Google Celebrates Pac-Man’s 30th Anniversary with a Playable Logo

Anyone who knows anything about the history of video games knows about Namco’s classic arcade game Pac-Man. It’s one of only three video games on display at the Smithsonian, along with Pong and Dragon’s Lair. The pizza-shaped pellet-gobbling hero, a literal icon in the video game industry, marks his thirtieth birthday today. Just in time to cap off the excitement of the Google I/O 2010 developer conference, Google celebrates Pac-Man’s birthday by turning its front page logo into a fully playable version of the arcade classic.

Google has a long tradition of altering its front page logo to commemorate events. In fact, Google has a name for those logo alterations: Google Doodles. Pac-Man now stars in the first-ever playable Google Doodle. Click here to continue reading “Google Celebrates Pac-Man’s 30th Anniversary with a Playable Logo”…

Google TV Brings Universal Search to Your TV

This year’s keynote presentations at Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer conference, feature quite a few exciting announcements: from WebM to the Chrome Web Store to Android Froyo. However, Google saved their biggest announcement for the last part of the last keynote: Google TV.

Google’s stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Like it or not, a lot of the world’s information still goes through traditional television. Google TV thus hopes to organize that information, by putting traditional television under the dominant information management paradigm of the Web: search. Clunky TV schedule guides could soon become a thing of the past, even for the laziest couch potatoes. Click here to continue reading “Google TV Brings Universal Search to Your TV”…