Google is stealthily preparing to launch an Amazon Prime competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway (though no specifics were mentioned by our sources).

When and if it launches, the product will be a competitor to Amazon Prime, eBay Now, Postmates’ “Get It Now” and even smaller startups like Instacart.

We’re hearing that the project is being run by Tom Fallows, an e-commerce product manager at Google, and is an effort to focus Google’s e-commerce initiatives. Google Wallet and Google Shopping need a focal point, and serving as a “store shelf” to big-name retailers could be that in. Google has been scrambling for a way to capitalize on its advantages in the space — the fact that it’s arguably one of the first places people visit when they want to find a product — for a while.

If the Google Shopping Express service debuts publicly, and we have no reason to think that it won’t, this would mean that the company could capitalize on its recent acquisitions of both BufferBox and Channel Intelligence to dominate the online-to-offline retail market. Google could possibly use its BufferBox delivery lockers to facilitate the ease of shipment — like what Amazon has been testing in Seattle, New York and the UK. It could use Channel Intelligence’s data-management platform to coordinate sales and delivery.

We believe Google employees may already be dogfooding the service, but we have little information as to how partnerships are handled and how subscribing works. You know where to find us if you do.

In the midst of today’s news whirl, this tidbit slipped through the cracks; Part of the design team Cuban Council has apparently been acq-hired by Google, according to a note on their blog. Google has also confirmed the mini-acquisition in an email to TechCrunch.

“We’re very excited to share that some folks on our team will be joining Google to focus on design aspects of Google+,” reads the Cuban Council blog, titled “A New Voyage,” ”Having worked closely with a variety of Google product teams since 2005, we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to focus our creative efforts within the organization.”

Cuban Council has served some pretty high-profile tech clients, including Google, Quora and Evernote, and is perhaps most famous for designing Facebook’s logo (full story here). There’s no word on how many of the team, which may have already been working on the Google+ product, will continue at the firm, or continue taking on non-Google business.

“Cuban Council’s unique approach to design has helped them create the visual identities of some of the most well-known brands on the web,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, “We’ve worked with them for years and think they’ll be a great fit here.”

The search company would not disclose the terms or price of the deal, or even where on the spectrum of “acquisition” versus “hire” it was.

Google+ honcho Bradley Horowitz announced one more Google+ partner at LeWeb today, tablet news app Flipboard. Flipboard joins Buddy Media, Hootsuite, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, Involver and Vitrue as a Google+ “trusted” partner.

The API will soon allow Flipboard users to Google+ comment on and +1 Flipboard items, in addition to sending individualized pieces of content to Google+ Circles. “It works like it should,” said Horowitz, “Flipboard has done an amazing job. “

Google+ has been infamously slow in opening its API to the public, so this is a small, but monumental baby step in the history of the product. When asked what was taking them so long, Horowitz was defensive, “We squeezed a decade of social networking history into 11 months.”

So will it be a year before they have a full public API? We’re assuming that Google will probably announce an exact date for all access at Google i/o, instead of (yet) another partner.

Company culture is a huge competitive advantage: That’s why Zuckerberg obsesses over Facebook’s hackathons and why Yahooers “bleed purple.” Of course, anything that causes people to feel loyal to organizations that encompass thousands of people is a force to be reckoned with, right?

At Foursquare they name their conference rooms after Foursquare badges, like ‘Gossip Girl’ or (Yes!) ‘Wino.’ Twitter has so many projects named after birds that it’s built an internal Wiki in order to keep track of them all.

At TechCrunch we’ve gotten hung up on a “Sharks” metaphor lately; i.e. we’re a team of sharks that devours our prey (news, lol).

And Google, well, Google is kind of random — Aside from the “Smart Ass” ad relevancy system, Google tends to name its projects after animals, like Gmail was “Caribou” and Google Drive was “Duck.”

But not always. Google Plus was coined “Emerald Sea” after this Albert Bierstadt  painting, with the metaphor being that if Google were to sit on its laurels and ignore Facebook’s rapidly encroaching advances, it would get swept up in an Emerald Sea much like the poor ship in the painting. Google Buzz was (inexplicably) called “Taco Town.”

Competitor companies at Google are code-named after countries, like Microsoft is Canada (because it once threatened it would move to Canada) and Aol is Hawaii (because founder Steve Case was born in Honolulu).

The coolest one I’ve heard? That Google’s Project Glass, its endeavor to build Minority Report-esque augmented reality glasses, is called ”Wingman,” because it’s meant to serve as your wingman as you navigate life. You know, like using its facial recognition technology to lookup any potential hookup partners on Facebook … I’M JUST KIDDING (But yeah, the future seriously has so much potential for sketchy).

Carry on.

The tech world woke up today to reports of an imminent Apple TV, as Apple works to solidify deals with content providers. The rumored television product could indeed be ground-breaking, not just for television, but for computing as a whole. We’re hearing exactly what Nick Bilton reported earlier this year, that Apple is going to integrate Siri into Apple TV as well as other iOS devices.

In fact a multi-platform Siri could be unveiled as early as next week, when Apple announces the iPad 3.

Hardcore right? Well our friends over in Mountain View, never ones to miss out on an opportunity to compete, have come up with their own answer to Siri, Google ‘Assistant’ (earlier reports had it pegged as ‘Majel,‘ I have no idea whether that name was scrapped but do know that ‘Assistant’ is not a part of GoogleX as Majel was).

Google has had the in-house voice technology for ages — it hired Mike Cohen, the guy who started Nuance. But ‘Assistant’ is set to go beyond Siri in many ways, most importantly in that the search company will retain complete control of all the layers involved.

The project, helmed by the Android team with the involvement of search engineer Amit Singhal, has three parts according to a source.

1) Get the world’s knowledge into a format a computer can understand.

