LG had a number of gorgeous HDTVs on display at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and apparently we aren’t the only ones who noticed how strong LG’s next-generation televisions are. Mere rumors of an HDTV in the works from Apple has set the industry aflutter, eying apps, voice and motion controls, and the Android OS in an effort to recapture consumers’ interest ahead of whatever Apple may be planning to announce as soon as this summer. Now, a new report from Bloomberg...

Mozilla announced Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with Google in which Google Search will remain the default search engine in Firefox for the next three years. “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Google’s senior vice president of search, Alan Eustace. While terms of the agreement remain confidential, Mozilla reported in October that its partnership with Google helped the company a...

Apple’s Siri and Nuance-powered “Assistant” voice control feature expected to launch with iOS 5 has hardly been a secret, and now MacRumors has commissioned a video mock-up of the service based on what we know so far. The video shows, for example, that a user might be able to hold down the home button to activate the application and speak a command, not unlike Apple’s simple voice controls today. Assistant should step today’s capabilities up quite a bit, however. The service will...

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion, an average drain of $1 billion per quarter, on Bing since it introduced the search engine in 2009, CNNMoney reported on Wednesday. Despite the losses, Microsoft’s Bing reached a 30% share of the U.S. search engine market in April of this year, slowly narrowing the gap with Google, although comScore’s figures pin the search engine’s share at just 14.7%. Despite the constant drain, Microsoft still has a plan for Bing. During the company’s financial analys...

Antitrust investigators with the Federal Trade Commission are focusing on Google’s Android operating system and web search services, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Reportedly, there is some concern that Google prevents its Android partners from implementing services provided by Google’s competitors to their smartphones. One example comes from backin May, when Google blocked Motorola from using Skyhook Wireless’ location services on its phones. The FTC is also investigating whe...

The European Commission now has a total of nine formal antitrust complaints targeting Google, Reuters reported on Tuesday. “The new complaints come from small companies,” one source told the news outlet, and another said two of the complaints were new while three came from national regulators. Until Tuesday, the EC had only confirmed that there were four total complaints. Microsoft has also filed a formal complaint with the European Commission and its general counsel, Brad Smith, said that the s...

Microsoft accidentally spilled the beans on a new social network it has been working on called “Tulalip.” According to VentureBeat, a splash page for the the social network appeared shortly on Socl.com on Thursday before it was immediately taken down. In an effort to conceal its mistake, Microsoft issued a statement. “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest,” Micr...

Google took the wraps off of Google Maps 5.7 for Android devices on Wednesday, and the software update adds quite a few new features. The most noteworthy addition is Google’s Transit Navigation beta feature, which provides navigation instructions for public transportation in more than 400 cities around the globe. You don’t have to leave it open, either. Once you’ve started your trip, Transit Navigation will automatically remind you with an alert when your stop is coming up. Google also made ...

Google officially announced on Friday that it received word on Thursday that the Federal Trade Commission will begin reviewing its business. Google said that “it’s still unclear what the FTC’s concerns are,” but early reports have suggested the complaints involve the Internet giant’s search and online advertising businesses. Google said that it will continue to follow its five pillars: “do what’s best for the user,” “provide the most relevant answers as qu...

The Federal Communications Commission may subpoena Google during the next five days as part of an anti-trust investigation related to the company’s search and web advertising practices. According to The Wall Street Journal, it is only illegal to purchase or abuse a monopoly, and so a subpoena and an investigation aren’t particularly damning to Google. Reportedly, investigators will examine if the search giant has purposely pushed users towards using its own services, as opposed to those offered by...

Google on Tuesday unveiled several tweaks to its core search product, including the ability to search by voice or image. Image-based searching has been around for quite a while now, but Google intends to popularize the alternative search method by supporting it right from within the main Google Images search engine. Users can initiate searches using images hosted on the Web, or they can upload images from a PC to start a search. Searches initiated by a photo will return both text and image-based results. The ...

Twitter on Wednesday unveiled two new services tied to its massively popular social network. The first is one that companies like ImageShack and Twitpic will be none too happy about — a photo-sharing service built right into Twitter.com. Users will see a new camera icon beneath the tweet composition box on the site, and clicking it will allow them to upload images that will display with their tweets. Twitter has partnered with Photobucket to host the photos, and uploading will not initially be supported fro...

It looks as though Google may be testing a voice search feature for its desktop search homepage. According to blog Search Engine Roundtable, several users have begun seeing the oh-so-familiar microphone icon in the search box on google.com — we can confirm that we have seen it on our Google home page as well. The icon will look extremely familiar to those Android users out there, as voice search has been an operating system staple for nearly a year now. No word on when/if this feature will roll out to the m...

Just moments ago on stage at BlackBerry World 2011, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (no, the other one is also CMO, dummy) announced a strategic mobile partnership with Microsoft (translation: we’re super scared of Andy Rubin). Starting around the holiday timeframe, Microsoft’s Bing maps and search will be the preferred search and mapping solutions for BlackBerry products. We’re talking about a system-level integration, “far beyond a search box,” RIM sai...