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Today at a special press event in San Francisco, Google is showcasing some of the latest features that will be rolling out on its search engine. The event will be starting shortly, and from the decor it’s clear that the focus of the event will be Google Image Search. One announcement will almost certainly be a new look for Google Images, but we expect to hear much more. My live notes from the event are below; look for more posts calling out each major announcement.

Update: Here are the links for what Google had to say today:

Google Image Search: Over 10 Billion Images, 1 Billion Pageviews A Day

Google Unveils Image Search Ads — Your Ads Now With Picture Thumbnails

Google VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer has taken the stage. She says that today is about Google Images. The site sees 1 billion page views every day. People come to the site for a multitude of reasons: they go to shop, to find out what something looks like, what the First Dog looks like. Education, coloring books. Entertainment.

Ben Ling, Director, Search Products has taken the stage. He says one of the site’s differnating factors is comprehensiveness. 250 million images when Image Search launched in beta in 2001. 10 billion images today. The fastest rising terms of 2010: Haiti, Kesha, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Avatar.

Nate Smith, Google Images PM, is on stage. Runs a query for “Beach”. Showing that you can jump between different types of images (clip art, line drawing, faces, etc.). ‘Find Similar Images’ lets you find images that are visually similar to a seed image. Showing using it to look at an eagle (and then similar looking eagles). Can search for leopard, see visually similar images, and also look at the content on the pages the images appear on to show related search.

Another feature that has proven popular: color search. If you run a search for ‘tulips’ and select the color pink, it will not just look for images that contain a lot of pink pixels, it looks for images in which the tulips themselves are ping.

One problem users have is they have to click an image, find one they might not like, hit “back”, go back to the list of images and repeat — it’s not very efficient. “That’s why we’re here today”. There’s still a lot of room for improvement. “Today we’re launching the largest redesign of Google Images since 2001″.

Results are now shown on the screen without text/links — it’s all images. It has infinite scrolling (images load dynamically as you keep scrolling down the page). You can get up to 1,000 images on one page. Second thing they’ve changed is that you get more information on the results page. Clicking an image gives a larger thumbnail preview, rather than opening it in a frame — this makes it easier to quickly browser through many images. The snippet accompanying each image is also more comprehensive.

What happens when you click through? First you see a big version of the image, with a preview of the website it came from in the background (no more annoying frame nested at the top of the browser).

Announcement for advertisers: Google Image Search Ads. A new ad product that allows you to run your own image as an ad on Image Search.

Q&A:
A: Ads will appear on the top, will have an image and ad text.

Q: Is there a fair use issue with showing full image instead of thumbnail?
A: We believe our implementation is within fair use. That said, when you look at the page, you do get webpage behind the image; you get both in a single view.

Q: Do you have estimate on percentage of queries that have commercial use (for ads)?
A: We see a lot of in entertainment, travel, retail. No number to announce.

A: It’s going out now, currently around 10%. Going out over the course of the week.

Q: How do ads show up/compete with organic search results?
A: They always show in the same place at the top of the page; they’re separated and clearly marked as sponsored links.

Q: Why now?
A: There have been ads before now, but they’ve generally been text based. Now we’re doing images.

Q: Do you see a pricing premium compared to a text ad?
A: We expect users to get higher value out of those ads, so we expect that there should be a premium over text ads.

A: For now this is just desktop. We’re launching on modern browsers first (Chrome, Safari, Firefox 3.0+, IE8 and 7).

A: There’s no tool to select time in image search now,but it will be coming.

A:. Google.com redesign has been very positive. Because of left hand nav bar many of our properties are now seeing increased volumes of searches.

Q: Images in search ads beyond image search?
A: Good suggestion, something we’ll explore.

Vertical Scroll Interface was hard to get right; had to do pagination to help make sure users knew where they were. Prefetching information about some images to make sure that page scrolling is consistent.

Q: Will infinite scroll come to web search?
A: It’s interesting, it’s possible. Something to think about, but may be more difficult with web search than image search.

Regarding the frame at the top of the screen in the old version, Smith says that even in the original design docs nobody really liked the frame (they knew it wasn’t quite right). But it was very difficult to come up with a better solution.

We’re here in San Francisco for a Google Search event. It’s not yet clear what this event will be about, but we know Marissa Mayer will be on hand to show off some new things. One of those things definitely looks to be a revamping of Google Images. Google has been bucket testing changes to the service over the past week or so.

The room we’re in has walls covered in a mural with large pictures. This matches some of the bucket test designs we’ve seen. Rather than show the meta data below images, it now appears that you can hover (or click) over an image to enlarge it and show the meta data.

In other words, yes, it looks more like Bing.

