It has been one heck of a crazy week for Apple’s share price. We are less than two months into the year and the share price has already seen a 22% increase this year. In fact, while AAPL continues to rise, GOOG’s share price continues to fall. This week alone, Apple’s share price has seen an averaged of $10 in gains per day. Also, since the time Steve Jobs passed away, the company’s market cap has grown $90 billion. Clearly doomed indeed.

Today, AppleInsider points out that Apple is now worth more than Google and Microsoft! That’s pretty amazing for a company that doesn’t dominate in marketshare. Microsoft’s market cap was around $256.7 billion, while Google was valued at around $198.9 billion. Today, Apple’s share price closed at $493.17 and was trading at $494.69 in the after hours. The company’s market cap reached $459.82 billion.

While Apple’s share price is going to pass $490, analysts have begun raising there expectations. Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company upped his estimate from $540 to $620, while Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity raised his target on AAPL shares even higher, to $665. In fact, even to this day, Apple is trading lower than what it should be at.

It seems to me that Apple will soar past $500 tomorrow without a doubt!

It appears that Google has had a change of heart, and has finally decided in favor of launching its own cloud storage solution to compete with the likes of Dropbox, Box.net, SkyDrive, and iCloud. The Wall Street Journal believes that Google is very close to launching Google Drive, something that users have been anticipating and demanding ever since Gmail launched with a gigabyte of storage. In fact, Google was almost ready to launch a similar product called GDrive, way back in 2008. However, Sundar Pichai, the current SVP of Chrome and Apps, managed to get the product dumped with a bizarre argument that files are outdated. According to Steven Levy’s “In the Plex”, Pinchai believed that “Files are so 1990”.

“You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
– Sundar Pinchai

Google’s entry into the cloud-storage arena is long overdue. Both Microsoft and Apple have compelling products in this segment, which are already (or soon will be) tightly integrated with their own ecosystem. Google, on the other hand, has allowed third-parties like Dropbox to take control of the Android ecosystem. What makes the prolonged lack of an online backup solution from Google surprising is the fact that Google is well known for having access to ginormous quantities of cheap storage. In fact, Google already offers plenty of storage to users in the form of Gmail, Google Docs, and Picasa. What it has been lacking so far is an integrated solution to unite its assorted services.

Like its competitors, Google will be opting for a freemium model. The basic storage plan for Google Drive will be free, with additional storage available for purchase. It will be interesting to observe how Google prices its new product. If it retains the current model of charging $5 per year for additional 20 gigabytes, and $20 per year for 80 gigabytes, it could very well demolish its competitors. It is also likely that at some point, Google will bundle Drive with Google Apps for Android, which should give an instant boost to its user base.

Dropbox famously turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple. Now, with Google, Microsoft, and Apple setting their sights on the cloud storage market, it will have its work cut out. However, if Dropbox manages to retain its focus on innovation and superior customer service, it will prove to be a tough competitor to beat.

As per schedule, the stable release of Google Chrome 17 is here. The biggest new feature is omnibox pre-rendering. Google already tries to autocomplete URLs for you as you begin typing in the omnibox, which is Google’s fancy way of referring to Chrome’s addressbar. However, in the latest version, Google will also begin to load the suggested URL in the background, if it believes that you are very likely to visit that website. This creates an illusion of speed by loading the website in advance. The technique itself is not new. In fact, Google’s infamous Web Accelerator heavily relied on pre-fetching to speed up web browsing, and Chrome already pre-fetches some of the search results on Google.com.

While pre-fetching of content is a great feature for most consumers, it does have its share of disadvantages. If you have a tight data cap, the last thing you want is your browser to waste your bandwidth by loading pages you might not even want to visit. It will also create headaches for webmasters by registering fake hits that will increase bandwidth and server resource consumption, besides messing up analytics. Netscape had earlier experimented with pre-fetching, but it allowed the webmasters to be in control.

The other major new feature is called “Safe Browsing”. Going forward, Google will cross check all downloaded executables against a whitelist of publishers and files. If it doesn’t find a match, it will attempt to determine if the download is safe or not by leveraging a complicated machine learning algorithm. It is worth nothing that this feature sends data about the file along with your IP address to Google. After two weeks, any personally identifiable information (such as IP address) is deleted, and only the file URL is retained on Google’s servers.

Chrome 17 also fixes a grand total of 20 security vulnerabilities. Google awarded a total of $10,500 to security researchers for the discovery of these potential security threats. You can learn more about the security issues patched by Google over here.

The new release can be downloaded from google.com/chrome. However, Chrome users on the stable channel should be automatically updated to the Chrome 17 during their next browsing session.

