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Big in Japan, a Dallas-based idea factory for mobile applications, announced that its GoCart(TM) application - a personal shopping assistant - has been named one of 10 winners among nearly 1,800 entries in the Google Android Developer Challenge, a contest to build mobile-phone applications for the Android operating system. Big in Japan was awarded a $275,000 prize by Google for its winning entry.

For Google, mobile is critical to its information-centric business - which is why it has big ambitions for getting the OS on as many devices as it can.

Welcome to the weekend Web, where people are spending a bigger slice of time online via wireless devices - and using a different set of sites than during the workweek. "At Google, we see the majority of our desktop traffic [in the US] during weekdays," says Matt Waddell, chief of staff for Google Mobile. "On mobile, the situation is completely reversed." Mobile browsing surged 89% in the past year, with mobile page views increasing by 127%, according to researcher M:Metrics. The increase reflects growing availability of all-you-can eat data plans and increasingly sophisticated handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone.

Supposed to be released today, it could be a week or it could be a month but eventually Google Voice is going to be released and it might hop right into the crosshairs of mobile carriers.

Android phones running stock or manufacturer-installed KitKat 4.4+ get a big photo-shooting upgrade today. Google Camera is now available from the Play store. The app replaces the standard shooter on Nexus devices and places a separate camera app on others. The headline feature: Lens Blur, which does exactly what the name indicates. You shoot the image, and then use the app to either blur the foreground or background. Photographers call the capability "bokeh", and it usually requires a specialized lens on dedicated hardware to produce well. The blurred effect is highly desirable for portraits. Can you say selfie?

Announced in August, Google's new Google Search app for iOS has been apparently stuck in Apple's app approval process for over two months. No longer. Google's just announced that the new app is out.

Google has decided the official name of upcoming version of Android N to "Android Nougat"

The first smartphone powered by Google's open source Android operating system - the G1 - was in one sense a big success even before it went on sale this week through Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA mobile unit. According to some reports, 1.5m T-Mobile G1 handsets were preordered by buyers eager to get hold of a device and an operating system that promise to deliver another boost to the consumer smartphone market. It goes on sale in the UK shortly.

Google's voice search feature is likely to enthrall anyone with an Android-powered smartphone or an iOS device that searches through the Google app.