A few weeks ago, the Google Chrome team launched a new app in its store called My Chrome Theme, which allows you to create and share your own custom theme for Google’s browser.

Today, the team shared that My Chrome Theme is now available in 36 more languages, making it more accessible to everyone who wants to get in on skinning Chrome.

Once you install the app from the Chrome Store, you simply upload a photo and start changing around the colors for the browser’s taskbar and such:

Once you’ve gotten your theme ready to share with the world, the app provides you with a link to send out to all of your friends. Socializing the browser a little bit more is a nice move on Google’s part, especially since desktop browsing is such a personal experience.

Since it’s an easy tool to use, anyone can create a theme. If you don’t think that browser personalization is an important feature, you haven’t talked to people like my mom. She’s all about making everything on the computer her own.

➤ My Chrome Theme

You might remember Wappwolf from its previously released product, which was crazy successful. The Dropbox Automator allowed you to set up folders and a series of rules and actions for those folders, whenever you dropped files in them.

The team has taken that success and poured it into a new product specifically for Google Drive, aptly named GDrive Automator. The service allows you to do the same thing as the Dropbox service does, with some added features since we last took a look.

By connecting your Google Drive account with Wappwolf’s GDrive Automator, you can do things like create a folder called “Books”, and each time you drop a PDF into that folder, Wappwolf will convert the documents into a Kindle-friendly format and send it to your device, automatically:

Once your folders and rules are set up on GDrive Automator, all you have to do is place files in the folders whenever you want. There’s no button pressing or confirmation needed, and it carries out your automated tasks rather quickly too.

I set up a test rule to try the service out in which I created a folder on Google Drive called “Drew”, and I set up a rule that said that any image I place in that folder, GDrive Automator should post on Flickr.

I did, and it worked seamlessly:

The process to set up the folders and rules are super simple, and GDrive Automator walks you through all of it. Once you get things going, you can stop the automated processes or delete them at any time.

This is a great service if you work in a company that relies on keeping its files in the cloud, specifically on Google Docs. You can add documents to specific folders and have them sent to specific people in a variety of formats. You set up the rules, the service takes care of the rest.

➤ GDrive Automator

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just drop a PDF in a folder and it would automatically show up on your Kindle? Or if imported photos automatically scaled themselves down to a smaller size? Or if your PDF documents automatically signed themselves? These are just a couple of examples of what Wappwolf can do along with your Dropbox or Google Drive account. Here's how to make the magic happen. More »

Google has always been pretty cagey about the financials behind its Android mobile OS — and data that has emerged over the last week could give us an indication why: it’s been losing money from Day One.

In the lawsuit between Oracle and Google — in which Oracle claims Google, in its Android platform, infringes on copyrights and patents related to Java — a judge and jury are trying to work out what kind of damages might be awarded to Oracle. That case took a turn for the specific yesterday, when Judge William Alsup (as reported by Reuters) read out excerpts of Google documents that determined that the platform produced a net loss for every quarter of 2010 — and “a big loss for the whole year”.

He also noted that Android generated around $97.7 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2010.

The jury began their deliberations on Monday, and if they cannot come to a unanimous decision, then the trial will proceed to its second phase, concerning patents, with the first phase on copyright subsequently facing a retrial.

How much money Google has or hasn’t made is an important part of the case because it can be used to decide how much Oracle can potentially receive in damages if it wins the case — although Oracle contends that even if Android is making a loss, this should not have any bearing on the case.

Ironically, if Google can show it’s not making much money out of Android, then that may mean it has less liability. On the other hand, that difficult performance might also become a lever by which critics might begin to ask why Google is pursuing a business that is going nowhere financially.

Figures from Google documents from 2010 revealed earlier in the trial showed that Google expected a loss of $113 million in 2010 from Android and that it expected to have profits of $64 million in 2011; $248 million in 2012; and $548 in 2013. The vast majority of that revenue will be coming from advertising, with small but growing percentages also coming from app sales.

Video chat is still something many people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Google Talk or iChat to video chat with each other.

There are significant differences between how many boys and girls use video chat, though. Only a third of boys use video chat while 42% of girls said they have video chatted. Maybe unsurprisingly, those teens who use the Internet more frequently also use video chats more often than their peers who only go online a few times per week. The same is true for teens who text and use social media more often than their peers.

