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According to a Financial Times source “familiar with the company’s thinking,” the search giant, having reached an apparent impasse with the Chinese government officials, has drafted detailed plans to close the Chinese search business, though it remains optimistic about finding a way to maintain its overall operations in China.

For Google, which, amid an investigation into alleged Chinese hacking of prominent U.S. Web properties, expressed in January that it no longer intends to run a censored search engine in China, staying in China after shuttering Google.cn could involve enabling its Chinese sales, software development, and research operations to remain intact.

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Google is building on its partnership with the World Bank and other statistics gatherers to present an array of data in visual form within Google Labs.

Google Public Data Explorer went live Monday, accompanied by the requisite blog post. The site takes public data regarding schools, population, crime, and even names to construct charts and graphs that help illustrate trends.

Google is also releasing a list of the top search terms that can be answered with public data, based on the analysis of anonymized search data. School comparisons and unemployment topped the list of the most frequent queries, followed by population, sales tax, and salaries.
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Google has developed a prototype for a new mirror technology that could cut by half the cost of building a solar thermal plant, the company’s green energy czar said on Friday.

Bill Weihl said that if development and testing go well, he could see the product being ready in one to three years.

“Things have progressed,” Weihl said in an interview. “We have an internal prototype.”

Bill Weihl, Google’s green-energy czar.
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Google’s deteriorating relationship with the Chinese government is proving to be a real drag for software developers in that nation’s capital.

The search giant has reportedly canceled the Beijing event at which it had planned to evangelize its new Nexus One Android smartphone. So while the Nexus One road show will stop in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is skipping the Chinese capital. Said a source close to the company, “If Google did not have such an issue with the Chinese government, they would have conducted a similar event in China too.”
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In the second hit of a one-two punch in Europe, an Italian court handed out guilty verdicts on Wednesday for three of four Google employees charged in a case concerning a 2006 YouTube video posted of a teenager with Down Syndrome.

The judge in the case, Oscar Magi, gave suspended six-month jail sentences for privacy invasion to David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer; Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel; and George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer. They weren’t convicted on defamation charges, though, and a fourth Google employee, Arvind Desikan, was cleared of all charges, Google said.

The findings come just one day after the European Union opened an antitrust investigation concerning Google search. There was a day when Google was an exciting newcomer to the technology landscape, but the company now is clearly a powerful force that has governments as well as competitors concerned.
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NEW YORK–The disparate and dissenting constituencies that showed up to federal court here on Thursday to comment on Google’s plan to create a digital library illustrated just how polarizing and far reaching the effort has become.

The gallery at the federal court house here filled not one but two rooms (one room watched the proceedings via close-circuit TV). Foreign dignitaries squeezed onto benches with cane-wielding advocates for the blind, college professors, literary agents, authors of children’s books, and, of course, lots and lots of lawyers.
“Copyright was intended to be an engine of cultural development, not a brake.”
– Lateef Mtima, law professor

The one thing that most in attendance shared was a passionate view of Google’s proposed library–both for and against. Google wishes to create a vast and unprecedented digital library and has reached an agreement with groups representing book publishers and authors that would allow the search engine to display digital snippets of out-of-print books still covered by copyright. Their representatives appeared before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin to seek approval for the deal.
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he Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authorized Google Energy to buy and sell electricity in bulk like any other utility.

The FERC, the agency with oversight of the U.S. power grid, signed an order (PDF) on Thursday that grants Google Energy market-based rate authorization. This paves the way for the search giant to not only better manage its own energy costs, but to possibly add electricity marketer to its repertoire of services.

The order specifically grants Google Energy–a subsidiary of Google–the rights “for the sale of energy, capacity, and ancillary services at market-based rates” while acknowledging that neither Google Energy nor its affiliates “own or control any generation or transmission” facilities.
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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authorized Google Energy to buy and sell electricity in bulk like any other utility.

The FERC, the agency with oversight of the U.S. power grid, signed an order (PDF) on Thursday that grants Google Energy market-based rate authorization. This paves the way for the search giant to not only better manage its own energy costs, but to possibly add electricity marketer to its repertoire of services.
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Google snapped up Remail on Wednesday, and the first thing it did was to cut Remail’s ties with Apple’s App Store.
(Credit: Remail)

That’s a pretty big hint as to what Google has in mind for the technology behind Remail, which developed an e-mail search application for the iPhone. Founder Gabor Cselle announced his decision to rejoin Google, where he worked on Gmail, on his personal blog, saying “reMail’s goal was reimagine mobile email, and I’m proud we have built a product that so many users find useful.”
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Google might be ready to get its Google Checkout service in line with the hiring of a new executive to oversee the division.

The New York Times reported that Google has hired former eBay executive Stephanie Tilenius as vice president of commerce, with marching orders to look over Google Checkout. Tilenius, who worked on eBay’s PayPal product while at the company, would seem a natural fit for the position.

Google Checkout gave eBay and PayPal executives fits when it was first announced back in 2006. But the service hasn’t done much to halt PayPal’s status as the de facto standard for online transactions by small businesses and Web sites.
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