Google is now working on a social news reader app for both the iPad and Android tablets, which will be the compititor of Flipboard app which was named in 2010 "app of the year" by Apple.

The rumor first emerged from Google+ by Robert Scoble, who said "I heard from someone working with Google that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor for both Android and iPad."

Flipboard Demo Below!

Google Voice Actions is a series of commands you can use on your Android smartphone to send texts, call someone and more. The service has finally crossed the Atlantic and has landed on European shores. Its now available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

Speak any of these commands to perform a Voice Action on your phone:

• send text to [contact] [message]
• call [business]
• call [contact]
• go to [website]
• navigate to [location/business name]
• directions to [location/business name]
• map of [location]

Demo Below!

We all thought that Google will be restricting their Music Beta service to Android users but we have been proven wrong. Google has now made the service, which is still in beta, to iOS users as well. There is a catch, however. The catch is that unlike Android, iOS does not get a native application. Its available in the form of a web app, which can be accessed from the web browser on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. Aesthetically, the web app is not on par with the native Android app but as far as functionality is concerned you can do everything that you can on an Android device, including running it in the background while you use other apps.

To those who do not know what Music Beta by Google is, it is a service, currently available for free, that allows users to upload up to 20,000 tracks to Google servers, which can then be streamed anytime, anywhere from a compatible device.

I guess it makes sense from a business point of view to offer the service to iOS users as well so that when it comes out of beta and becomes a paid service Google will have a lot more prospective customers on their hands.

Google has issued a small updated for its Google Voice app for Android. The new release (version 4.2.34) adds only one thing tablet support, allowing those of you with Honeycomb tablets to make cheap international calls, send free text messages, listen to the voicemail and read transcripts from the comfort of your sofa (presuming this is how/where you use your tablet).

Unfortunately this is still the US only service but folks from across the world will be able to join the fun in the near future. In the meantime, US readers with Android-powered tablets head to the link below!

Android Market link

Google announced that it will be performing some optimization of its business, shutting down ten of its minor projects. The company says its done in order to streamline and simplify the user experience as most of these are already integrated in its other services.

Here comes the list, along with the reasoning:

Here is a quick overview of where a number of products and features are headed:
• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each others questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we will continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.
• Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
• Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.
• Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
• Google Pack: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
• Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we’ve integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although our previous sales channel will be discontinued, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
• Image Labeler: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.
• Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
• Sidewiki: Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.
• Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we’ll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people’s search results.