The event should be starting relatively shortly. Stay tuned for more.

Update: Here are the links for what Google had to say today:

Google Image Search: Over 10 Billion Images, 1 Billion Pageviews A Day

Google Unveils Image Search Ads — Your Ads Now With Picture Thumbnails

Live From Google’s Image Search Event

[thanks Roi]

The plucky little PogoPlug, which I reviewed last December, has seen a number of modest updates in the months since. All of these updates are rolled out automatically, so unless you’re following the PogoPlug blog you might never know about them. The word on the street today is that a whole new PogoPlug device is coming, called the PogoPlug Biz. It sports a white case, instead of the jarring pink of the non-biz version, and offers a number of handsome features.

Ever sent or received an email that was just screaming to be misunderstood?

There’s a good chance you have, and if not it will happen some day – just trust me on that one. Unless …

Canadian startup Lymbix thinks it can help you avoid situations that come out of misinterpreted textual communication with the launch of a new service called ToneCheck.

Think of it as an emotional spell-check application.

Available today for Microsoft Outlook, with support for more desktop and Web-based email clients slated for the future, ToneCheck is supposedly capable of identifying the emotional definition of words and phrases in order to help end users improve the clarity of their communication.

The application gauges words and phrases against 8 levels of connotative feeling, enabling end users to make real-time corrections and adjust the overall tone of messages using a simple menu system. Text interpretation problems: solved. Provided you use Outlook, of course.

Any readers who still do, please be so kind to give ToneCheck a whirl and tell us if it sucks rocks stinks is worth its salt. At the very least, their graphics are quite amusing:

Cloud-based game streaming service Gaikai has taken an investment from Intel Capital and Limelight Networks. While it’s unclear how much Intel invested, the firm could have been one of the un-named partners in Gaikai’s $10 million funding round in May.

Gaikai offers a server-based, cloud-gaming technology that streams games, allowing users to play any game inside the web browser. Gaikai’s game streaming service hosts the games, runs them and then streams them to users, allowing them to interact with games wherever they are browsing. Gaikai will launch this summer, with unsurprisingly, servers powered by Intel’s Six-Core processors and Intel Solid State Drives. The games will also be running throught the key nodes of the Limelight network.

Gaikai recently announced a deal with Electronic Arts to stream EA’s games, including The Sims, Mass Effect and Medal of Honor, over Gaikai. Gaikai faces competition from OnLive.

In a lateral move that is akin to a car company selling buggy whips, MovieTickets.com will start selling movie tickets through an Xbox 360 interface, thereby allowing players to experience a thing called “real life” and perhaps take part in a common courtship ritual known as a “date.”

As you see from the description, you don’t actually buy the movie tickets via the interface but instead are connected to a “Microsoft tag” that brings you to a payment system for tickets using a mobile phone.

Read more…

Online gaming service Raptr has just dropped its beta tag and launched its 1.0 release, and it’s safe to say that it’s finally living up to its mission statement: to make it easy to play games with your friends.

A year ago, Raptr rolled out a multi-protocol chat client that allowed gamers to see what games their friends were playing (this included support for both PC games and console games).That worked fairly well, but CEO Dennis Fong says that it came with one big caveat: it only worked if you got your friends to sign up for a Raptr account, which was obviously a significant hurdle. Raptr’s latest release fixes this, allowing you to see if your friends are playing games on their PS3, Xbox 360, and PC (including casual Flash games, Steam and Xfire) — even if they don’t have Raptr accounts. In other words, the service is now far more useful than it used to be.

When you see that one of your buddies is online and in a game, you can send messages to them from the Raptr client regardless of which platform they’re on. For some games, you can see even more supplementary information — for example, if someone is playing Madden 2010, you can see which teams your friends are playing as. Another recently added feature is a chat overlay, which PC gamers can pull up on top of the game they’re playing without having to switch — or “alt-tab” — out of their gaming session.

Raptr does all of this with its own technology, not through APIs sanctioned by Sony, Microsoft, and the other gaming platforms. This obviously isn’t the ideal solution, but these gaming networks tend to be walled gardens and give third parties minimal access to their communication channels. Still, the fact that Raptr had to build the technology itself makes the barrier to entry that much higher for competitors (assuming the gaming companies don’t try to block Raptr).

Fong, whose past companies include Xfire and Gamers.com, says that Raptr has quietly rolled out some of the service’s biggest improvements in the last few months, and that user growth has reflected this. Overall, he says the service has “north of 1 million users” and is growing by half a million users a month. Given the second statistic it sounds like the service probably has significantly more than 1 million users, but Fong wouldn’t get any more specific.  He did give some predictions for the future, though: he hinted that a year down the line, we may see a ‘Raptr Connect’, which would allow games to tie directly into the service.