As we pointed out last week, Apple’s share price is seeing tremendous growth in 2012, but that’s not all. Turns out, while Apple’s share price continues to increase, Google’s continues to fall. There’s no other tech company stock right now which is seeing growth like this. Now, let’s compare Apple’s share price growth versus Google’s in a similar time frame. I’m going to graph the share price until February 7th.

In roughly the past month, AAPL has a seen a gain of over 60 points that has increased its price by nearly 16%. This was due to the blowout quarter the company reported two weeks ago, and since then, the share price has seen solid growth and closed at yet another record high of $468.83. Not only that, but Apple’s iPhone also nabbed 75% of mobile phone profits last quarter with just 9% of unit share. The company’s share price is nearing $470. Remember, this company has been declared “doomed” many times now and is not dominating in marketshare.

However, if we take a look at Google’s share price during the same duration, GOOG has seen a monthly decline of over 30 points which has decreased its price by 6%. This is due to the fact that the company failed to meet earnings expectations for the second time in a row. It really is only a matter of time until Google’s share price is lower than Apple’s. In fact, even to this day, Apple’s share price is trading lower than what it should be at. If things continue to go the way they are, it can get much worse for Google. Remember, business is always about the money. How can this be for a company that’s dominating in marketshare and “winning?”

A couple of years back, Google launched Goggles for Android, which is pretty cool by itself. However, Google is now reportedly trying to build the real thing – an actual goggles with a HUD (heads up display).

9To5Google learnt by the way of a tipster that Google is currently developing wearable glasses that resemble Oakley Thumps. These glasses will be fitted with a tiny HUD for each eye on the sides. The display is expected to provide an augmented reality experience by showing real-time information corresponding to objects in your sight. Navigating the on-screen HUD is said to be as simple as tilting your head. The glasses will have a tiny camera equipped with flash, along with a mic for recieving voice commands. CPU, RAM, and other storage will be equivalent to previous generation Android smartphones, which will be stunning considering the form factor for the device.

Oakley Thump

The glasses are still a long way from being done, and Google isn’t even sure if there is an actual demand for such a gadget. However, what this clearly illustrates is just how ambitious and bold Google has become. It’s not afraid to invest money and time into projects that almost appear to be science fiction. 9To5 believes that Google might launch a public beta testing program to gauge demand, as it did with the Cr-48 Chromebooks. Let’s hope that they are right.

Google Maps is a wonderful worldwide mapping service. It provides excellent geographical details, and all its features are available for free, if you are a direct consumer of their mapping product, Google Maps. Google Maps also has an API for all of its mapping features like directions, traffic information and place information. However, Google has recently started charging developers for its API, and this has put it in a controversial position.

Bottin Cartographers is a provider of mapping services to many French companies, and it has been in this business for two decades. Bottin Cartographers accused Google Maps two years ago of killing competition, by offering a competitive service for free. Their argument was that Google Maps would drive out other players in this field, and then, once it captures the market with its free product, it will start charging its users. Finally, the court has ruled in favor of Bottin Cartographers, and Google has to pay a fine of 515,000 euros.

While Bottin Cartographers is only a provider of mapping services, Google has both a free Map service, and a map API for use by developers and other mapping services. However, it has recently started charging higher for its API, which gives meaning to Bottin Cartographers’ worries.

Google’s decision to increase charges for its API usage has also upset many developers, and services that used Google Maps. They are looking for Google Maps API alternatives, or considering building their own maps now.

In the last few months, numerous companies, which sell anti-malware and anti-virus apps, have published reports stating that the Malware on Android phones are on the rise. According to them, many apps that are added to the Android Market daily are infected with Malware. These reports made it look like Android is getting less secure with every passing day.

Today, Google has revealed its new service, codenamed Bouncer, which automatically scans the Android Market for apps, which are potentially malware or are, infected, and silently removes them. The service is already active since quite “a while now”, and according to Google this led to a 40% decrease in the number of potentially malicious app in the Android Market. The Bouncer service will perform a set of analysis on new applications, scan them for any potential thread, and if found removes them immediately. The service also analyses the developer accounts for any suspicious activity. Google also highlighted some of the core security features present in Android, which make the OS less prone to malware infection.

Hopefully, this move from Google will lead to a reduction in the number of malicious apps in the Android Market.

One of the biggest problems that the Internet has faced for years, and is facing still, is spam. It is estimated that more than 90% of the total Internet traffic is email spam. The figure has come down considerably, after Microsoft hunted for and took down a number of botnets. Nonetheless, the volume of spam is still high enough, that it is a matter of concern.

