Category: Archive

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has launched an iPhone and computer application called FoxPop, aimed at offering users a more interactive experience while they watch DVDs or Blu-ray Disc.

Students and statistics hounds now have even more reason to love Google.  Today, the search giant announced that it’s made information related to 17 World Development Indicators available through standard search results pages.

Today, as is often the case, one tech company’s loss became another’s gain.  Utkarsh Srivastava has left Yahoo after spending more than three years as a senior research scientist there, and Srivastava confirmed (in well under 140 characters) that he’ll land at Twitter.

Srivastava’s background is quite impressive.  On the educational front, he earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford, and happened to receive the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, too.

Digital technologies continue to drive a new approach to shopping, with social media and mobile phones becoming key influencers this holiday season, according to a new survey of holiday retail spending and trends by Deloitte.

Social media is gaining traction with 17 percent of consumers planning to use social media during their holiday shopping, and 60 percent plan to use it to find discounts, coupons and sales information, More than half (53%) plans to use social media to research gift ideas, while 52 percent plan to check the gift wish lists of friends and family.

In a recent interview we wrote about this morning, Rupert Murdoch indicated that News Corp. may block search engines from indexing its sites.  Now, it doesn’t exactly look like Google’s going to offer money to him (or throw a fit) in response, as the search giant’s more or less replied by saying "fine."

Don’t be shocked if ads for 420,000 square feet of office space start popping up all over MySpace.  It seems that the social networking company no longer intends to use a particular facility, but until it can unload the space, has gotten stuck paying over $1 million per month.

Google has launched a new way to lock SafeSearch. What this accomplishes is, users will have to enter their password to change the setting, and Google Search results will be visibly different than when SafeSearch is not locked.

Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip:

YouTube has begun testing a new kind of ad format on some of its videos – skippable pre-rolls. These ads let users choose whether or not they want to watch the ad as it appears at the beginning of a video.

YouTube says that when it first began testing in-stream ads a couple years ago, abandonment rates on videos were as high as 70%. They found that users were much more likely to view and engage with overlay ads.

Mozilla is celebrating the fifth birthday of its Firefox browser today.

Mozilla says in the first four days of launch, more than 1 million people had downloaded Firefox 1.0 Now that number is at 330 million users globally, accounting for almost a quarter of all Internet users.

Currently Firefox is available in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7,000 add-ons to customize their browsing experience.

A quick, but important, note: the stuff we’re about to discuss is only available on an opt-in basis.  So there’s no need to stop halfway through this article and drown your phone or tape it to a neighbor’s car.  Now, with that out of the way, let’s move on to the news that Google Latitude’s gained two features called Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (which is in beta).