If true, it’s really interesting. When I started hearing that Apple was working with Nuance last year on the Siri stuff, digging in, I learned that one of the reasons why Google was one of the few companies with their own voice technology was thanks to Cohen. Nuance is known to be very aggressive with pursuing lawsuits over their IP, which leads to a lot of partnerships — like Apple. Google was able to maneuver these waters without a Nuance partnership because Cohen was a co-founder of — wait for it — Nuance. And, more importantly, holds several of his own patents in the space.

Google is clearly working on their own direct Siri competitor for Android. And it was presumed that Cohen — and his patents — would be the key to this. But if he’s now gone from Google, it raises a lot of questions. 

(via Dan Primack)

The writing has been on the wall for this for some time. Chrome is great and IE hasn’t done anything interesting in years — the recipe for disruption. I suspect Google themselves will announce this milestone soon.

Next up: the battle for mobile browsing dominance. Safari clearly has the lead here right now, but Google is pushing hard with Chrome for Android. Next up: Chrome for iOS?

Given my love of Kickstarter, it should be no surprise that I’m also extremely excited about a company like Crowdtilt, which is aiming to push the crowd-funding model into real world events. And it should be even less of a surprise that CrunchFund has invested. 

When I first met with co-founder James Beshara to chat about the service, we talked about the episode of Friday Night Lights where Billy and Tyra raise money for the massive party they throw after one of the games. Just imagine if they could Crowdtilt it…

Sold.

TechCrunch has more as well.