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Posted by Michelle Chen, Software Engineer

If your calendar ends up full of many different types of events (film nights, lunch dates, and doctor appointments, for example), there’s now an easy way to categorize them using colors.

When you’re searching for images, sometimes it can be hard to come up with exactly the right words to describe what you have in mind. For example, when you think of London, you might picture the iconic clock tower or the big Ferris wheel. You may not always remember the names of those landmarks, but you can visualize them in your mind. To make it easier for you to find images in situations like these, you can now use Google Images with sorting.

When you search for [london], by default you’ll see image results ranked by relevance. Click on “Sort by subject” in the left-hand panel and you’ll see images organized into categories that will narrow down your search and help you find the exact image of London that you want.

Sorting by subject shows that some of the most popular images associated with London are the London Eye, Big Ben, Tower Bridge and the city at night. This organized view helps you find the images you were visualizing more quickly, so you might realize, “Ah, that big clock tower is called Big Ben, that’s what I was looking for.” You can then can click on the Big Ben group to find the best image within that subject group.

You can also use this feature to explore categories of a general topic that may be easier to learn about visually, like flower varieties or dog breeds. For example, if you want to get flowers for someone but you only know what their favorite kind looks like, not the name of it, you can sort by subject to learn different flower types and discover the name of the type you’re looking for. Watch this video to learn more about how sorting can help you find the image you’re seeking:

Sorting by subject uses algorithms that identify relationships among images found on the web and presents those images in visual groups, expanding on the technology developed for Google Similar Images and Google Image Swirl. By looking at multiple sources of similarities, such as pixel values and semantic relationships, and by mining massive amounts of data, we can make meaningful connections and groupings among images.

Sorting will be rolling out globally to nearly every domain and language over the next week. Whether you have a particular image in mind or you’re just exploring a general topic, sort by subject can help you find the image you need—even if you don’t have the exact words to describe it.

Posted by Donald Tanguay, Google Images team

Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. says it is buying Calgary-based sporting goods retailer Forzani Group Ltd. for $26.50 a share in cash.

Opening a lot of links takes a lot of clicks, which gets tedious when you’re scouring Google for information. These Chrome and Firefox add-ons will let you select multiple links with a click-and-drag motion, opening them all at once. More »

As last week’s promised date for the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services to go back online passed us by, Sony users must be feeling pretty antsy right about now. It’s not looking good however, as Sony’s spokesperson told Bloomberg that they now plan to have the services up and running by May 31st. As the services shut down on April 20th, that means it would’ve taken Sony a full six weeks to get their shit together. More »

We’re still not sure what’s stylistic about Smart Card readers, fingerprint scanners and TPM modules, but you won’t find them in many slates, so if you’ve been considering the Fujitsu Q550 — which has one of each — today’s your lucky day. The Oak Trail-powered Windows 7 tablet with a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 IPS screen is ready for US pre-orders today, with $729 bringing you the base model with a 30GB solid state drive and a two-cell rechargeable battery. $849 upgrades the slate to 62GB of storage and four cells worth of swappable Lithium-ion joy, while both sport front and rear cameras, HDMI out, a bootable USB 2.0 port, a full-size SD slot and dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi. Let’s just hope the UI is a tad more optimized than last time.

[Thanks, Manish]

Fujitsu’s Stylistic Q550 business slate up for US pre-orders, starting at $729 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 May 2011 04:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Canadian troops will be dispatched to Manitoba as the flood threat from the Assiniboine River continues to grow, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says.

Developers are getting plenty of toys alongside Windows Phone 7’s “Mango” release, but there may be extra baubles for regular users, too — Microsoft will reportedly add a few features to Bing in the near future which could prove particularly useful. According to the latest episode of the Windows Phone Dev Podcast — which hosted Microsoft’s Brandon Watson as a guest — a new function called Bing Audio will act like a Shazam for recognizing music (and will sell you Zune tracks) while Bing Vision will use your smartphone’s camera to read barcodes and do optical character recognition, plus potentially provide support for augmented reality apps. There’s also allegedly turn-by-turn voice directions for Bing Maps and a native podcast player, and one more potentially exciting thing — voice-to-text for sending SMS messages without lifting a finger. Hear all about the rumor at our source link, at just about the 40-minute mark.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Windows Phone 7 updates Bing to find music and barcodes, provide turn-by-turn directions and send speech-to-text SMS? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 May 2011 22:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comscore report finds widening Android lead in US smartphone market, largely at RIM’s expense originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 May 2011 18:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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About 3,000 Saskatchewan health care workers are poised to go on strike early Monday.

Add another notch to DoubleTwist’s Apple ecosystem integration belt, now that its Android app has added AirPlay streaming to the list of features. As of version 1.4 it will stream music, videos or pictures to the Apple TV or other compatible devices while also claiming beta support for Sonos hardware. The DoubleTwist player is free, but using AirPlay means purchasing the $4.99 AirSync add-on that also enables wireless sync with your media library (iTunes) and streaming to DLNA or uPnP compatible devices. Twonky Mobile is a free alternative that’s also AirPlay-compatible but without the tight iTunes integration; you can check them both out in the market.

DoubleTwist upgrade features AirPlay support for more Apple / Android miscegenation originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 May 2011 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When you need to get the same message out to a lot of people immediately, you could send them an email, but that’s hardly real-time communication. At these times, group texting apps are excellent tools for the job. Here’s a look at five of the most popular group messaging apps or services that communicate with several people instantly. More »

Amazon Cloud Player has been laying low following its scuffle with Sony Music, but that hasn’t kept the company’s developers from rolling a crucial new feature out — support for Apple’s iOS devices, which it didn’t have on day one. Despite running in the Safari browser window, we’ve confirmed that songs will indeed play. If you’ve got a device handy, give it a try yourself; otherwise, we’ll update with impressions a little later this evening.

Update: Great news — we ran the Cloud Player on an original iPad and iPhone 3GS without a hitch. In fact, there was very little (if any) lag or time delay when buffering a new song, and were able to refresh playlists and other information quickly. The interface of the Cloud Player is almost the same as — if not identical to — the page that loads up on your computer browser.

Even better, the Cloud Player works flawlessly with the multitasking controls in iOS; the usual forward/pause/volume options are all usable as you play Angry Birds. Sadly, there is just one bump in the road that keeps the process from being perfectly smooth: mobile Safari prohibits you from doing drag-and-drops, which adds a couple extra steps to the process of adding songs to your playlists. Take a look below for some screenshots of the Cloud Player in action.

Sean Hollister contributed to this post.

Amazon Cloud Player streams tunes to iOS, following silent upgrade (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 22:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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