The Associated Press was able to come up with this figure from the state-by-state breakdown of operations released by Google Inc. on Tuesday.

It is the second time within two days that the Internet giant has shared previously unknown information regarding the marketing channel, which covers a big part of the company’s revenue. For the first time on Monday, Google specified in detail the commission it gives to its ad partners as payment.

The greater transparency is beginning to surface amidst increasing legal, regulatory and political scrutiny of the power that the Internet search leader has acquired while developing the most profitable ad network of the Internet around the most popular search engine on the Web.

The breakdown on Tuesday came as part of the attempt of Google to quantify its effect in the US economy.

It also revealed that the Internet giant has at least 12,200 employees in the US, mainly in Washington, New York, and California.

The work force of Google in the US is probably larger than the report listed because the company did not specify the number of employees they have in data centres or offices in six states: Wisconsin, South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Iowa.

Besides Washington, New York, and California, the report of the company provides employee counts for Washington, D.C., Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, Georgia, and Colorado.

Previously, Apple failed to acquire AdMob, but successfully acquired mobile ad company Quattro Wireless worth $275 million. In April, Apple finally launched iAd, a mobile advertising system.

This clears a clash of the tech titans as Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Google are expected to do their best to have the hottest segment in an advertisement.

According to IDC, mobile ads spending would be doubled to $433 million this year.

Karsten Weide, an analyst for IDC said, “Mobile will be important for the mid- to long-term future, but not decisive within the next five years simply because search advertising will attract more absolute dollars”.

With AsMob now owned by Google, the firm has a fast start with advertisement offers’ ability to find common advertisements on result pages of Google search on mobile devices and PCs.

Greg Sterling, a senior at Opus Research, said, “It very much remains to be seen whether Apple can become an effective advertising company”.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft will blend their search engine and online ad system, giving them the ability to sell mobile ads.

Hence, consumer groups promises to still be vigilant.

Centre for Digital Democracy Director Jeff Chester said, “We will press the commission to ensure mobile privacy is protected”.

In a presentation with a lot of good-humoured pokes at its rivals, including Apple, the Internet giant showed how the popular mobile OS’ new version can make applications run faster using the same hardware and insisted it was ‘enterprise friendly’.

A ‘cloud-to-device’ API was also shown in the presentation that will likely be popular, as well as a portable WiFi hotspot for phones with Android 2.2.

Another major update was done on the phone’s Android browser – with two or three times better performance of javascript, giving Google the chance to initiate the SunSpider test along with the Apple iPad and an Eclair Android device.

Google claimed that this mobile browser is the fastest to date, but there are still rival products that can compete.

There were also major improvements to the voice search, such as using the command ‘call’ for direct dial, and a Google Translate which speaks back the query in any desired language.

Support for Flash was also shown, giving more jibes to Apple for its piece against one of the most popular formats in the Internet.

Applications can now be saved on SD cards, a main feature that users and developers desire, and a major overhaul was done to the application search mechanism.

With the new version, users can now allow automatic updates to be applied on their applications, and reports about crashes can now be sent.

Rather than waiting for an invitation, users can now directly access the service from the homepage of Google.

Last year, Google said that it would make the Wave service accessible to everyone by the end of 2010, so it seems that they are ahead of the schedule.

“We began previewing Google Wave with individuals and a handful of Google Apps customers six months ago. Since then, Wave has been used in a great many interesting ways”, said Google, discussing about the news. “It’s clear from the invaluable feedback we’ve received that Wave is a great place to get work done, in particular for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion and close coordination”.

Though it appears like Google is very much excited with the potential of Wave, the service received a number of criticisms, mostly from someone who did not have real understanding about its practical uses.

Fortunately, Google is able to mention those who will benefit from utilising its Wave service, pointing out that creative collaborators, schools, and businesses can utilise the collaboration instruments within the service.

Seems like pleading, Google also said in its blog that if the users have already tried the Google Wave previously and found it not ready for practical use, it is the right time for them to make another try.

There were rumours that the laptop company was firm to take the chance of putting the Chrome OS on show at the Computex, but Acer has insisted it was not their plan.

“Despite recent rumours in the press regarding the launch of Chrome OS based netbooks at Computex, Acer confirms that it has no short-term plans for such a product”, the company said in a written statement. “Acer believes that Google Chrome OS is without doubt an exciting product announcement and deserves its full attention as well as an in-depth study of its potential from a consumer’s perspective”.

“Acer is naturally interested in any product or service that enhances the overall experience of its products and will of course be following the development and progress of Google Chrome and the evolution of Google’s overall product strategy very closely”, the statement continued.

It will be disappointing to those people who are hoping to know if Google’s plan of using the OS will be successful.

