Google reports strong earnings, stock jumps 7%

Revenue growth, however, has slowed in recent years

Google's stock jumped more than 7 percent in the after-market hours on Thursday, after the company reported strong earnings results for the second quarter.

Total income for the period ended June 30 was $3.93 billion, up 17 percent from $3.35 billion in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced Thursday. Excluding certain expenses, Google reported earnings of $6.99, beating analysts' estimates of $6.71, as polled by the Thomson Financial Network.

The company's stock was trading at around $620 after Google reported its earnings at the end of trading, up from closing at $579.

Still, Google's growth has been slowing.

Advances in the Internet giant's crucial advertising sales have taken a hit the last few quarters. Revenue is still growing, but at a slower rate than in years past, as the company has made new investments in ambitious "moon shot" projects like self-driving cars and Internet balloons in the stratosphere.

The company's sales for the second quarter were $17.73 billion, up 11 percent, and coming in just shy of analysts' estimates of $17.75 billion.

But the 11 percent growth rate is the smallest revenue increase reported by the company since 2012.

The company reported mixed results in its ads business. Its paid clicks grew by 18 percent, but the cost-per-click paid by advertisers fell by 11 percent.

The company's operating expenses, meanwhile, grew by 13 percent, to $6.32 billion.

One concern among investors is that Google is struggling to grow its ad revenue on mobile devices. In comparison to the desktop, ads in mobile search results are smaller, and can yield fewer interactions from users, driving down their price.

Google has tried to attract more users to its ads on mobile by adding more information and functionality to them, like product ratings and store inventory information. Just this week, the company said it was rolling out a new way to let users make purchases directly from the ads in mobile search results.

Google is also competing with a rising number of apps made by other developers built around specific types of searches or online activities. In April, Google made a change to its search algorithm that prioritized sites that had been optimized for mobile. By prioritizing higher quality sites, the effect, dubbed "Mobilegeddon," was aimed at getting more people to use Google search on mobile.

Google doesn't break out it's desktop versus mobile advertising sales. But Google might be making new strides in mobile. In its announcement Thursday, CFO Ruth Porat said mobile "stood out" in the context of the company's core search results.

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Microsoft and Google push for FCC's public Wi-Fi for free networks

Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC's free Wi-Fi proposal that might mean you could dump that monthly cellphone bill.

How sweet would it be to dump that monthly cellphone bill in favor of making calls over free Wi-Fi networks, so powerful it would be like "Wi-Fi on steroids"? Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC's powerful Wi-Fi for free proposal. As a bonus, Super Wi-Fi is also "super for improving how we transmit and distribute energy in America." However, as you might imagine, wireless carriers are fit to be tied and doing their best to put a stop to providing such free access.

Of course, it's not the first time that the Microsoft-Google team — now there's a phrase you don't see very often — joined forces. In 2007, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips came together to give FCC officials a "free phone" prototype device built by Microsoft. The FCC later rejected the white space device. Microsoft had wanted to be named an administrator to rule the white spaces, but so did Google. Microsoft came up with Wi-Fi over narrow channels which the company called WiFi-NC last year. In February 2012, Microsoft, Google and hundreds of other nonprofit groups and companies urged Congress not to restrict the FCC's authority to structure proposed spectrum auctions.

Now, the Washington Post, which has jumped on the "Chinese-hacked-us-too" bandwagon, reported that Google, Microsoft and other tech giants "say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor."

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient's heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

Meanwhile, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and chip makers Intel and Qualcomm are lobbying hard against the FCC's proposal. In fact, AT&T announced that it, Verizon and T-Mobile had entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense "to test the viability of sharing 95 MHz of spectrum that is currently used by DoD and other federal agencies. This spectrum is located in the 1755 to 1850 MHz spectrum band, which NTIA has analyzed in great detail for potential clearing and sharing opportunities." These wireless carrier companies are opposed to using the spectrum for free Wi-Fi to the public and insist that the airwaves should instead be sold to businesses.

But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has designed the free Wi-Fi plan. If you are interested, you can read Genachowski's Presentation on White Spaces for Wireless Broadband and Genachowski's remarks to the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology. He told the Washington Post, "Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers."

As Neowin pointed out, Microsoft and Google want more devices connecting to their cloud services such as Microsoft's new Office 365, dubbed as "Your complete office in the cloud."

It would seem as if law enforcement would be vehemently opposed to such free Wi-Fi. After all, law enforcement has a gold mine when it comes to spying via wireless carriers. In 2011, the cops collected a staggering 1.3 million customer records. Innocent Americans get caught in dragnet surveillance via cell tower dumps. The ACLU has warned that location tracking is out of control. Additionally, the ACLU uncovered "new" law enforcement/mobile carrier spying deals, such as "voicemail cloning, copying existing voicemail to a different account, resetting voicemail PIN, or the Verizon smorgasbord for law enforcement mobile/landline spying." It seems the feds hope to replace warrantless GPS tracking with warrantless cell phone surveillance. But on the other hand, even with free and powerful wireless networks, cell phones wouldn't go away entirely.

Besides, as it stands now with ECPA, the cloud is the cloud and any info stored there is not private, but is a favorite surveillance hunting ground used by law enforcement. Also, keep in mind that when an online service is "free," it is because you are the product. Just the same, let's hope the Microsoft/Google "team force" can help bring on the free Wi-Fi on steroids!