Honda isn’t exactly the first Japanese car company that comes to mind when thinking about hybrids. Toyota, thanks to its Prius and hybrid Lexus line-up, won the general populus a few years back, but Honda is set to make another run with the third generation of Honda Civic Hybrids along with a new line of electric vehicles.

These new lines should start hitting streets in both Japan and the US sometime next year for the 2012 model year. This comes on top of the current plans to introduce a hybrid version of the B-segment Honda Fit later this year. Details about the up-coming electric car wasn’t announced, but a few tantalizing specs concerning the next-gen Honda Civic Hybrid leaked a few weeks back and seem to confirm today’s report. Can we say Prius-killer? Yup.

Kukunu is a social travel planning service that puts you, your fellow travelers and your friends in the driver’s seat when it comes to planning your vacation(s). The company, which was one of the winners of Seedcamp Week 2009, has been operating quietly so far, having launched a private beta version at Le Web 2009.

Kukunu is now available in public beta, and the fledgling company has also announced that they’ve raised $400,000 from Seedcamp, Jaina Capital (the fund of Meetic founder and angel investor Marc Simoncini) and Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel).

The Dell Streak, the 5-inch tablet that won the hearts of the technorati last month, is coming to the US and we had a chance to play with it over the past few days. The Android-powered tablet is no iPad but a worthy entrant in the tablet olympics.

The device has a 5-megapixel camera, touchscreen, and built-in GPS. You can use it to watch movies and listen to music and it has a fully-featured webkit browser running on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, making it quite speedy. The device features a built-in GSM modem so you can connect to 3G networks and make calls, making the Streak look like a comically big EVO 4G, except without the 4G.

READ MORE…

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Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a new portal today that aims to give anyone a real time view of what’s happening in a location. You can access the new search portal here.

Fwix Local Trend Search allows users to search for anything that is happening at any geo-point. The search feature rounds up news, events, government data, business reviews, check-ins from Foursquare or Gowalla and more on a map of a given area. You can expand the sphere of location to show coverage from a greater area or a more localized location. For example, you could see all of the hyperlocal news from the city of San Francisco, but can then pinpoint the Mission neighborhood and see all of the most recent news relating to that given area.

One question I had for Fwix’s CEO and founder Darian Shirazi was how the site determine an article’s “location.” Dhirazi tells me that Fwix’s proprietary technology analyzes and indexes nearly 40 million pieces of content to determine and scan for any reference to location within the text of a document. So if a restaurant review refers to an establishment in the Financial District of San Francisco, the content will be geolocated to that area. The site will also serve hyperlocal, targeted ads on top of search results.

Of course, with the introduction of a news search portal, Fwix now competes with Google News. But Shirazi thinks there can be mutiple players in this space, especially considering Fwix’s emphasis on hyperlocal news. And Fwiz already has a number of well-known media partners on board to integrate the technology, says Shirazi (the partners will be announced in a few months). Fwix just inked a deal with The New York Times Company to deliver local and hyperlocal content across the publisher’s properties.

Fwix, which also recently launched an iPad app, is getting into the geolocation game, adding geo-tagged status updates (from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite), geo-photos (from Flickr, yfrog, Smugmug, and Twitpic), local events (from Eventbrite, Eventful, Upcoming, and Zvents), nearby reviews and restaurants (from Yelp and Citysearch), concerts (Songkick), local crime and government data, weather, listings (Oodle, Trulia), and deals from local merchants (Groupon, Town Hog, and Living Social) to its feeds. Clearly, Fwix wants to be a destination that you go to not only for news, but for all contextual information around a given locality. The new search portal makes it much easier for consumers to sort through this flux of information.

Last week, Offerpal Media announced that, as a direct result of Facebook transitioning games and applications from their proprietary currencies to the newly-launched Facebook Credits and partnering with rival Trialpay, the company saw itself forced to lay off people who worked on its Facebook monetization initiatives.

Today, the company is launching a new product that should make it clear it would be unwise to consider that event a lead-up to its eventual demise.

With SocialKast, which the company will be presenting later today at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Offerpal aims to relieve many a game developer that was hurt by Facebook’s recent decision to seriously cut down on the many ways they could distribute notifications via the social networking site in order to get new users to sign up.

Dubbed a ‘user acquisition and re-engagement solution’, SocialKast aims to enable game developers to connect with audiences across social networks and media platforms such as Yahoo and Google, opening the doors to massive distribution of game-related notifications to roughly 1 billion users in over 150 countries.

George Garrick, Chairman and CEO of Offerpal, says it has proven costly and difficult for game developers to find new means of distribution in the current environment, and that the new product aims to solve that problem and allow them to accelerate viral growth and at the same time lower the cost of acquiring new users.