Google has, in fact, always insisted that laptops begin using the operating system by the end of this year, which made Acer’s timeline look a bit off.

But, it’s likely that people will begin to see netbooks with Chrome OS in the months to come.

In a long blog post on Thursday from Alex Payne, the online product management team director of Microsoft, he took on a sales pitch from Google that urged Office users not to upgrade to Office 2010 and instead use Google Docs as online complement to previous Office versions.

Earlier on Tuesday, Matthew Glotzbach, the enterprise product management director of Google, made an appeal to corporate workers who use Microsoft Office.

“If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs,” Glotzbach said. “You probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000), and there’s no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better.”

That pitch gave a problem to Microsoft.

“They are claiming that an organization can use both [Office and Google Docs] seamlessly,” Payne said. “This just isn’t the case.”

Payne claimed that converting files between Google Docs and Office documents was full of flaws. Anything converted wouldn’t look like it did before conversion; this included style, font, tracked changes, watermarks and charts.

Changing between Google Docs’ formats and Office’s document formats means that users will lose formatting and components, he continued.

Payne said that the Office Web Apps offer “higher fidelity”, ensuring that elements that do not appear online are not lost when a certain document is reopened.

Google’s sale pitch and Microsoft’s rebuttal were coordinated with the Office 2010 official launch on Thursday.

Using cameraphones as its eyes, the service currently is limited to a number of languages including English, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Taking a picture of a menu, street sign, or words off a computer screen, Google Goggle first asks individuals if they want a translation to be completed before automatically processing words. Meanwhile, whilst Google also aim to increase the number of languages that Goggle’s can recognise, they revealed that they had also improved the foundational database to the system, allowing the application to recognise far more objects than before.

Google Goggle’s was first launched last December, marking an important step for the company as visual search was introduced to their portfolio. Whilst it remains a small developmental programme, the company behind it has been pushing efforts to increase its capabilities in a bid to eventually develop an automatic and instant translator. Buying Plink, the virtual search app in April, Google quickly integrated its developers with their own Goggle’s team whilst revealing that they were aiming to open the service to additional mobile platforms other than its own Android.

The move is radically different to methods used by both the Amazon e-book store and iBookstore which provide books for their own specific devices. And with Google already having scanned more than 12 million books it could mark a point where e-books become far more accessible. Yankee Group have already suggested the U.S e-book reader market could be equalling $2.5bn by 2013, but those at Gartner have intimated that Google’s latest announcement could push this figure higher. “Anything that puts more kinds of art in people’s hands in a way that fosters competition, innovation and creativity is good,” explained Gartner senior vice president Whit Andrews.

Markedly opening the access to publications through Google Editions either on PC, netbook or mobile phone, Google engineer Dan Clancy said “It’s much more of an open ecosystem, where you find a way for bricks-and-mortar stores to participate in the future digital world of books. We’re quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space, because they’d like to dominate.”

The important step marks a move away from the current system which uses applications that are only able to be stored on Android’s limited inbuilt memory. With developers therefore having to reduce the amount of storage space needed, software quality is impacted. However, with the ability for developers to begin creating applications requiring far more space for storage, Google could see a chance to finally seriously compete against Apple’s thriving application market.

Though the feature has been long awaited by fans and developers alike, Google have now announced that the move is currently in development and will be hitting Android systems soon. However, whilst apologising for the delay in not rolling the system out sooner, Google negated to actually confirm any specific schedule. Meanwhile, with Apple’s iPhone HD speculated to be released later this year, therefore bringing a host of new, graphically advanced applications, Google needs to implement its action fast before it loses an important opportunity.

Available from www.google.com, Google revealed that in an effort to improve current standards for viewing images on the iPhone, new software would allow for users to not only search for pictures quicker but to view them in higher quality. Accessible on the Android 2.1 software and iPhone 3.0+ platforms, images can be viewed as square thumbnails so that more pictures are accessible per page, whilst users can slide left and right through pages allowing broader scope for individuals to browse at a faster pace.

Meanwhile, whilst functions such as tapping an image to make it full size remain, an alternate black background increases the “emphasis” of pictures allowing for better viewing. And with the application easily available on Google’s main website, they expressed that the software was available in 38 languages for universal use adding “whether you like to look through pictures of prom dresses, impressionist paintings or 猫　ジャンプ we hope you love this update to Image Search for mobile.”

The move marks continued steps by Google to remain dominant in its internet presence whilst making a concerted effort to apply its innovative approach to Apple’s forwarding thinking products. And with Apple’s speculated iPhone update only around the corner, Google’s latest offering may be seen by many as an attempt to prepare for the imminent iPhone onslaught.