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Imagine hiking 5,000 miles through Asia, with only Google Maps as your guide. Winston Fiore, a U.S. marine formerly deployed to Senegal and Afghanistan, did it in about a year, calling the journey his "Smile Trek."

The inspiration for "Smile Trek" came in 2007 when Fiore witnessed "an incredible amount of poverty" while in Senegal. He then decided to set aside a year for traveling, and found a cause to throw his weight behind: the International Children's Surgical Foundation (ICSF), a nonprofit that provides free corrective surgery for kids in developing countries with cleft lips and palates.

For the past year, he has hiked through Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, and Singapore. He completed his journey last week.

Speaking to CNET Asia in Singapore, his start and end point, Fiore says he didn't carry any physical maps and only relied on Google Maps to map his daily walking route. (Probably a good thing Fiore wasn't using an iPhone 5 -- we all know about the Apple Maps kerfuffle.)

Along with Google Maps, Fiore relied on Google Translate (to communicate with locals); Google Latitude (for keeping his family, friends, and supporters informed of his whereabouts); and MyTracks (to record his speed, distance, and places visited). … Read more

The Federal Trade Commission may not have enough evidence of harm to consumers to proceed with an antitrust claim against the heart of Google's business, search, Bloomberg reported.

Google faces antitrust investigations from the U.S. FTC and from the European Commission, both going on for many months and both carrying the potential to wreak havoc with Google's search business. At the heart of the issue is whether Google gives unfair prominence to its own properties -- YouTube, Google Flight Search, Google Images, Google Shopping, Google Maps, and more -- at the expense of other businesses.

Regulators aren'… Read more

Payphones are a dying breed, which will probably make some people yearn for our simple past and others celebrate our tech-filled future.

New York City and two companies, Cisco Systems and City 24/7, announced today that they're officially commencing their plan to transform those endangered species into 32-inch touch-screen information kiosks, a.k.a. "Smart Screens," around the city, according to GigaOM.

The idea was originally introduced in April and the companies have been testing the pilot project over the last few months. Now, the Smart Screens are officially live and a handful of kiosks are … Read more

It's hard to listen to Paul Davison and not get swept up in his enthusiasm, hard not to want to buy into his grand vision for the app his small company built.

Davison is the high-energy CEO of Highlight, a people discovery app for iPhone that came out last January, and that was widely predicted to start its world domination tour at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in much the same way that Twitter did in 2007 and Foursquare did in 2009.

Looking back, it's clear that much of the reason so many people expected so … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- There's so many choices. Cupcakes. Pizza. Sandwiches. Artisanal beverages. A chiropractor. Even a world-class speaker series. And that's all just within a few blocks.

My iPhone is in my hand, and I'm about to head out on a spending spree. No cash or credit cards will see the light of day, but I won't be having any uncomfortable conversations with security guards either. Welcome to my Square Wallet walking tour.

For the uninitiated who think of Square and visualize someone in a food truck ringing up a burrito by swiping a credit card … Read more

Tim Carter was blindsided when his home-improvement site AsktheBuilder.com fell out of favor with Google's search algorithm about 21 months ago. His daily ad revenue from Google AdSense crashed from $1,400 to $70.

"I have learned my lesson," Carter said. "Anybody who builds a business based on the whims of a search engine's algorithms -- that's a foolish thing to do."

This recrimination, mind you, is coming from a former Google advocate. In 2009, Google published an AdSense case study about his success, and Carter even testified before the U.S. Congress … Read more

Think of them as the good cop and the bad cop.

Two individuals hold central positions in Google's antitrust challenges from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the EU's European Commission. As the European commissioner for competition, Joaquin Almunia has tremendous influence over what happens to Google. And in the United States, George Mason University professor Joshua Wright is expected to get some influence soon as an incoming FTC commissioner.

They contrast sharply. Almunia has been highly critical of Google and how it's done business since becoming dominant in search. Wright, though, not only advocates minimal … Read more

Last updated: 10:30 a.m. PT, Nov. 19 with Facebook's statement.

Yahoo and Facebook in a grand search alliance? This news from unnamed sources came from The Sunday Telegraph, reporting that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have been talking about the two companies working together on a search engine.

Some industry watchers are throwing cold water on the report. Kara Swisher of All Things D, who has a good track record covering Yahoo's ups and downs, said that her sources indicated that the two Silicon Valley companies are not currently in … Read more

If you happened to have set up a TweetDeck column to filter tweets with the "#Debate" hashtag during any of the recent presidential or vice-presidential debates, you may well have had the same experience I did: the application crashing under the weight of thousands and thousands of posts per second.

With Twitter becoming a bigger and bigger part of mainstream culture, there are an increasing number of big events that generate huge numbers of tweets, and today the microblogging company announced it is attempting to address the dynamic of TweetDeck buckling when those events generate incredible amounts of … Read more