There is only one thing that I can say about the whole situation – I am glad that it is Google who provided maps that depict the different evacuation routes as well as various shelters for those affected by Hurricane Sandy to go to, if it were Apple Maps, one would most probably find non-existent shelters, or perhaps they might even walk into the eye of the storm itself. Apart from that, the Internet search giant also introduced a new service which will send emergency alerts to Google users.
All the information provided was garnered from government agencies such as Ready.gov and the National Weather Service. Google initially wanted to introduce this service sometime down the road, but needless to say, Hurricane Sandy forced Google’s hand, and the future iterations of Google’s efforts will include alerts from other services such as Nixle that publishes messages from the local police.
Nigel Snoad, a product manager for Google Crisis Response, said, “This is part of our continuing mission to bring emergency information to people when and where it is relevant.” Did you find this new service to be extremely useful?
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Maps increases new building footprints by 25 million , Street View in Google Maps on mobile browser is good to go,
Whenever a particular device or consumer electronics arrive at the FCC, you know for sure that it is being primed for a general release to the masses, and the same can be said for the Dell XPS 10. Having arrived at the doorsteps of the FCC today, complete with its user manual as well as photos of the 10” tablet’s case and internal components, we do look forward to the day where the Dell XPS 10’s product page appears for the masses to take advantage of – after parting with their fair share of dollars and cents, of course.
There is a certain prestige for a country to more or less “own” the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and the Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that they have just turned on such a behemoth, calling it the Titan. At the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility, its latest Titan system has gone live, where it is capable of performing a whopping 20,000 trillion calculations a second, hitting the 20 petaflops mark – which is actually 10 times more powerful compared to the laboratory’s Jaguar supercomputer, once billed as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, lying in sixth place today.
Does 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in under a week sound impressive to you? This is quite a strong start by any standards, as Microsoft continued with their aggressive overhaul of its Windows operating system, now arriving at Windows 8. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shared some statistics at the annual Build developer conference, citing that 4 million Windows users have already upgraded their operating systems since it was launched late last week.
The land of fine wine, food and women (in no particular order) might soon be the first country in the world that imposes taxes on search engines – if French President Francois Hollande has his way. He is working on a new kind of tax which will require search engines like Google to fork out money each time they make use of content from the French media. Hollande did work out some small talk with Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, during a meeting in Paris yesterday.
Should you happen to use both Twitter and Skydrive in a prolific manner, then you would obviously realize that it was possible to only post links to your stream – until today, that is. From now on, Skydrive images will also be able to be posted natively on your Twitter feed, which is a nice albeit small gesture to include. Obviously, this is not some sort of ground-breaking feature, but it sure as heck is more than a welcome addition to the micro-blogging tool.
Most of us would not give second thoughts about our keyboards – after all, aren’t these inanimate objects that do not have the ability to think, feel, or express itself (other than respond to your keystrokes, that is)? Robbie Tilton of NYU decided to take a second look at the humble keyboard that is used by millions and millions of people worldwide, where this bit of inspiration came about after he undertook a course in fabrication, realizing that he wanted to introduce a change of pace in keyboard technology – by making it more personal and less lifeless. The Natural Keyboard, as he calls it, is a wooden keyboard that comes slathered in moss, and you are required to add some moisture from time to time so that the moss does not die off and stink.