Webware

Google's Street View is now live in Canada.

(Credit: Google)

Google announced on Wednesday that it has launched its Street View service to 11 cities in Canada, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, among others.

Google Street View, which originally launched in May 2007, allows users to virtually navigate neighborhoods in 14 countries around the world. When the service first launched, it was only available in five U.S. cities.

Street View has come under some fire since its debut for the service's alleged potential to infringe the privacy of those people found in its images. To address that issue in Canada, Google said in a statement that it "has gone to great lengths to ensure Canadians' privacy."

The company said that all the images in Canada's Street View are already visible from public roads. Identifiable faces and license plates were blurred to ensure no one in the images could be identified. As with its other Street View services, Google's Canadian Street View features a "Report a problem" link, allowing concerned users to request images be taken down.

Whether Google would ever be able to bring Street View to Canada was very much up in the air not too long ago. In September 2007, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart wrote to Google saying that she was concerned that the service might violate her country's privacy regulations. She believed that Street View could infringe Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2004.

For its part, Google said in the statement on Wednesday that it "consulted with Canada's federal and provincial Privacy Commissioners in developing Street View and its privacy safeguards." Evidently, that has helped the company bring Street View to the country.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Good news for Canadian iPhone owners. On Wednesday, finally crossed the border into Canada, where it is now available for download from the App Store. The well-known voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, app first became available for the Apple smartphone about five months ago, on March 29.

Skype for iPhone handles the basics of its desktop PC-to-PC and PC-to landline calling service. It offers free calls between Skype users over a Wi-Fi connection; Apple won't allow 3G-based data calls.

The app can, however, use 3G and EDGE data connections for non-call-related activities such as signing in and sending Skype instant messages. There are also competitive rates for calling out to a landline or mobile phone. Call forwarding has been implemented, as has Skype Voicemail and Skype-generated texting.

Besides English, Skype is also available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and Traditional Chinese.

Related story: Sold! eBay jettisons Skype in $2 billion deal

Oh, no! They can't get Twitter SMS updates anymore!

(Credit: Second City Television)

This can't be good. Just a few months after restricting its U.K.-based text-messaging number due to cost issues, Twitter has done the same for Canada.

The microblogging service has cut outbound SMS messages for the folks up north, citing "unexpected changes in our billing." Costs had been doubling for a few months.

Basically, this means Canadian Twitter users will be able to send numbers to its short code, 21212, but not receive them that way. They can instead use the Twitter mobile site or one of many third-party mobile apps to see what their friends are "tweeting," but that requires a mobile data plan. Text messages do not.

"There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world)," a post on Twitter's blog read. "We're working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress."

Twitter, which allegedly rejected a buyout offer from Facebook, has raised a significant amount of venture funding but has yet to produce a business plan.

Google's popular free 411 service GOOG-411 (1-800-4664-411) is now available in Canada. The toll-free directory service that uses Google results to give people phone numbers and addresses of local businesses launched in the States back in April of last year. Since then it's added an SMS maps service that will send you a link to the WAP-friendly map. The computerized operator has also since been enhanced, and now has a voice closer to the all-seeing HAL 9000 seen in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 instead of the Microsoft Sam-like one from before.

With the updated version the real work is not just in the sound of the voice, it's also in the service's capability to understand what people are saying. To that end, Google's official blog post on it says the voice recognition engine was tuned to better understand some of the Canadian dialects:

Although English is spoken in both the U.S. and Canada, there are enough differences between the way it's spoken in the two countries that we engineered GOOG-411 especially for Canadian English. We incorporated some Canadianisms [sic] such as "eh," "Traw-na," "Cal-gry," and, of course, "aboot." We also took into account geographical differences. Whereas users in the U.S. are prompted for "city and state," Canadians are asked for your "city and province."

For the segment of French-speaking Canadians, the announcement also says an updated version of the service with support for localized French is coming soon, which might lead to international variations for large markets in Europe.