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Hottest Android news and rumors for week ending Jan. 18

All quiet on the Galaxy S IV front, but plenty going on elsewhere.After a CES week during which the Android world was all a-twitter over a device that wasn't even revealed at the show, the previously hyperactive Galaxy S IV rumor mill has quieted down, mostly. It's likely to only be a momentary respite, however, as the device is heavily tipped to be released at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

MORE OFFBEAT: The dumbest products of CES 2013

Perhaps the biggest news on the most hotly anticipated Android device so far in 2013 is that an ostensible screenshot of mobile benchmarking results has been published by a Japanese-language blog), which points out that the 1.8GHz CPU speed matches up with Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa eight-core SoC. (More on the Octa later.)

Given the source, it's important to remember that this should be taken with many grains of salt - even the inclusion of the point about the Exynos 5 Octa could easily be read as a little too circumstantially convenient. (Like Manti Te'o confessing to Lance Armstrong on Oprah or something.)

Still, I can't deny that the pairing of Samsung's two biggest headline grabbing topics makes sense. We'll see what happens (probably) at MWC at the end of February.

Speaking of the Exynos 5 Octa, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs is unsurprisingly not a fan, according to a report from Unwired View. Essentially, he told reporters in China yesterday, Samsung is just covering for the fact that the four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores drain a ton of power by jamming four slower but less demanding Cortex-A7s into the SoC alongside them, and attempting to reap a publicity windfall by boasting about their eight-core processor.

While Jacobs is correct in noting that all eight of the Octa's cores won't operate at the same time, I'm not sure why he's saying this means the SoC is going to suck. OK, so it's not a "true" eight-core SoC, but the idea of using the low-power cores for light work and switching to the A15s for more serious tasks still makes sense, and could well back up Samsung's claims of improved battery life and better performance. Seems like fairly ineffectual spin to me.

The Nexus 4 official wireless charger has appeared on the site of Norwegian store Dustin Home, providing a slick pad on which to charge the Nexus 4 that you still probably don't have. Presumably, this means that it'll become available soon in the U.S., but this is a product release story involving the phrase "Nexus 4," so who really knows?

(Hat tip: Android Central)
But wait! The Nexus 4's availability problems will soon be a thing of the past, according to an LG executive who spoke to Challenges.fr Wednesday. LG France director of mobile communication Cathy Robin says production of the Nexus 4 is due to increase by mid-February, which could ease the supply crunch. As of this writing, both the 8GB and 16GB models are still sold out on the Play Store.

(Hat tip: r/Android)
Android Police has what it says is an internal Sprint document, which asserts that the company plans to offer a $400 device credit to new family plan customers who port at least one line in from a competitor. The deal's supposedly set to roll out tomorrow, so you don't have long to wait, if you're interested.

All quiet on the Galaxy S IV front, but plenty going on elsewhere.

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Chrome 24 vs. Firefox 18 - head to head

A quick look at the two latest versions of the biggest non-Microsoft browsers on the market

With major new releases of both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox happening within days of each other, it's been a big week for the browser market. Chrome 24 began to be rolled out to stable channel users via Google's automatic background updater on Thursday, while Mozilla announced the release version of Firefox 18 on Tuesday.
Chrome vs. Firefox

FURTHER READING: Google revs up Chrome, crushes bugs

FIREFOX 19 BETA: Firefox getting built-in HTML5-based PDF viewer to improve security

But which browser got the biggest upgrade? Who's the fastest? The safest? The easiest to use? We took a look at Chrome 24 and Firefox 18 to try and find out.
CHROME 24

Both Google and Mozilla highlighted performance boosts in their latest releases. Google said during Chrome 24's beta phase that the browser had achieved a more than 26% improvement in JavaScript speed over the course of the past year, and Chrome has always had the reputation of being snappy and responsive.

But that isn't all that's been added to Chrome 24. New support for MathML, or math markup language, means that it's a lot easier to display mathematical notation on web pages, and a Flash update will keep that plug-in working on Chrome for the near future. (It should be noted that MathML has been natively supported on Firefox for some time.)

Google made a number of security updates in Chrome 24, as well -- 11 out of 24 of which were rated "high" risk by the browser's security team. Three of those highly rated vulnerabilities resulted in bug bounties for their discoverers, with one prize of $4,000 and two of $1,000 handed out.
FIREFOX 18

One of the knocks against Firefox has long been its supposedly poky performance compared to the fleet Chrome, but Mozilla is apparently working to change that in Firefox 18 -- the new IonMonkey JavaScript compiler should provide a 25% speed boost compared to the previous JavaScript engine used by the browser. Whether that's enough to close the gap on Chrome isn't clear, but it's still a substantial improvement, if Mozilla's figures are correct.

Firefox 18 also packs several new features like support for Retina display resolutions on sufficiently recent versions of OS X, and the underpinnings of support for the developing webRTC standard, which is designed to enable real-time communication via the Web.
SO WHO'S ON TOP?

Broadly, it's still a matter of personal preference -- Chrome's cleaner design, blazing speed and instant updating will be more attractive to some, while Firefox's flexibility and customization options will tempt others.

In this latest round of updates, however, it seems like Firefox has received more of a boost -- the new JavaScript engine should help address one of the most common complaints about the browser, potentially giving it a more compelling user experience.

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