Spam is so popular and widespread, there are businesses based on spam, which thrive on the naiveness of the casual Internet surfer. Most of these spammers gather personal data or credentials, using phishing attacks.

This time, all tech giants, namely Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, PayPal, Facebook and LinkedIn are going after spammers. They have decided to verify if the email sender is indeed the actual sender. Ars Technica writes on this, claiming that SMTP is too old to, and the concept of emails has become complicated since its birth.

Although methods like SPF and DKIM  have been used in email phishing protection already, they have their limitations. Instead, these tech giants are working on a new protection scheme called DMARC.

As with SPF and DKIM, DMARC depends on storing extra information about the sender in DNS. This information tells receiving mail servers how to handle messages that fail the SPF or DKIM tests, and how critical the two tests are. The sender can tell recipient servers to reject messages that fail SPF and DKIM outright, to quarantine them somehow (for example, putting them into a spam folder), or to accept the mail normally and send a report of the failure back to the sender.

As DMARC stores extra information about the sender, it has to record all the senders, to function effectively. This makes a global rollout compulsory for DMARC to be effective in fighting spam. In the next few months, we will see how the Internet community receives DMARC and whether it is effective against spam.

Google recently started redirecting Blogspot.com blogs to Blogspot.in and other country specific domains. The reason being that Google wants to give more freedom of expression to users while also being able to adhere to removal requests from different governments.

The country based redirection was first rolled out in India thanks to some recent stupid court judgments against websites in India. However, this will highly inconvenience Blogspot blog owners in India since they will not have duplicate content. Even though Google has promised to minimize the  negative effects of this change, you can definitely take an initiative to minimize the problems this will cause.

Google had introduced the rel=canonical meta tag to overcome this issue. This tag allows users to point tell search engines the actual location of the content if there are one or more URLs which have the same content, thus avoiding duplicate content on your website.

If you are Blogspot blog owner, you can avoid duplicate content by adding the following content to your template. Please note that you will have to edit the HTML code of your Blogspot template and add this before the </head> tag.

If you are using a HTML template for you blog, you should add the following code:

<ItemPage><Blogger><link href=’<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>’ rel=’canonical’/></Blogger></ItemPage>

On the other hand if you are using a XML template, you will have to add the following code to include all meta tags:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Or also individually include the rel=canonical tag by using:

<link expr:href="data:blog.url" rel="canonical"/>

Once you have added the tags, make sure to save your template and then view source of your browser to check if the tag is added to your template. That’s it. Once you have added the rel=canonical tag, search engines will only index one page instead of creating duplicate content.

Google.com has historically redirected to country-specific versions. For example, if you are in Australia, typing Google.com in the browser will redirect you to google.com.au and in India, it would redirect you to Google.co.in. This redirection has been in place so that Google can serve up local content to the users. However, Google is now expanding the country specific URLs to Blogger based blogs as well.

Google OS is reporting that BlogSpot blogs based in India are redirecting to BlogSpot.in from BlogSpot.com. The new redirection policy has been made available in a Blogger help page (emphasis added).

Why does my blog redirect to a country-specific URL?

Q: Why am I seeing a URL change?
A: Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you’re reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or “ccTLD.” For example, if you’re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.

Q: Why is this happening?
A: Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

As per the Google help page, the move to country specific domains is so that Google can allow free expression for bloggers and also comply with valid removal requests from local authorities.

So, why this move? Several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and Google have come under fire recently from courts (Read: Indian Government and Courts Ignore Common Sense and Laws of the Land in a Drive to Leash the Internet) in India asking them to remove derogatory and inflammable content from their websites. Google however has not yet complied with the requests, but this change will allow them to remove country specific content.

Currently, this changes will only affect blogspot.com blogs and will not affect custom domains. The implementation of the domain redirection has already started in India where Google recently faced problems (read above story).

Also Read: How To Add rel=canonical to Blogspot Blogger Blogs for SEO

Majority of BlogSpot blog owners would be worried about the SEO for their blogs. However, Google has said that they will try to minimize the negative consequences of hosting BlogSpot content on multiple domains. They are also suggesting users to add rel=”canonical” directive to their blogs.

Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?
A: After this change, crawlers will find BlogSpot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting BlogSpot content on multiple domains.

The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we will specify the blogspot.com version as the canonical version using rel=canonical. This will let crawlers know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. When a post or blog in a country is affected by a content removal, the canonical URL will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This will ensure that we aren’t marking different content with the same canonical tag.

If you are a reader of Blogger blogs, you can request to stop the redirects by adding “/ncr” to the end of the URL. NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display Blogger blogs in English.