Google

Google has added six new cities to its Google Maps Street View, as well as the ability to pan to the top of skyscrapers.

The new cities with the 360-degree view are: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. And the images in Phoenix, Tucson and parts of Chicago are in high resolution, like those in San Francisco and San Diego, according to Google's Lat Long Blog. There's also a dorky video about it on YouTube.

The images in the new cities were captured by Google's own camera-equipped cars since its contract with Canada-based Immersive Media expires … Read more

Google is acquiring Helsinki, Finland-based mobile social-networking provider Jaiku, also known as Twitter's competitor.

The news was announced on Jaiku's Web site:

"Exciting news: Jaiku is joining Google! While it's too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together, and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, … Read more

When Google first announced in 2006 that it had purchased @Last Software, and its Sketchup 3D modeling tool, there were few people more excited than Jerry Paffendorf.

Paffendorf was at that time the futurist-in-residence at The Electric Sheep Co., as well as one of the people behind the Accelerating Studies Foundation's Metaverse Roadmap project.

And he saw, even early last year, that folding Sketchup into Google could mean magic for virtual world developers, since it meant there was a high probability of a 3D, social virtual environment built around Google Earth.

As a futurist, Paffendorf was spot on: Virtual … Read more

I love wireless Internet.

I know, I'm hardly alone. There is no end to the number of road warriors and writers in cafes and rural professionals whose incomes and lifeline to friends and family depend on getting online on the go.

But after spending a few days away from connectivity, I'm really struck by just how vital Wi-Fi and other methods of getting on the Internet wirelessly are to me.

I noted the other day that I had managed, via an EV-DO card, to get a connection, albeit a slow one, while visiting my in-laws. This was ground-breaking, … Read more

Google is expanding its AdSense program so that Web site publishers can display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads, in addition to the traditional text ads that Google offers.

Pretty soon Web sites will be able to get any kind of content they want on their sites and get a cut of the revenue from accompanying ads. This will boost Google's already successful online ad business and give publishers a way to earn more money on their sites. Soon, we'll see Google distributing all of the … Read more

IBM and Google on Monday released details on their "academic cluster computing initiative" to provide data centers for remote computer programming.

The centers would allow a larger number of students and programmers to have access and processing power for writing software code involving massive amounts of data over the Internet, a practice known as "cloud computing."

The program, which is already under way at the University of Washington, will also be rolled out at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. IBM and … Read more

Keywords are a key element in every website and keyword research is at the foundation of SEO. Keywords don't just go into page titles, headings, and the copy of a page, but play a critical role in links, file names, and even the architecture of a site.

When we SEO practitioners think of keyword research, we often think of "full-blown" research projects, pulling and filtering through thousands of keyword phrases. This kind of research can't be understated, but sometimes it's more than we need. There are times when we just need to fine-tune a page, … Read more

A tech industry legend who claims Google fired him because he was too old to fit into the company "culture" has just won another shot at making his case in court.

A California state appeals court in San Jose on Thursday threw out a lower court's decision to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Internet pioneer Brian Reid. He's best known for helping to create the first firewall, the pioneering AltaVista Internet search engine and the alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups in Usenet.

Reid, who was 54 when he filed his lawsuit in 2004, came to Google as … Read more

I'm sitting in a tent at 4,000 feet, surrounded on all sides by national forest. And I'm online.

It's astounding.

This is where my in-laws live, on top of a mountain, a 45 minute drive to the nearest town. I've never been able to get online here before. In fact, when I was first coming here, in 2000 or so, we could barely get a cell signal.

But here I am, connected--albeit, certainly not at high-speed--via Verizon's EV-DO network. Doing Google searches. I even got into Second Life for a moment.

I mean, I'… Read more