Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yesterday, Yahoo expanded their oneSearch feature and made it available for just about any phone in the US on Yahoo! Mobile Web Service.  oneSearch will give you quick access to important answers while you’re on the go. 

oneSearch provides you with a convenient way to perform your searches. It uses context like your zip code for location to provide you with relevant search results. The results you receive after performing a search are varied depending on what you’re searching for.

For example, if you’re searching for a camera, it will provide you results divided into categories like products, product categories, and nearby camera stores.  Another example is if you’re searching for pizza. oneSearch will pull up a list of options with phone numbers and ratings from users for the different pizza places around, and you’ll also see business categories pertaining to it, Flickr photos of pizza, and several related web sites.

If you were to select one of the options that it gave you, you’d get another layer of information with the “extended details” option(pictured to the left).  Then you’d see more options like getting directions, or actually reading the reviews for the restaurant from Yahoo users who’ve rated or reviewed it on Yahoo Local.

You’ll probably notice that Yahoo is monetizing oneSearch by using advertisements, and sponsored links. Overall, the search results will give more more than just a bunch of links to Yahoo pages, and the interface is much improved, so the discrete adds will probably be worth it.

If you’re wanting to get oneSearch on your mobile phone (if you’re in the US), you can click here , and in the upper right corner you’ll be able to enter in your phone number to receive a text message with a link to get you started with oneSearch on the mobile web.

Yahoo is definitely taking the competition with Google seriously because they’ve made the extra effort to create a PDF that compares the two. If I had to choose between using Yahoo’s oneSearch on my mobile phone over Google’s search, at this point I’d pick Yahoo. They’ve done a great job of integrating their services to provide a concise helpful mobile search.

Source: Read/Write Web [via Yodel Anecdotal]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on April 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Like the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China are being followed in a whole new way this time around, thanks to the Internet. With the Olympics quickly approaching, we’ll be seeing that more and more people follow the events leading up to the start of the games, and then of course the actual sporting events via the Internet whether it be through blogs, online news sites, or maps. And of course big Internet companies like Microsoft and Google are doing their part to make it happen by creating different sites and services related to the Olympics.

We already know one huge way in which Microsoft will be involved, and that’s with their Silverlight platform. They teamed up with NBC several months ago to build www.nbcolympics.com and Microsoft’s Silverlight will be playing a pretty big role on that site. Offerings include:

• 3,000 hours of on-demand Olympic videos will be available (replays, highlights, etc)
• 20 simultaneous live video streams
• 2,200 hours of live event video coverage
• Full-screen viewing will be available
• Metadata overlays so users can view statistics, bios, rules, etc.

At this point Google is involved in the Olympics with Google Maps. Just yesterday on the Lat Long Blog, Google announced that they launched an embeddable map (shown below) as well as a Google Earth layer so that users can follow the path of the 2008 Torch Relay. Users can watch as the torch travels from city to city and over oceans to reach Beijing by August 8th.

By pulling up http://maps.google.com/help/maps/torchrelay/ , we found that the Torch was in Istanbul, Turkey yesterday and tomorrow it will be in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Kids especially, could have a lot of fun with this and learn something in the process.

Sources: TechCrunch, Google Earth Blog

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on April 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Most mapping services out there have some type of real-time traffic system which helps alert users to the locations where traffic might be backed up. Microsoft up until now, hasn’t had such a feature with their Live Maps. As of yesterday not only do they have a real-time traffic feature for Live Maps, theirs is arguably better than any of the others thanks to a technology called Clearflow.

Clearflow has been a project in the works for over five years now and was developed at Microsoft’s Research laboratories. The New York Times describes it as “an ambitious attempt to apply machine-learning techniques to the problem of traffic congestion.  The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on the freeways and spills over onto city streets.” The nicest feature that is now available with Live Maps thanks to Clearflow, is that drivers can receive alternative routes based upon four years worth of real-world traffic data.

At the moment, this technology is available in 72 cities. They cover most major cities in the United States, and other cities will be added in the future. Traffic is predicted based upon several things like time of day, weather, sporting events that may be going on, and other factors. Not only do they look at major street and interstates, they also look at traffic conditions on side streets to help determine the best route. Clearflow takes into consideration so many more factors than other traffic services which should help users get to where they need to go with the least amount of congestion as possible.

What we’d like to see is the Clearflow technology integrated into Microsoft’s Live Search Mobile so that people can use their mobile phones to get the most up-to-date conditions. It would also be helpful if when you were getting directions, you could enter in the date and time you’d be making your trip.

Aside from the new traffic avoidance feature, Live Maps has launched a new version with all kinds of improvements and features like:

• Export your collection to your Nav/GPS device
• Improved “version 2″ cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix)
• 1-click directions improvements
• MapCruncher integration (add layers of information)
• “GeoWeb” tagging and collections enhancements
• and more…

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 08, 2006 by CyberNet.

When a new version of a program becomes available, so many of us are quick to download the updates to see what’s changed or what is better. While getting the latest is typically a good thing, sometimes it’s not. Maybe there are compatibility issues or other problems which require you to return to a previous version. When you want an older version of a program, at times it’s difficult to track it down. I have come across two different websites that make finding and downloading previous versions of software easy; they are versiontracker.com and old-versions.net.

Version Tracker is organized nicely and divided into 4 different platforms: Mac OS X, Mac OS 8/9, Windows, and Palm OS. This makes searching for software easy. They also organize updates into categories like audio, educational, games, graphics, etc. The amount of software to search from is insane and they update previous versions regularly. This is probably the greatest thing about it. For each download, they provide a lengthy list of the changes that were made. One downfall is that they do not host the download files themselves. For example, I clicked on a previous version of Skype that I wanted to download. When clicking to download the file, it forwarded me to Skype where only the latest version was available.

Another website is old-versions.net which doesn’t have nearly the amount of programs that Version Tracker has, but the ones they do have are pretty common and probably the most widely used. They organize into categories such as internet, communications, and security. You can find well known programs such as Firefox, Opera, WinRAR, Winamp, Acrobat Reader, etc. They actually host the files themselves so you’ll have no problem getting the version that you want. While they lack the vast amount of software to choose from like Version Tracker has, you can be sure that you won’t have a problem downloading the file that you need as you won’t be sent to the developer’s site for the original download. If you have any reason to track down a previous version of software, try versiontracker.com or old-versions.net. Between the two sites you’re bound to find and get the download of what you’re looking for.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

While developing our new site we decided to move away from the orange text because a lot of readers have emailed me saying that it is hard to see. We decided to go from orange to a more gold color because it is easier to read. The combination of blue and gold that we chose can be seen to the right (they have a few effects applied to them so that they look a little glossy).

It wasn’t an easy decision but thanks to the color scheme finder we were able to find complimentary colors in just a matter of seconds. I found it when searching for a way to find some nice matching colors and I didn’t even have gold in mind. Once I found this site it recommended a shade of gold that perfectly complimented the blue we chose to use. The best part is that it gives you several different shades of colors along with their HEX values so that you can easily implement them into your HTML.

If you have your own website that targets web development then go ahead and place this tool on your site for free! They give you the HTML code that uses an iframe to integrate it and this is the URL for that iframe. Even if you don’t want to embed it into your site you may find that you like using that URL to lookup color schemes because it doesn’t have anything else on the page…it’s just a nice clean interface.

Maybe you’ll find some use out of the color scheme finder and I definitely hope that you like the new colors our site will have when the redesign launches on Thursday.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com