Smartphones are awesome. They are futuristic and reminiscent of our imagined future where we all carry our personal computers in our pockets. Robots are also awesome, and for very similar reasons. If only there were some way to combine the two into something so future-tastic that it would make us nostalgic for a time that hasn’t even happened yet. Well, late this August, in Las Vegas there will be. At the annual Appcon event this year, they will be holding a fantastic competition known as the Cellbot Hackathon. Yes, the premise is just as epic as the name makes it sound.

Yes, after more than a year of speculation, Google Voice has resurfaced again and this time it will be open to the public. Initially, Google Voice was available by invite only. More recently, it was made available to students with valid school email addresses. Now that the service is open to the public (and still free), it’s defiantly worth a second look.

Ok, so by now we are all aware of the mountain of feature upgrades that Google has been piling onto Google Docs.  They’re trying to prove to the world that they are the superior method of putting Office documents in the cloud, and some of these features are even enough to make you think twice.  However, today Google has really outdone themselves with the release of this new feature: scanned character recognition.  Yes, that is as in “scan a printed document, and have it digitally converted to a editable Google Doc” character recognition.

Ever since Google bought that former branch of Microsoft that allowed them to make cloud MS office options, they’ve been doing surprisingly well at providing a decent alternative to standard MS office cloud.  It’s actually surprising, given how utterly dominant/streamlined office currently is.  They even did well enough that Microsoft had to make their cloud-based office free to continue to compete.  However, it looks as though Google may be ruining their “no idiotic marketing decisions with MSO Google Docs” streak.  They are seriously pushing the Chrome extensions/applications of using the new Google docs, and by extension trying to push Chrome.

Dell is involved in a discussion with Google to implement the search giant’s cloud based Chrome OS into Dell machines, said a Dell executive. Amit Midha, Dell’s president for greater China and South Asia recently told Reuters that the company wants to be positioned “on the forefront” of “unique innovations” like Chrome OS that will hit the market in the next few years.

Remember that file-sharing upgrade that Google Docs recently got to set themselves apart from Microsoft Word Online again?  Well Google didn't like being outdone even more than we thought, and there were actually two other rather impressive improvements to the cloud documents system released in the same wave of upgrades.  The first of which is an improvement to the UI for documents and Spreadsheets. While the new UI for documents isn’t particularly groundbreaking, the spreadsheet UI may be the closest someone’s actually come to imitating Excel well.  Granted it’s still very much NOT Excel (they have been perfecting it for decades), but this is an order of magnitude closer than any copycat has done before.

We are all aware of the battle going on between Microsoft and Google over who will control Microsoft Word’s cloud implementation.  With MS word still being the dominant word processing program and cloud on the verge of becoming something big, whoever controls MS word in the cloud is going to have quite a bit of tech-clout.   After Microsoft caved and made their product free, Google had to counter by having some sort of advantage other than being free.  Never the ones to be out-done, Google has just given Google Docs a major upgrade in the cloud utility department.

Google has added more apps to its Apps Marketplace. The internet search behemoth has announced the addition of 16 more apps to make it easier for businesses and universities to benefit from the rapidly growing ecosystem of apps in the cloud. The new apps are varied in their function and utility.

Google has launched version 5.2 of Google Earth. With summer here, the update targets outdoor enthusiasts and their GPS devices. The primary feature of Google Earth 5.2 is that users can now import directions for their next hike, bike ride, boat trip, etc. right to their GPS device. Previously, the process was more complex, as you needed to enter your GPS data as line strings or hundreds of points. This newly introduced KML extension allows you to create simpler plots of where you were at a specific time. It contains all the additional information such as time stamps and lat/long coordinates.

Football (soccer is U.S.) lovers around the world rejoice! The 2010 FIFA World Cup has kicked off in South Africa and to commemorate the event, FIFA has collaborated with Google on a slew of online features to help you keep track of how each team is faring. Google, on its blog, has announced that Google Chrome users can now add a live feed of FIFA World Cup results, news and, match stats. This feed can be personalized for a particular team, so go ahead and tweak your feed for the team you are rooting for.

Google has announced in its LatLong blog, a new update to the user photos available within Street View. The newly introduced feature allows you to really explore a location, and it gives users a chance to know how other people have experienced the same place. While browsing a location in Street View, snap shots will now be overlaid within the panorama.

Oh Apple, you rap-scallion.  We all know about your propensity for manipulating every little piece of legal documentation, ever so slightly in your favor until it all adds up to one giant monopolistic advantage.  But, there was some hope due to apples less maniacal behavior after their rise to #1.  Unfortunately, that fantasy was not long for this world because Apple’s new mobile advertising terms has just burst that bubble.  There is a slew of prohibitive terms that will severely reduce developers’ ad revenues in the name of maintaining Apple’s preeminence.

Though all Gmail users can take advantage of voice, video and group chat within Gmail, there may be some users who didn’t know the features existed and/or simply forgot because they hardly notice the “Video and more” menu at the bottom of the chat window. To make it easier for all users, Google has now made it possible to access all three features with a single click. At first glance you can see the difference. Now each icon is prominently displayed at the top of the chat window.

Google announced the launch of a new search index named Caffeine. Compared to the previous search index, Caffeine promises to give web surfers 50% fresher results in terms of news story, blog post and even forum posting. Now you’ll be able to find the latest and most relevant content for the searches you make in the least time possible. The problem with the old search index was that, it took a longer time to analyze the layers of web content and hence there was a delay in getting updated/matched results to the keywords searched.

It hasn't been a good couple of months for Microsoft.  First their position as king of the profitable computer technology companies was taken by Apple, and then Google starts to seriously move in on their primary cash-cow software: Microsoft Word.  It even got so bad that they had to offer a cloud MS word for free.  Just to add insult to injury, the current iteration of Microsoft Windows has just been revealed by Palo Alto Networks to have some very serious security holes (even by their standards).  Normally this would be bad, but with their recent history, and online security/privacy being such a hot button issue right now, it’s absolutely disastrous.