acquisition deal, and in the following years dedicated most of its attention on the company’s Web-hosted product, the free Google Analytics, anyone can now download a 90-day free trial, at Urchin.com.

Google To Introduce Radio Automation This Week

Google in the coming weeks plans to open up a latest system to automate everyday tasks for radio broadcasters, beefing up an important piece of its radio-advertising product line.

Google Radio Automation, constructed from scratch, will be shown at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, which commences Friday in Las Vegas, with an exhibit floor opening on Monday.

“Google Apps are incorporated with sales-force automation tools promises an enterprise app cloud.”

San Francisco -- Two of Microsoft’s most flagrant rivals, Google and Salesforce.com, are further developing their 10-month-old cooperation in an attempt to accelerate their sales of customer management and office software to businesses.

“The engine that hosts the company’s online applications suite will shortly be available by a limited number of developers, for testing their own Web services at their own pace...on Google’s servers.”

San Francisco -- In an exceedingly plausible move yesterday, Google Inc. took the wraps off a new hosted software platform offering developers access to its application servers, to the first 10,000 developers who apply.

“UK policy reflects US AdWords rules.”

The latest controversial amendments made to Google’s search advertising system could see Scottish companies facing significantly higher marketing costs. The UK PPC Blog reports that Google AdWords UK has modified its trademark guidelines for the UK and Ireland bringing it to be more aligned with the US policy.

Under the present system, only the proprietor of a trademarked word can buy the attached sponsored links, and they are able to do so at a relatively low rate. For example, if a person types in Bank of Scotland, then only the bank’s official sites appear on the right-hand side of the search engine page.

“Companies are finally permitted by auction rules to speak about the recently accorded 700 MHz spectrum, with Google now confirms what everyone doubted: its bidding in the 700 MHz auctions was primarily about triggering the open access rules.”

San Francisco -- Google Inc. declared Thursday its intention in the latest government spectrum auction was to wring out higher competing bids out of Verizon Wireless and open up a large chunk of the airwaves to outside Internet devices.

San Francisco -- Facing thorny questions about possible conflicts of interest, Google Inc. plans to break off its search marketing arm from its affiliate marketing business, said it will sell a recently acquired service called Performics that helps Web sites improve their ranking on online search engines, including Google’s when it bought DoubleClick.

New York -- In a short span of two months, Google has lost another junior member of its executive team -- Douglas Merrill, Chief Information Officer at Google, is leaving the Internet search company to become a president of digital at EMI Music, the recorded music division of EMI Group, according to an executive briefed on his move.

The act was a head-scratcher, strange enough to be second-guessed as a hoax, especially given how different the music industry is from Google's world.