Google announced Tuesday that it has acquired Tel Aviv-based startup, Labpixies. No price was announced, but some estimate the acquisition may have cost Google a cool $25 million.

The Google-Labpixies partnership goes back to 2005, when Labpixies was one of the first developers to create web widgets for Google's personalized homepage service, iGoogle. Google and Labpixies also worked together on a number of other OpenSocial based gadgets.

Labpixies creates web and mobile applications for OpenSocial, which runs on a number of platforms, including the iPhone, Android, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and My Yahoo. The company also creates web applications for the Facebook platform.

Google said its mobile services in China were fully accessible or subject only to small-scale blocking, upgrading them late on Wednesday from "partially blocked" on a status page.

The change could signal an easing of tensions after the Internet search giant angered China by ending censorship of search results for users in the country. The status change means most Chinese users should have no problem accessing Google search from their mobile phones, even though Google is allowing politically sensitive search results to appear.

Tests on two mobile phones with GPRS data connections in Beijing showed Google's Hong Kong search site could be accessed on Thursday in China. That site was unavailable in a similar test last week. Google's mobile services include search, maps and news.

Users in China may still face troubles because the services censored by local mobile network operators around the country can vary, and Google's status label still means its services could see some blocking.

What an early joy of christmas for Google employees!, Google decided to give all it's employees around the world new mobile devices that run on the company's Android operating system.
This move is to help the search giant to continue push into the wireless market and toward more direct competition with Apple.

In a blog post Saturday, Google said the new device combines hardware built by an unnamed partner with its Android software. The free software is crucial in Google’s efforts to make its search engine and other services as accessible on cell phones as they already are on personal computers.

When you type www.lwegatech.com into your browser's address bar, you expect nothing less than to be taken to lwegatech website. Chances are you're not giving much thought to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS.
Today, as part of  ongoing effort to make the web faster, google launched a  public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and the public has been invited to try it out.