Google Drive is a direct competitor to Dropbox. You can upload and access all your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond. With Google Docs built into Google Drive, you can work on documents in real-time.

Google Drive is also pushing search features. You can search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and other designations. There's even Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, technology.

"Let's say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article," explained Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome & Apps, in a blog post. "We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up."

Is Cloud Backup Secure?

We caught up with Tom Gelson, a cloud strategist at Imation Scalable Storage, to get his thoughts on the potential impact of Google Drive. He told us interest in Google Drive reinforces growing demand for online or cloud backup.

"While Drive is primarily targeted at consumers, some companies will consider the solution for backup, and IT departments will have to contend with employees using Drive on their own for corporate data storage," Gelson said. "Cloud backup is certainly a practical and cost-effective storage tier, but security of data stored in Google Drive -- or any other cloud -- is essential.

To address cloud backup security, Gelson said IT departments should carefully evaluate vendors' data encryption strategy. As he sees it, an ideal security policy would dictate that data is encrypted on-premise at...

The new Street View provides images of ordinary life, contested areas and religious sites in the Holy Land. Due to security issues, areas around several sensitive sites, such as the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, are blurred out.

Google Street View is available in more than 30 countries. It was held up in Israel by concerns that images of its streets could be used by terrorists. The Islamic Jihad militant group in Gaza, for instance, has boasted that it used Google Earth, which gives birds-eye views and some street-level pictures of sites around the world, to aim rockets at Israel.

Last August, after a panel of government ministers met for six months to draft security guidelines, Israel announced it had reached an agreement with Google.

The service was quietly launched late last week and officially unveiled Sunday. The images are obtained by specialized cameras mounted on vehicles.

Israel is the first Middle Eastern nation to display its cities and streets online. Iraq's National Museum is also available on Street View.

Pictures online Sunday showed typical street scenes -- bicycles chained to the gates of apartment gardens in Tel Aviv, tourists sunbathing on Haifa's beaches, and the crowded cobblestone Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus is said to have walked before his crucifixion in Jerusalem's Old City.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai brushed off security concerns about Tel Aviv, a city that was hit hard by suicide bombings on buses and in restaurants during the Palestinian uprising a decade ago.

He said militants know the city well enough without the Google service. "Tel Aviv-Jaffa is a target anyway," Huldai said Sunday.

He noted that other urban military installations, like the Pentagon...

That makes us wonder if Vodafone's joint subsidiary with Verizon Communications, Verizon Wireless, will carry the device in the United States. The Galaxy S III is expected to be launched May 3 at Samsung's Unpacked 2012 event in London.

Launch Delayed

Samsung in February announced that the S III, widely expected to be launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, would instead be released closer to the date of availability. Meanwhile, it built anticipation with teaser videos and ads with the familiar theme that the device will help the masses break free from conformity with other popular devices, presumably meaning Apple's iPhone. Such ads were also used to promote the Galaxy Note "phablet."

The Galaxy S III will be the second smartphone to ship with Google's Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich, or ICS) operating system, after the Galaxy Nexus.

The first Galaxy S phone was released in June 2010 and its successor, the S II arrived in February of the following year. The first model had variants on all four major carriers, selling as the T-Mobile Vibrant, AT&T Captivate, Sprint Epic, and Verizon Fascinate.

But Verizon declined to carry the S II for unexplained reasons, perhaps to avoid an overstock of Android-powered devices. The S II is available via AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and a smaller carrier, U.S. Cellular.

No U.S. carrier has been named for the S III. Vodafone stocking the device does not necessarily have any bearing on Verizon's plans, said J.D. Power and Associates wireless analyst Kirk D. Parsons.

"Vodafone pretty much leaves Verizon Wireless alone in the U.S. market," Parsons said.

Leaked screenshots and a video...

Hamburg's state court sided with Germany's GEMA, which had sued Google Inc.'s YouTube unit over 12 temporarily uploaded music videos for which no licensing fees were paid. The organization represents about 60,000 German writers and musicians.

The online video platform has maintained that it bears no legal responsibility for the uploaded content -- saying it checks and sometimes blocks content when users alert the firm about alleged violations of laws.

YouTube currently offers copyright holders software that allows them to identify recordings for which they hold copyright, enabling them to flag the content as infringing their rights.

The Hamburg court ruled that once an alleged violation is flagged YouTube must now apply the software to the recording to prevent further copyright infringements.

The court also told YouTube to install a new program that filters uploaded videos for possible copyright infringements according to key words -- such as musicians' names and song titles -- to catch versions of a song that only sound somewhat different, such as live recordings.

"The platform operator only has the obligation to block the video ... and take appropriate measures to hinder further rights violations after being notified about the copyright violation," the court said. "There is no obligation to control all videos already uploaded to the platform," it added.

Kerstin Becker, a GEMA attorney, said the verdict is "a great success for GEMA" because it made clear that YouTube bears some legal responsibility for videos uploaded by its users, German news agency dapd reported.

But Google spokesman Kay Overbeck said the ruling was only a "partial success" as the court made it clear that YouTube is a platform hosting external content.

In its ruling, the court said it...