Yahoo Inc. has publicly launched its Trip Planner, a research tool that allows users to create their travel guides and itineraries and share their experiences online.

Yahoo Trip has several new features, including personalized formats for journals with text and photos and simple search functions to help find others’ journal entries for help with planning. It also has an interactive map with top trip plans, as well as pan and zoom technology. Yahoo Network Integration offers search integration, travel guides and FareChase.

Other new features include Web clipping and tagging, a recommendation engine from Yahoo Travel Guides, printing options, community feedback and collaborative editing capabilities.

Source: InformationWeek

This sounds like more of a product promotion tie-in than a technological breakthrough, but the new SanDisk U3 Cruzer Smart Drives have Skype loaded in. You can keep all your contacts, account info, and the Skype program on the disk and use it on any old computer you visit—provided that computer has a mic and speakers.

Source: gizmodo

Michael Horwin, founder of Cancer Monthly, has just launched a new web site called MyCancerPlace, which he’s calling the first cancer-focused community website. It’s modeled on MySpace, but, Horwin said in an email, focused on helping cancer patients share and find treatment information.

Source: Wired

Be extra careful when looking for work in cyberspace. The FBI is investigating some cases that involve fake job interviews and offers of employment that are actually ways to lure people into helping crime rings.

The FBI has released a warning, saying it is investigating several “online employment scams. The FBI outlined several schemes and told candidates to protect their information and be skeptical of some prospective employers.

Some of the cases under investigation involve fake job interviews or offers of employment that are actually ways to lure people into helping crime rings.

According to the warning, fake recruiters are pretending to do background checks or set up bank accounts for direct deposit. Instead of getting a job, the candidates become victims of identity theft or owners of empty bank accounts.

Source: InformationWeek

The first processor of “Keifer” - Intel’s project name for many-core processors - will be surfacing in the 2009/2010 time frame and integrate 32 cores (128 threads total): The first Keifer chip will be manufactured in 32 nm and use eight processing nodes with four cores each. Every node will have direct access to one 3 MB on-die last level cache (LLC) and 512 kB L2 cache. There will be a total of 8 x 3 MB LLC slices that are connected by a ring architecture and represent a total 24 MB of cache,” Gruener reports.

Source: tgdaily

Achieving a long-sought goal of the $48 billion memory chip industry, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. announced the commercial availability of a chip that combines traditional memory’s endurance with a hard drive’s ability to keep data while powered down.

The chips, called magnetoresistive random-access memory or MRAM, maintain information by relying on magnetic properties rather than an electrical charge. Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, MRAM is fast to read and write bits, and doesn’t degrade over time.

Source: AP

Desktop collaboration software options for the Linux platform will get a boost when IBM releases its Lotus Notes on Linux product on July 24.

IBM will deliver this product, its first mainstream business application for the Linux desktop, using the platform-independent Eclipse development environment, and all applications built in this environment will also work with future versions of Notes for the Windows and Macintosh platforms, according to Fontaine.

Source: eWeek

Sony’s PlayStation 3 will play almost every PlayStation game, a senior IBM staffer has claimed. It’s not clear how many PSOne titles won’t play, but according to Tom Reeves, VP of semiconductor and technology services at IBM, even 40 of them was too high a number for Sony.

Source: TheRegister

Google has been ordered to disclose the identity of one of its advertisers. The High Court has issued the ruling to assist a potential copyright infringement case.

Helen Grant said a search on Google triggered an advert for a site, Realityunlocked.com, which offered a free download of an earlier draft of the book, and that the site violated the trust’s copyright.

Google refused to pass on the details but advised Grant to follow the lead of Norwich Pharmacal in the 1970s in seeking a High Court order to force the internet search giant to disclose the information. Grant did that and Google told the court it would not oppose the order to disclose.

The European Commission plans to raise the ceiling of future fines on Microsoft to 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day if the company continues to defy an antitrust decision, a diplomatic source said on Monday.

This will be the first time the Commission has fined a company for what it sees as defying an order to remedy an abuse. The current ceiling for the fine is 2 million euros a day.

The Commission, Europe’s top antitrust authority, ruled in 2004 that Microsoft shut out rivals by withholding information that would help them make server software as compatible as Microsoft’s own with its ubiquitous Windows operating system.

It demanded that Microsoft provide that information and now says it has not done so sufficiently.

Source: Reuters

he British music industry stepped up its campaign against illegal file-sharing on Monday by demanding that two Internet service providers suspend 59 accounts it believes are being used to swap copyrighted songs.

“We have said for months that it is unacceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to industrial-scale copyright infringement,” BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said in a statement.

Source: Reuters

Blogger, niraj, found some evidece of the planned storage service from Google, GDrive. By going to one of the pages on the writely.com domain, there’s a test page for Platypus (GDrive).

According to the page you’ll need a peace of software called Platypus to insttall on your computer, and it will let you do the following:

• Backup. If you lose your computer, grab a new one and reinstall Platypus. Your files will be on your new machine in minutes.
• Sync. Keep all your machines synchronized, even if they run different operating systems.
• VPN-less access. Not at a Google computer? View your files on the web at http://troutboard.com/p.
• Collaborate. Create shared spaces to which multiple Googlers can write.
• Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible.

So according to the above, GDrive will let you securely save files, and also it seems that GDrive will take on services like RapidShare which let you share files across the net and also share drive space with friends so they can too upload files to your drive.

Source: Blut