Daily Archives: May 30, 2007

Google’s creepy new maps feature

May 30, 2007 7:43 pm

For all its talk about not being evil, Google’s latest maps innovation is, well, a bit creepy. Similar to the now-defunct "block view" feature on Amazon’s A9 search engine, Google’s new "street view", makes it possible to zoom in for an up close view of addresses in Google Maps.

That is well and good for someone who was interested in locating something like the FT bureau in San Francisco, for example. But it veers into the Orwellian when it allows you to peek into the windows of unsuspecting private citizens such as this Boingboing reader, who was startled to see that Google’s street-level photographers had captured an image of her tabby cat perching in her living room window. Read more

Posted in Internet | Permalink

HP and “Printing 2.0″

May 30, 2007 7:42 pm

People and companies around the world will print the equivalent of more than 50 trillion pages in 2010. Vyomseh, Joshi, head of Hewlett-Packard’s $27bn imaging and printing group, spent this morning in New York outlining how the company plans to capture more of them.

According to HP, an astouding 48 per cent of pages printed in the home now come from the world wide web, in the form of travel itineraries, directions, news articles and other online media. In spite of this huge demand for web printing, formatting remains a problem. Simply put, most web pages look terrible when you print them out. Read more

Posted in Tech | Permalink

Last.fm’s $280m jackpot

May 30, 2007 7:40 pm

Who says European entrepreneurship is dead? Last.fm, a music site that pools its users’ preferences to offer personalised music recommendations, became the latest EU-based startup to be bought out on Wednesday after it agreed to be acquired by CBS for $280m. The company, which operates from the gritty streets of East London, is the latest in a string of internet deals for the US television network. Other recent deals include CBS’s acquisition of Wallstrip.com, an innovative web show; and investments in Joost, the online TV site created by the founders of Skype, and Spot Runner, a web-based TV ad group.

Richard Jones, a Last.fm founder, outlined the company’s reasoning about the deal on the recently-launched Last.fm blog: Read more