Google has integrated Places in the mobile version of their search site. So now you can search for a restaurant, coffee shop, gas station or an ATM with just a coupe of taps through your mobile browser.

The feature obviously requires your location so you must share that information with your browser. Then you will see restaurants, coffee and bars being displayed prominently on the screen. To access other categories you need to click on More.

Once you select a category, a new page opens with a map of your current location on the top of the screen and results of your selected category below. You can scroll through the results below while the map remains fixed at the top of your screen and changes according to the result that is currently at the top of the list.

Google introduced a trio of new features that make searching from a desktop computer so much better. The first feature is Voice search, something that has been around on mobiles for a while. Then there is the Search by image feature, which does what it says and is surprisingly good at it and convenient to use too. There is Google latest attempt to speed up browsing as well, called Instant Pages.

I will start with my favorite Image search. Go to Google Images and drag and drop an image on the search box it works whether you drag the image from another page in the browser or from your desktop. Chrome and Firefox extensions are also available they put an Image search option in the right click menu.

From there you can do various searches related to that image the simplest is simply finding pages that have the image (even if it was slightly altered). You can also search for the same image but in a different size great for finding a wallpaper sized version of a cool image you have stumbled across.

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When Google announced the Music Beta service at the I/O conference, it was only limited to those in the United States. However, it seems now it has started rolling out in other countries as well.

Reports are coming in from Europe from people who have successfully managed to install the Music Beta application on their Android devices. The application, along with Google Books, is being pushed to the device automatically. However, not all have been able to use the service successfully, while others, although able to use it with the content on their phone are unable to use the desktop companion application.

The Google Chrome web browser got a new stable release version 12 which brings along a safer browsing experience and faster graphic performance. The Chrome browser got safer with the enhancements added to its Safe Browsing technology. It will warn you if you are about to enter a site with malicious content or a phishing site and will also warn you while trying to download malware.

Google has worked closely with Adobe to bring users more control on what sites store on users computers via Flash content. Previously Flash cookies could only be deleted from an online setting on Adobe website and can now be deleted through Chrome itself. The stable Chrome 12 also has support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which means that websites and web apps with 3D content in them will be snappier on your Chrome browser.

Google have just announced their new Google Wallet and Google Offers services, this then dropped them straight into a lawsuit with PayPal, but thats not going to stop them from rolling out their new service. Google Wallet hopes to make use of the NFC infrastructure as a mobile based payment system. There are a small, but growing number of handsets with NFC capabilities, such as the Google Nexus S, theSamsung Galaxy S II, Blackberry Torch 2 and the Nokia C7, all of which effectively allow you to transfer data and in the case of Google Wallet, pay for items simply by swiping your handset against a special reader.

Of course NFC technology is very new and adoption will naturally be slow to start off with, as it will take a few years for NFC handsets to become widespread enough. Google have however established an alternative way to make use of their new payment method, without the need for a fancy NFC enabled chip in your handset.

The solution, a sticker. A special barcode-like sticker that users can stick to the back of their phone. The sticker would then be registered to a single credit card and should apparently be able to communicate with the Google Wallet app on the users phone, one assumes via the cloud. Osama Bedier, VP of Payments at Google, said the experience with the Google Wallet sticker would differ from that of an NFC handset and users should come to expect limited functionality by comparison. Google are keen to expand Google Wallet to other sectors as well, so its not entirely unlikely that we see the Google Wallet payment stickers cropping up elsewhere, we shall see.