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2009

2009
Google City Tours Simplifies Trip Planning – Adds Walking Directions, Custom Maps
December 31, 2009 at 11:32 am 0

San Francisco -- The team at Google Labs last summer introduced a new service dubbed as Google City Tours, one of the ongoing projects by Google Labs team that has tweaked the interface that generated a tour of various attractions near a location including real walking directions and My Maps integration within walking distance of the starting point--making it more friendly as to how people actually vacation: head to a city, pick places to go, and get precise directions to them.

It fine tuned the service as it still had some rough edges, but it proved useful enough to become quite popular. It had a few major catches, though some of which have since been rectified by the developers team which is now providing an update on their progress.

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2009
Google Analytics Adds New Annotation Feature
December 31, 2009 at 11:29 am 0

Mountain View, California -- Google Analytics is one of the most robust offerings by the search giant and with its recent release of Google Analytics new features, it has almost become ubiquitous for a large number of companies reaping benefits from it. The Mountain View, Calif., company has just rolled out another set of pretty impressive new features. It includes “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.

This newly launched “annotations” feature which enables you to make comments and bookmark major campaigns on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days within your statistics for future reference. Although, many people criticize against the amount of data that Google has at its disposal as a result of their analytics offering. This will help to explain a spike or drop in traffic to other members within your organization, without having to dig through the past. (more…)
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2009
Facebook Ranked The Most Visited Website In The US On Christmas Day
December 30, 2009 at 1:38 pm 0

Los Angeles -- Hitwise, a market analytics firm that tracks online stats, has some good news for the team at Facebook. The popular social-networking entity Facebook hit an audience milestone recently when it was crowned as the most visited site in the U.S., for the first time on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, topping Google, according to research firm Hitwise.

Those two days mark the first time Facebook has historically gotten a traffic spike during the holidays. It seems that people flocked to Facebook to send season's greetings to friends and families, and all of that traffic catapulted the popular social networking site to the most visited site on the Internet. This was a first for the site in its history according to the statistics tracking company Hitwise.

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2009
Consumer Groups Urge FTC To Block Google’s AdMob Acquisition
December 30, 2009 at 1:36 pm 0

Washington -- Two consumer groups requested the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday to bar the global online search and advertising giant Google's proposed acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob, a provider of advertising services for mobile phones, citing potential damage on antitrust grounds and to address privacy issues raised by the deal to users, advertisers and application developers.

In a joint letter, Consumer Watchdog, a consumer advocacy organization, and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), an advocate of open access to the Internet urged the FTC to oppose Google's proposed acquisition of AdMob on anti-trust grounds and said that the planned deal would “substantially lessen competition in the increasingly important mobile advertising market.”

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2009
Google Confirms January 5 Android Media Event
December 30, 2009 at 1:33 pm 0

Mountain View, California -- It may be the much-anticipated moment the tech industry has been waiting for as Google apparently seems well prepared to give outsiders a glimpse at its latest vision of the world-changing possibilities of smartphones -- Google has officially scheduled an Android-related press event to be held next Tuesday, January 5 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters.

The Mountain View search giant dispatched invitations to various members of the media Tuesday, without disclosing any specifics about what is in store, to be held just days ahead of the annual CES gadget fest gets under way in Las Vegas.

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2009
Mozilla Pushes Timeline For New Version Of Firefox
December 29, 2009 at 12:02 pm 0

San Francisco -- Famed open source web browser, Firefox, looks to have a bit of a change of plans. Mozilla's next outburst in the browser wars originally intended to be released before the end of 2009, but now it would not come quite as soon as the company previously promised. Mozilla has pushed back the release of future Firefox versions.

Mozilla is forcing back deadlines for new versions of Firefox, estimating that consuming a bit more time to deliver new software will be worth the risk.

Firefox 3.6, which was originally planned for release this month, would not be available until sometime during the first quarter of 2010, and the release of Firefox 4.0 has been pushed back, as well. More time for the Firefox releases will allow Mozilla to perfect features, but may also allow Microsoft to gain more market share for Internet Explorer 8.

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2009
Twitter Fetches Location Tracking Start-Up “Mixer Labs” To Its Arsenal
December 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm 0

Los Angeles -- Popular micro-blogging website Twitter is acquiring the location tracking start-up “Mixer Labs,” in an attempt to enable users to map their Twitter posts to specific locations on maps and other tools, for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition would facilitate the site to enhance the “contextual” relevance of location to tweets -- messages posted on the site which can have a maximum of 140 characters.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mixer Labs, founded by two ex-Google employees, who have developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI. Twitter chief executive Evan Williams said the deal would allow Twitter users to indicate people where they are when they post updates to the site.

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2009
Google Assists Businesses Locate AdWords Professionals In Beta
December 29, 2009 at 11:58 am 0

Mountain View, California -- Companies that are looking for some assistance with their AdWords campaign may now rejoice to receive some thanks to Google. Google has launched a beta search platform that allows people to search for AdWords Professionals those certified by the company who can help manage their campaigns based on location and budget.

On the new Google Professionals Search homepage, people can search by location and budget they wish to allocate on a weekly basis, and allows you to find people who are approved by the Google Adwords Professional certification. (more…)
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2009
Yahoo Pulling Down MyBlogLog Next Month
December 28, 2009 at 10:54 am 0

Sunnyvale, California -- It seems like Yahoo has not done eliminating “non-core” services quite yet. “10 Million Dollars Down the Drain!” The company says it is going to shutter another popular blogging widget MyBlogLog next month, leaving more than a few people scratching their heads.

Still remember MyBlogLog? way back in 2006, it was one of the most popular social networking tool for bloggers because of one simple reason -- it allowed bloggers to put a face on their blog visitors.  (more…)
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2009
Google Starts Off Holiday Fashion Celebrates Christmas With Latest “Postcard Doodle”
December 28, 2009 at 10:42 am 0

San Francisco -- With all the latest Internet toys, and gadgets, Google has marked the start of the holiday season with the latest in a series of “Postcard Doodles” to mark special occasions and celebrations period. The image, the newest and more innovative designs in an extended tributes from Google, shows a small boat on a mountain lake and a festive building on the shoreline.

Google is famous for their innovative logos that commemorate major events. To start things off, Google is now displaying an image of a post card over the regular logo, rolling out a number of Holiday Wishes logos that they plan on rotating for the rest of the Holiday season, which is followed by the previous day's picture of a palm tree on the postcard that replaces the second half of the usual multi-coloured logo.

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