The Galaxy Nexus, the first of many phones bearing Google’s latest Android 4.0 operating system, will hit the shelves in Singapore in January 2012, to the delight of Android fans who have waited a long time for a new Google-branded device.

Though it won’t make it in time for the holiday season, the Samsung-made gizmo will come with all the goodies on the “Ice Cream Sandwich” OS that were unveiled in Hong Kong about three weeks ago. Among these: a face recognition feature that unlocks the phone by detecting a user’s face, and updated Gmail features.

However, all the bells and whistles will come at a cool S$948, said Samsung at a regional media event.

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The next Nexus phone from Google and Samsung, the Galaxy Nexus, will start shipping in November with new features like an improved Gmail experience and the ability for the phone to unlock by simply recognising a user’s face.

They are part of Google’s new Android 4.0 operating system, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, which will feature for the first time on the Galaxy Nexus, according to a Google show-and-tell in Hong Kong this morning. …

Stand aside, browser wars; a new battle is heating up between Microsoft and Google and this time, the battlefield is email.

Google fired the first shot by launching a new website called Email Intervention, designed to help you stage an intervention among your friends who still use that outdated email address from the 1990s. The accompanying video featuring an “intervention specialist” is cute, funny and completely in Google’s cheeky style.

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(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Facebook has taken down an app developer’s ads promoting this Google+ account and promptly banned his other ads on the social networking site, as the tussle for control of the Internet heats up between the online giants.

According to reports over the weekend, Michael Lee Johnson had put up an ad telling fellow Facebook users to visit his Google+ page, where he claimed to be an “Internet geek, app developer (and) technological virtuoso”. But a few days later, Facebook yanked his ads out, saying that he had flouted their terms and conditions. …

Everybody is looking at social media as the next gold rush.

It’s not surprising, given that social media has moved beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise.

At a press event last week, infrastructure software company TIBCO showed off Tibbr 3.0, an social media platform for enterprises that will be available in August 2011.

Tibbr was launched in January this year after being in development since 2009.

It may be a little bit late to the game though, and gaining mindshare will be difficult as the market is quite crowded.

There are a ton of niche companies who specialize in this space like Yammer and Socialcast.

Not to mention all the big IT companies, who all have solutions or are looking at this space, like IBM (with Connections and Lotus Live) and Microsoft (with Office 365 and Officetalk) and Salesforce.com (with Chatter).

So what makes Tibbr different?

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This is it, folks. No more half-hearted and half-baked social products. Google has revealed their trump card in the war for your online social life and gone all in with their chips.  Google+ is an amalgamation of all of Google’s efforts to penetrate the social sphere thus far.

Although initially open only to a select number of users, the service has since expanded into the hands of quite a good chunk of people. But how will this latest foray into social networking fare for Google?  I spent the last few days playing with Google+ and messing around with it, so here’s my verdict, for what it’s worth.

Google+ is no Facebook killer, but it’s nothing to scoff at either. …

Google has secretly unveiled a new service called “What do you love?” (or, wdyl.com) to help you find out, well, what you love. Think of it as something like a search engine, but instead of searching the Web for “something”, you actually search across various Google services for “something”.

For example, searching for “shoes” gives you the option to translate shoes into 57 languages via Google Translate, find books about shoes via Google Books, watch videos of shoes via YouTube, read the latest news about shoes via Google News, and more. …

The Web is buzzing with Google’s newly announced addition to their search engine. Called “+1”, it works like Facebook’s “like” button, except that you use it on search results from Google search.

For example, when you try searching for “strawberries” on Google, a bunch of results come up. You feel that one of the results is the best and would like to let other people know about it. With +1, you can do so with just one click, and it’ll appear as one of your recommendations the next time somebody else searches for “strawberries”. …

Fortune published its list of the Most Admired companies in the world earlier this month, and BrandFinance just followed suit with its list of the 500 world’s more valuable brands, measured with a different methodology. Surprisingly, this list is rather different from Fortune’s; more technology companies made it into the top ten, and (gasp!) Microsoft is ranked higher than Apple! …

Does a new logo herald the launch of the new Chrome OS soon?

Google unveiled a new logo for its browser yesterday, and gone are the shiny metallic plates and the shimmering blue light in the middle. Instead, Google adopted a design which abandons the robotic look and flattens the logo into a more 2D aesthetic.

This could mean more than a simple re-design. Google has always been a brand-conscious company, and they don’t often alter designs without a reason. The Google homepage, for example, looks almost identical to its original one more than a decade ago.

Looking closer, it seems that the new Chrome logo is closely aligned with the individual app logos for Google Apps. This could be a coincidence, but could this point to a launch of Chrome OS soon? Maybe Google is simply unifying the visual aspect of its products before the launch.

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