Category: Archive

Attention all Street View fans: another update’s been announced, and this one could be considered especially significant.  Images of Hawaii were released, meaning Street View now has coverage of all 50 U.S. states.

Street View’s come a long way since its early days of functioning as a fun little distraction/curiosity.  It’s now a useful resource for travelers, an advertising aid for businesses, and even a friend of some tourist agencies (the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau worked with Google on this latest update).

Microsoft announced that it has made some changes to Bing Maps. Changes include the color of the navigation bar, draggble routes, zoom bar changes, command parsing, embedding, dynamic computing, new navigation, speed, and Bing Maps will no longer stop at the international date line, but will wrap around the world continuously.

Amazon.com has released its free Kindle for PC application that allows users to read books on their personal computer without having to own the e-reader device.

The move comes as Amazon aims to make it s Kindle content available on a broader range of devices. Kindle books can now be read on the iPhone, iPod touch, Kindle DX and now a PC.

As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization’s content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview.

If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn’t frequently crawled by search engines.

Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns’ effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

Google said Tuesday it is working with airports in the U.S. as well as Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, Airport Marketing Income and others to provide free Wi-Fi as a "holiday gift" through January 15, 2010.

The free Wi-Fi is available in 47 airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte. As a result of this project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

LinkedIn has developed a reputation for being a rather sedate, professional site.  Twitter, on the other hand, is at the anything-goes, trend-of-the-minute end of the social networking spectrum.  But last night, the two companies announced a partnership that should see a bit of back-and-forth result.

Social Media policies of well-known organizations often appear in the news with commentary throughout the Blogosphere, the Twitterverse, etc. There is an ongoing debate about just how restricted social networks should be when it comes to employee use.

Where do you stand on this debate? Share your thoughts.

Amazon.com has just launched an online store for jeans it calls the Denim Shop.

To attract shoppers to its Denim Shop, Amazon is offering free shipping on some men and women’s jeans. It is also offering shoppers free returns for purchases that for whatever reason don’t work out. Customers will have up to 30 days to return their jeans for a full refund.

It could be said that the Google Books case is becoming the new Microsoft-Yahoo deal, having created all sorts of controversy and dragged on and on.  And on some more, as it turns out, since the involved parties are pushing a target date back again.