Google Inc. on Monday released the latest upgrades to the mapping tools that rank among the company’s biggest success outside the Internet-leading search engine that steers much of the Web’s traffic.

The improvements include a major expansion of the satellite imagery included in Google’s three-dimensional software for touring Earth.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said four times more land will be covered in the latest version of its free Google Earth software, enabling about one-third of the world’s population to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhood.

Source: AP

Intel said Friday it will move up the ship date for Tulsa, its next CPU for multiprocessor servers, to the third quarter.

Intel originally had said Tulsa, aimed at four-way servers and above, was to ship toward the end of the second half of the year, said a spokesman for Intel.

Source: InformationWeek

MySpace Careers, a new site launched on Monday, is powered by Simply Hired’s online job-search engine.
The site, aimed at the typically young MySpace.com users, includes summer job categories such as internship, lifeguard, camp counselor and landscaping.

News Corp., along with Foundaton Capital, purchased a majority interest in Simply Hired for $13.5 million in April. Fox Interactive Media, a parent company of MySpace, is part of News Corp.

Source: News.com

icrosoft has re-branded its WinFX technologies as .Net Framework 3.0 to clarify the naming convention for its developer framework.

.Net Framework 3.0 is planned for inclusion in Windows Vista, due out in early 2007. The framework features the Windows Communication Foundation Web services platform; the Windows Presentation Foundation presentation layer technology; Windows Workflow, for workflow; and the newly renamed Windows CardSpace, for identity management. CardSpace had been code-named InfoCard. Current .Net Framework 2.0 technologies, such as the CLR (Common Language Runtime), also are part of .Net Framework 3.0

Source: InfoWorld

The lines are being drawn in the search wars, with Yahoo and Microsoft squaring off against Firefox and Google.

Yahoo has launched a customized version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 which has Yahoo search built into the browser.

The customized browser sets Yahoo.com as the default home page on the primary tab, while Yahoo Mail automatically loads in the secondary tab. The Internet giant used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Administration Kit to customize IE 7

Source: News.com

Microsoft was still warning users Monday to order a DVD copy of Windows Vista 2 rather than download the massive multi-gigabyte files, saying that it couldn’t pump out bits any faster without impacting the Internet as a whole. On Friday, the Redmond, Wash. developer posted a message on the Visa 2 Beta download and order page that said company servers were experiencing extremely high demand.

Source: InformationWeek

Apple’s iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 per month, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday.

The report, ‘iPod City’, isn’t available online. It offers photographs taken from inside the factories that make Apple music players, situated in China and owned by Foxconn.

The Mail visited some of these factories and spoke with staff there. It reports that Foxconn’s Longhua plant houses 200,000 workers, remarking: “This iPod City has a population bigger than Newcastle’s.”

Source: Macworld

Almost two thirds (64 per cent) of servers controlling spam traffic are located in Taiwan, according to a survey by email security firm CipherTrust.

Such servers, used by internet low lives to relay spam and phishing emails through zombie, compromised PCs, are also commonly located in the US. The US accounts for 23 per cent of the machines identified on CipherTrust’s spam server blacklist with China in a fairly distant third place (three per cent).

Source: TheRegister

Google’s online payment system, Gbuy, is expected to launch June 28, further pitting the Internet giant against industry titan and rival eBay, according to a research note released Friday by a Wall Street analyst.

Gbuy is expected to be free during the initial phase, but merchants may eventually be charged a 1.5 percent to 2 percent per-transaction fee, Jordan Rohan, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, said in his research note. A fee of that size would be slightly less than that charged by eBay’s online payment system, PayPal.

Source: News.com

AOL is opening its toolbox to the software-developer community with the purpose of bringing new services to its broad base of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users.

“We are looking for the best ideas from third-party developers to improve the IM network,” said Alan Keister, director of engineering for AIM. “It will increase the value of the service to us and to the AIM community.”

Building new automated “robots” that will help users quickly find information through AIM is a critical component of the initiative, said Keister.

Source: NewsFactor

Microsoft on Monday detailed a plan to make its Office applications a common entry point into back-end business applications from other vendors.

The initiative, called Office Business Applications, is meant to encourage third-party application providers to write code that will integrate closely with Microsoft Office applications.

Source: News.com

Some of the world’s top newspapers publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the Web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.

Flexible versions of these readers may be available as early as 2007.

Source: Reuters