Microsoft has signed an agreement with GlobeXplorer, an aerial and satellite imagery provider, that will provide new images to Live Search Maps. GlobeXplorer’s images will be integrated into Virtual Earth within the next few months.

The update will affect Live Search Maps, which is powered by Microsoft’s Virtual Earth online mapping platform, according to Microsoft. Among the changes, more than 400,000 square miles of U.S. aerial footage will be updated with high-resolution images.

Source: News.com

Microsoft has been forced to acknowledge that a substantial number of PCs running the new version of its Windows operating system will not be able to play high-quality DVDs.

The Vista system will be available to consumers at the end of the month. However, in an interview with The Times, one of its chief architects said that because of anti-piracy protection granted to the Hollywood studios, Vista would not play HD-DVD and Blu-ray Discs on certain PCs.

Dave Marsh, the lead program manager for video at Microsoft, said that if the PC used a digital connection to link with the monitor or television, then it would require the highest level of content protection, known as HDCP, to play the discs. If it did not have such protection, Vista would shut down the signal, he said.

The admission will be a blow to Microsoft, which is hoping that more users will turn to their PCs for watching films and other content.

Source: Times Online

Visa is launching a global payment system that would let people pay for goods through their cellphones, the credit-card company said Monday.

The new system, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at Visa credit-card issuers and cellular phone service providers.

Visa says it believes the new product will help spur the development and delivery of the so-called electronic wallet.

“Visa has long realized the importance of the mobile channel to the future of payments and as a medium to deliver to consumers,” Patrick Hauthier, Visa’s senior vice-president of innovation, said in a written statement.

The first stage of Visa’s plan will let people make payments by passing their cellphones near a special reader.

Source: cbc.ca

A Microsoft online puzzle game launched this week promises to send the winner on a rocket ride into orbit around the Earth.

The Redmond, Washington-based software giant teamed with computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices to promote the new Vista operating system with Vanishing Point, a “large-scale online and offline collaborative puzzle game.”

Microsoft is to launch the home version of Vista on January 30.

The companies used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a venue on Monday to reveal prizes including Microsoft Zune MP3 players, Xbox 360 video game consoles, Vista-based computers, and a sub-orbital space ride.

A NASA-trained astronaut will take the winner just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere for “the ultimate vista” courtesy of Rocketplane Limited Inc., Microsoft said.

Source: Yahoo

A judge reversed course Tuesday and lifted an order that led to a ban of YouTube in Brazil because a sexy video of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli had circulated widely on the video-sharing site.

The move came after telecommunications companies and Internet providers blocked YouTube from the Amazon to Brazil’s populous south in recent days, saying they were unable to limit blocking to the video of Cicarelli making out with her boyfriend.

The case, the first of its kind in Latin America’s largest nation, spotlights the extremely gray and technologically challenging area of when and how Internet companies and providers should remove content when privacy rights are violated.

Source: AP

At Macworlds Apple’s CEO Steve Jobes in his keynote announced that Apple is changing their name “From this day forward we’re going to be known as Apple, Inc. We’ve dropped the computer from our name.” said Jobs.

According to Jobs, the Mac is the only computer product that Apple makes. The iPod, iTV and the new iPhone are not computers and it was time to change the name of the company.

The iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE — and amazingly, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate.

Source: Engadget

Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced on Tuesday that movies from Paramount films would be sold in iTunes in addition to titles from Disney.

Speaking at the annual Macworld user conference, Jobs also said Apple’s iTunes store has sold more than 2 billion songs since inception.

Jobs said the company has renamed its iTV device that will let users stream movies, music, photos, podcasts and TV shows to their home entertainment systems “AppleTV.” The product will have a 40 gigabyte hard drive.

Source: Reuters

Walt Disney Corporation has created an online world in which people can be virtual swashbucklers in the spirit of iconic movie company’s blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.

A massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a pirate theme befitting the film’s beloved Captain Jack Sparrow will be online by the spring, Disney revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

People will be able to find the gateway to the game at the revamped Disney.com then create animated “avatar” characters to “crew-up and live the life of a pirate,” Disney executives said.

People will be able to play the game “free for as long as they want,” according to Disney.

Source: Yahoo

Yahoo Inc. unveiled a slew of deals with mobile phone handset makers and network operators to feature its Web search services on tens of millions of phones worldwide, the company said on Monday.

In a flurry of announcements with major electronics makers, officials of the Internet media company introduced software that mobile phone users can download themselves at a news conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Yahoo said it had developed oneSearch, a new mobile search service that give phone users instant answers. OneSearch redesigns search to offer potential answers as immediate search results instead of how computer-based Web search returns lists of search results.

Source: Reuters

Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 launched a new email alert service on Tuesday to warn the public about changes in the security threat level.

Internet users will be able to register on the MI5 Web site to receive automatic electronic updates in their email inboxes.

The email alerts are the latest in a series of moves by MI5 and its partner, the international spy agency MI6, to open up to the public after decades of guarding extreme secrecy.

Source: Reuters

Google has signed on to develop a search engine for what will be one of the most powerful telescopes in the world.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project, slated for completion by 2013, is a 3-billion pixel camera/telescope currently being built atop the Cerro Pachon mountain peak in Chile.

When completed, the 8.4m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will generate over 30 terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) of multiple color images of visible sky each night, according to the LSST Corp., which oversees the project.

Google will collaborate with LSST to develop a search engine that can process, organize and analyze the voluminous amounts of data coming from the instrument’s data streams in real time. The engine will create “movie-like windows” for scientists to view significant space events.

In addition to helping astronomers and scientists, Google and LSST are also working on a parallel viewing system for the general public.

Source: News.com