Google

Google's One Pass hurriedly graduated yesterday from University in Berlin hot on the heels of the announcement of Apple's subscription service.

The online content payment platform is available to publishers in the UK, US, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The subscription billing application will be making its way onto smart phones, tablets and computers in the UK, mainland Europe and the States now.

How it works?

Readers who purchase content from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smart phones and websites after signing in with their Gmail email and password.

There have been some quite big changes in the way search engines work over the past 6-12 months, mainly due to Google rolling out what they’ve nicknamed the Caffeine update.

All this means that SEOs now need a lot more coffee so that they can stay awake all night long wondering how the heck to optimise their clients’ websites. 

So what is this Caffeine? In a nutshell, it is a new web indexing system that means that the crawling and indexing of web pages now happens in parallel (in the past these were two separate things). The impact this has is that the current index (and thus the search results you see) are now far closer to real-time. Gone are the days of waiting for your latest blog post to get indexed; this has probably already happened by the time you’ve boiled the kettle.

London does seem to be very much on the radar of the US-based tech heavyweights, seeing visits from both Zuckerberg and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joins the line-up for The Guardian's Activate summit later this month (10% discount for Chinwaggers).

Google Wave is proving itself to be the perfect platform to discuss climate change. Debatewise  Global Youth Panel (GYP) is using the technoloy to spark discussion  and debate from young people about the state of the planet. During the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Take that Twitter.

More than 1,000 members of the Debatewise Global Youth Panel (GYP), aged between 14 and 25, discussed the pros and cons of the conference using Google's new instant messaging platform, launched earlier in the year. It's hoped the parrallel discussions will give a good measure of how young people around the world feel about climate change and the steps being taken to tackle it.

Google announced the launch of their Nexus One phone on Tuesday, garnering the expected amount of geek love.

But, arguably the real revelation comes from the ecommerce site built to sell the phone, the only place you're going to pick one up in the near future.

Heralded by Business Week as an ecommerce revelation, Google have combined a pared down purchasing process with simple animations which demo the phone using a 3D feel rendered on the 2D computer screen. A nice touch.

Complicated charges, long contracts, complex fees and bundles are being ushered out in favour of simply buying the device, then finding the service. Unusually, the first option available is an unlocked version of the phone, although operator deals are available in the US with t-mobile with more on the way, and a European roll-out schedule (through Vodafone) for Spring 2010.

We all know that when we go for a job interview our social network profile will probably get a once over by HR or we'll at least have a Google search done on us but in the social network/job interview scenario the odds, it seems, are stacked against the candidate. 

The latest newsletter from eMarketer, that gets to grips with how social networks help and hinder job candidates, makes for some eye-popping reading.

Out of the total HR professionals polled 18% said that a person's online profile had encouraged them to make a job offer. A profile can work in a candidates favour. It can show that you're a good fit for the company, professionally and creatively, which would be tricky to determine from an interview alone.

The jury might be out on the success of Microsoft's Bing reports of modest rises in search traffic share and Google cage-rattling punditry aside, their TV spots hit the nail on the head about semantic search (see below).

Knol, Google's Wikipedia beater has been in beta since December 2007. Last week we saw the wrapping come off and Knol opening up to accept new content entries. Knol, short for Knowledge, is on a steep slope to compete with Wikipedia. With 9.2 million UK users [according to Nielson], even with Google's size, trying to achieve over 8bn articles [and counting at Wikipedia] will take some time.

On the day the Google Doubleclick deal goes ahead, we see the launch of Google Ad Manager. Their free ad management tool.