The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘from-companies’

Google just added another content boost to its stream of real-time information: it now features MySpace updates, which will start appearing both on Google’s main search results page and under the ‘Updates’ filter in the advanced search bar. The move was actually announced back at Google’s search event in December, which featured the debut of Google’s real-time search results, and is going live today. MySpace says that it sees around 1 billion status updates a month, which is about on par with what Twitter currently gets according to a recent Pingdom report.

Rather than launching a site dedicated to real-time search results, Google incorporates a constantly updating real-time feed into its main results page as a small widget nestled between the standard static links. Other partners providing real-time results include Twitter, which like MySpace, is sharing its full stream with Google. Facebook has also agreed to share some of its content in the future (integration with Google hasn’t launched yet), but it will only be sharing updates from companies, celebrities, and groups with Facebook Pages — not updates from the site’s 400 million users.

MySpace’s push towards openness and real-time has been one of the only bright spots for the site in the last year. The company recently fired CEO Owen Van Natta only nine months after a hiring him. And despite an executive overhaul last spring we haven’t seen many changes to the site’s core functionality, which badly needs to change if MySpace is going to reverse its downwards spiral.

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.

Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating “Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon” from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don’t speak the language. Google Translate works in more than 50 languages.

Schmidt also revealed that 60,000 Android phones are being sold each day now.

Missing a payment on your car might get a whole lot dicier in the near future as more and more dealerships are equipping vehicles with devices capable of disabling vehicles remotely. Termed “electronic reposession,” drivers will be reminded to pay the car’s bill thanks to a non-stop series of annoying beeps if payment hasn’t been received within 24 hours of the due date. Consumers’ rights advocates point out that motorists could be stranded somewhere dangerous or late for work thanks to a remotely disabled car and worry that billing errors have the potential to render some cars undriveable even though the bills have been paid on time, but car dealerships and even some consumers think the tradeoff is worth it

Read more here: 
Repossession going electronic with remote vehicle disablers