2) Create a personalization layer — Experiments like Google +1 and Google+ are Google’s way of gathering data on precisely how people interact with content.

3) Build a mobile, voice-centered “Do engine” (‘Assistant’) that’s less about returning search results and more about accomplishing real-life goals.

Unlike Apple with Siri, Google is planning on extending this service to developers so they can build novel things. Imagine the possibilities for apps, websites, etc interested in hooking into ‘Assistant’?

From what I know, Google has now set its ambitions beyond social and is focused wholeheartedly on building this “Do engine,” or goal oriented search: 2011 was the year of social for Google. 2012 is the year of ‘Assistant.’

According to one source, Google higher-ups plan on unveiling the ‘Assistant’ product by the fourth quarter of 2012, though they themselves are uncertain. Because our details are sparse for now, the fact that we might be missing a huge piece of this puzzle is also a possibility.

Email me if you know more, it’s alexia@techcrunch.com

Image: Warren Goldswain

Let’s say that you’re browsing the searchable web at your job, looking for some facts on some hot startup or whatever it is you get paid to do …

You’re sitting there web surfing, just going about your business on Google.com, and all of a sudden it’s like “Well gee I’ve got seven notifications on Robert Scoble Google+ … Well let me just click on this animated red button here …”

“Hmm … well look at this ‘hi sweet baby how r u’ comment some stranger has left on my last post [click] …” And boom, seventeen hours later you awaken deep inside the belly of the Google+ beast, with the crumbs from day-old Dorito taco shells crusted around your mouth and empty Merlot bottles strewn across the floor.

“FROM WHERE YOU ?” some random person from your “Public” circle asks from within your 20-person Google+ hangout. The answer is … “I DON’T KNOW.”

My point is that my Presidents’ Day weekend your whole Google+ K-hole could have been avoided, had  I you used “Go Away! Google Plus” a user script that eliminates those pesky (and manipulative) Google+ notifications and requests to share plaguing you every time you visit a Google site, except for when you visit plus.google.com on purpose, of course.

The script can be installed directly from this page in Chrome and needs a Greasemonkey extension to work in Firefox, an extra plugin to work in Safari and what the hell are you doing using IE?

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go wash Doritos out of my hair. Enjoy!

Image via Guanabee

Let’s say that you’re browsing the searchable web at your job, looking for some facts on some hot startup or whatever it is you get paid to do …

You’re sitting there web surfing, just going about your business on Google.com, and all of a sudden it’s like “Well gee I’ve got seven notifications on Robert Scoble Google+ … Well let me just click on this animated red button here …”

“Hmm … well look at this ‘hi sweet baby how r u’ comment some stranger has left on my last post [click] …” And boom, seventeen hours later you awaken deep inside the belly of the Google+ beast, with the crumbs from day-old Dorito taco shells crusted around your mouth and empty Merlot bottles strewn across the floor.

“FROM WHERE YOU ?” some random person from your “Public” circle asks from within your 20-person Google+ hangout. The answer is … “I DON’T KNOW.”

My point is that my Presidents’ Day weekend your whole Google+ K-hole could have been avoided, had  I you used “Go Away! Google Plus” a user script that eliminates those pesky (and manipulative) Google+ notifications and requests to share plaguing you every time you visit a Google site, except for when you visit plus.google.com on purpose, of course.

The script can be installed directly from this page in Chrome and needs a Greasemonkey extension to work in Firefox, an extra plugin to work in Safari and what the hell are you doing using IE?

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go wash Doritos out of my hair. Enjoy!

Image via Guanabee

So I tend to think of news in this industry as falling into two basic categories 1) Boring as fuck 2) So hyper-dramatic I feel like I need to take a ton of anti-anxiety medication just to read Techmeme.

While tons of crap posts this week have fallen into the former category, a few have fallen into the latter, mostly MG Siegler’s work surrounding Google’s failed efforts at, well, anything.  All of MG’s posts have been, to borrow a phrase, “very well done” — Mostly because they lean into the drama.

The fact that tech news can be so crazy histrionic is a byproduct of the personality game that this industry essentially is; It’s all about conflict and genius and conflict. I mean here Google is incorporating its social initiatives into its own search results and everyone is acting like its going around murdering children. I mean, it’s enough to unfriend Google on Facebook!

This heightened sense of drama around a seemingly mundane series of events is part of what makes the Hitler “Downfall” meme so funny important. The Hitler in the tribute clip above is so enraged at Google+’s transgressions, “It’s definitely going to change the way I share stuff.”

And, for the record, MG and Mike are not “starting a new TechCrunch.” They are really really busy being VCs.

Via/ Parislemon and a bunch of people on Twitter. 

Google, Google, Google … What’s amazing is that you still haven’t learned how to market yourself socially, after all these years. Lesson 1) You can’t just strong-arm people into using your product .

Seriously, you’ve got to, like, you know, earn traction by making something people want and not, like, use your search muscle to make sure people hit up your social stuff. It might “work,” sure. But don’t for a minute think that we all can’t see through that shit for just what it is.

You don’t have to listen to me. I am merely a blogger after all; crazy and not even that good. But here’s the gist: I’ve been talking to people, Normal people (because I’m hanging out with my family in the OC this week) and they don’t like what you’re doing. At all. In fact, the only time they even think about Google+ is when someone mentions it on Facebook. Or Twitter. Ring the alarm.

The time has come. You unleashed “Search, plus Your World” which has the weirdest punctuation, right? But aside from that these “Normal” people don’t use Google+ as their world, in fact they just use Google+ when it’s delivered at their front door like a FedEx package… for work or something, right?

Sure, there’s just a toggle between Google+ and World, so people should chill the fuck out? I agree. Chill the fuck out y’all; Google is just trying to make the world a better place. Right? Right?