SocialKast allows game developers and social platforms to ‘write once’ in order to interact with multiple platforms using a set of lightweight REST messaging APIs and Javascript calls, allowing them to distribute both user-to-user and app-to-user invites, gifts, notifications and other types of text-based or graphical messages directly into the activity streams and email inboxes of Offerpal’s partner sites.

Messages from a game on any platform or Website using SocialKast will be distributed through Yahoo’s Updates API, for example, which will make it possible for those actions to be shared by users in a variety of formats across Yahoo properties.

A new generation of spam, or a legitimate way to reel in new users across multiple platforms? Time will tell how users feel about it, but for sure game developers will be drooling over this.

Access to SocialKast is available for free – for now – as a value-added service to select game developers and social platforms using Offerpal’s monetization platform, which allows gamers to earn virtual currency by taking part in alternative payment options such as advertising offers, surveys, shopping rewards and other brand engagements.

Pan-european startup programme Seedcamp has released the names of the teams appearing at the Mini Seedcamp London next week. Seedcamp says they “saw many teams applying with innovative ideas in the mobile space and we are seeing more and more dedicated, smaller applications adressing very specific markets.”

Teams applied from all over Europe and beyond, and there is a trend towards self-financing and bootstrapping but the “quality [of teams] is growing from strength to strength each year”. Personally I am not surprised they are doing that given the dearth of early stage funding right now, but, perversely this lack of funding, especially in Europe, does rather concentrate the mind on what startups should be doing. There’s nothing like a downturn for sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

The below is a run-down on what the teams are doing, supplied by Seedcamp:

Waste Management and its subsidiary Greenopolis are diving into social gaming with a new Facebook app called Oceanopolis. The game will launch in beta, with a full rollout expected in the coming weeks.

In the game, players maintain their own island by recycling trash to build a sustainable community and interacting with friends. Points earned virtually turn into printable coupons that can be used at movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Alternatively, they can be turned into cash donations. Points can also be earned in real life through recycling or through blogging on Greenopolis‘ site.

When Greenopolis, a environmentally themed social networking site and blogging community launched two years ago, Michael Arrington wrote that it would be better suited as a Facebook application. Oceanopolis seems to fit that bill.

According to the site, Greenopolis members have earned 6.7 million rewards and the physical recycling kiosks have recovered 3.5 million bottles, cans and other items thus far.

Greenopolis and Oceanopolis Creative Director Anthony Zolezzi said the reason for creating Oceanopolis was to virtually engage consumers. “It’s critically important that large companies get involved in the solution,” he added. “One thing Waste Management does is lets Greenopolis operate independently as part of a solution.” Waste Management is the largest recycler in North America.

Oceanopolis is kicking off its beta launch with a fundraiser for Ocean Aid, which will hold an annual concert to fund research on pollution-filled ocean gyres. Greenopolis will donate a dollar on behalf of anyone who tweets: “Make waves. Fight ocean pollution with http://apps.Facebook.com/Oceanopolis #Oceanopolis.”

It remains to be seen whether recycling on a virtual island can inspire real-life recycling, and whether Oceanopolis will be able to gain a significant user base. At the very least, Oceanopolis could be an addictive game to feel good instead of guilty about playing.

Location-based social networking service Brightkite has experimented with the concept of badges in the past, threading in the footsteps of Foursquare and Gowalla, who have popularized if not pioneered the now-familiar virtual loyalty and rewards system.

Last May, the startup partnered with coffee chain Starbucks to create a set of branded badges, self-reportedly the biggest brand integration they had done until then.

Today, they’re ramping up their badging efforts.

Brightkite badges now have levels. For example, if you use their mobile website or one of their many mobile apps to post 10 photos, you’ll earn a ‘Slick pic’ badge at level 1. You can monitor your progress in a status bar on the badge, which will be visible on the web or your iPhone. Once you get to level 1, Brightkite will tell you what to do to get to level 2, and so on.

According to Brightkite, the biggest reason to introduce levels to its badges was so stores, bars, restaurants and brands gain ways to reward users / customers. The company is setting out with a number of partnerships: check in to stores that sell Sharpie products, and you’ll earn their custom badge and automatically enter into a sweeps to win $1,000.

Get down to some serious social networking via the Brightkite service, and Dentyne will be sponsoring your ‘social swagger’ badge. Read the August edition of Redbook magazine, and there’ll be a surprise there for you, as well.

Brightkite says it is currently working out the details for more branded badge programs with the likes of McDonald’s, Visa and the CW. The company says they also have a “bunch of home-grown badges live and plenty more to follow” and invites users to discover them and “level up”.