Google once considered issuing its own currency, to be called Google Bucks, company Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said on stage at the Mobile World Congress on Tuesday.

At the end of his keynote speech, Schmidt hit on a wide array of topics in response to audience questions. “We’ve had various proposals to have our own currency we were going to call Google Bucks,” Schmidt said.

The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals.
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Right now, the two major mobile operating systems are jostling with one another to be top dog – iOS and Android, where the latter experiences 850,000 activations daily, and there is always Windows Phone lurking in the background. Having said that, do you think that there is enough room in the mobile operating system environment to handle another ‘member’ to the club? Mozilla and Telefonica think so, with Boot2Gecko, Mozilla’s HTML5 operating system, being the main thrust to open up the mobile Web scene. Telefonia Digital, a Spanish broadband and telecom provider, disclosed plans to make available handsets that run on Mozilla’s software.
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Social network says a Sunday Times report that it is using smartphone apps to access text message data is “completely wrong.”

Facebook is being accused of snooping on its users’ text messages, but the social network says the accusations are inaccurate and misleading.
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There’s been a lot of fuss over internet privacy recently, and to appease the angry mob Google has announced that it will be including a new feature in its Chrome web browser. According to Bloomberg, Google has announced that it will be including a “Do Not Track” button in Chrome. When activated, the user’s browsing history will not be given away to Google and other web services for tailored ads. This new feature falls in line with previous reports about Microsoft, Google and Apple offering more noticeable privacy disclosures in their apps and services.
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In a world where seemingly every video game marketing exec tries to convince people that every product will be a revolution in the industry, Blizzard is being refreshingly candid.

Diablo III is on the horizon, and fans of its two predecessors are understandably excited about the potential of a new entry in the series. Diablo III will, of course, be a hack-and-slash adventure with epic environments and awesome graphics.

But what else will it contain? According to the Blizzard community manager who goes by the online handle Bashiok, “I too worry that we won’t be able to meet the expectations people have built up for themselves.”
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Apple, Google and other mobile platform providers will present privacy policies for all the apps offered in their stores as part of an agreement with the state of California.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced an agreement developed with mobile platform companies including Apple, Google, Research In Motion, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, to ensure that all mobile apps will offer privacy policies that users can read before downloading the app.

Although the plan technically only applies to apps in use in California, it will affect the global marketplace by making privacy policies visible to all users who download apps through the Android Marketplace, the App Store or any of the other platforms hosted by the participating companies.
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By Patrick Thibodeau Secretariat was famous for coming up from behind in a race to win, and the same may be true for the U.S. in the global push to build exascale technologies. Because for now, when it comes to delivering the needed funding to build these systems, the U.S. is just getting out of the gate.

The European Commission last week said it is doubling its investment in the push for exascale computing from [euro]630 million to [euro]1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion). The announcement comes even as European governments are imposing austerity measures to prevent defaults.
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