The Pew study also looked at how often kids upload video to the web. A quarter of the U.S. teens who were interviewed for this study also said that they record and upload video to the web. This represents a 100% increase since 2006. Just 14% of adults, by the way, upload video to YouTube and similar services.

Despite the gender gap in video chatting, though, boys and girls are equally likely to upload video these days. That’s quite a change from 2006, when Pew last asked this question. At that time, boys were twice as likely to say that they regularly uploaded video they had taken.

Streaming video over the web, however, still remains a bit of a niche activity among teens. Only 13% of respondents said they stream video live online. Interestingly, 3% of teens with dial-up connections manage to stream video to the web – one postage stamp-sized picture at a time.

The Pew study also noted that 95% of the 799 teens it interviewed said that they use the Internet. This number has not changed over the last few years. It’s worth noting – and somewhat odd – that this data is based on interviews that were conducted between April 19 and July 14, 2011. Given how quickly these trends change, chances are these numbers are actually a bit higher today.

It was just over a month ago that social media management platform HootSuite picked up $20 million in a secondary investment round that valued the company at $200 million. Now we have heard from multiple sources that the company is looking to better than double that: HootSuite is in the process of raising a $50 million round at a $500 million valuation.

And what’s making this even more interesting are the investors that are being mentioned in connection with the round: HootSuite is looking to have discussions with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google – a sign of how the surge in social media investments is also giving a lift to companies that are figuring out ways to harness that for third parties.

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter were described by one source as all having a “great relationship” with HootSuite already, and that the company was looking to build a deal that would give them all “upside in Hootsuite’s success.”

We also reached out to HootSuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes, who wouldn’t comment directly on who might be investing but did confirm the $500 million valuation:

“At today’s run rate this would be a very fair valuation for investors, but we have yet to determine if we will bring in additional partners. That said, we have had quite a few inquiries,” he told me.

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter’s networks already form the core of the HootSuite social media dashboard. Enterprises (and individuals) use that dashboard to monitor social media interaction across those networks, and they also use HootSuite for custom analytics and for executing and monitoring campaigns using other services like MailChimp, which HootSuite allows users to do through the web and via mobile apps. Customers include PepsiCo, Fox and the NBA among 3.5 million others.

You can see how that relationship could become even closer and be even more beneficial for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. Companies like Twitter and Facebook, built on consumer bases, need more inroads into the enterprise sector to further build out their businesses. LinkedIn, built on an enterprise customer base, needs to build out more products to serve them. And Google needs a lot more traffic and traction for its Google+ social media strategy.

A $50 million round would be a huge step up for HootSuite, which is profitable already but has reached that end at a relatively modest pace.

When HootSuite reported that OMERS Ventures, a Canadian VC firm, had taken a $20 million stake in the company in March, that was done through secondary purchases from existing shareholders, which included employees and also Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures, Geoff Entress and Millennium Technology Value Partners.

Before that $20 million deal, HootSuite had picked up investments worth $4.9 million: $3 million in debt and only $1.9 million capital investment.

Earlier this year HootSuite had reported an annual run-rate of $11 million in revenues. At the time it reported 140 employees and now expects to double that by the end of 2012.

Some venues are checking IDs against Facebook on your phone, Google News gets the social treatment, and a judge informs his colleagues that an IP address is not a person. More »

Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: From fish to football—what's the connection? More »

Google News already featured some integration with Google+ in the past, but today, Google is expanding this integration by bringing “relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective” to its news aggregation site. Starting today, Google News users will be able to see what their circles, journalists covering the story and those who are the subject of the story have to say about it. Google News will now also feature a new “realtime coverage page” for every news story that will surface these Google+ comments, as well as new articles as they become available.

In addition to these updates, the Google News design will change a bit once these features go live, as Google is also expanding the size of the images on the main page.

These updates are only coming to the U.S. edition of Google News for now. Google plans to roll these features out over the next week, so chances are you won’t see them in your account just yet.

The main feature here, though, is obviously the addition of more content from Google+ on Google News. Given the almost visceral reaction many Google users have to Google+, the company has wisely decided to allow its users to opt out of this feature. If you don’t want to see these discussion from Google+, Google says, “you can either log out of Google or turn off the display of Google+ posts via the Google News settings page.”

CSV files are a common enough format for data that it's a bit strange Google Docs doesn't open it natively. However, you don't have load up Excel just to check out those files. As tech blog Digital Inspiration points out, it's easy to convert CSV files directly in Google Docs to make them readable. More »