Google releases My Maps

Google is now letting you create your own Google Map, by adding placemarks, drawing lines to demonstrate a route you've taken, inserting shapes, photos and videos.

Called My Maps, it's all explained here. You get a URL for each of your maps so you can share it with friends, and you can submit it to be included in Google search results, and place it on Google Earth.

This is just the latest move by Google to add searchable pages to its massive database.

Below is a map produced by someone who traveled across the U.S. ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.5.07       1 Comment

Mozilla releases The Coop — social networking in your browser

The Coop is a new social networking feature by Mozilla, which will let users of its Firefox browser keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share content with them.

It will integrate with web services, using data feeds so that you can keep up your friends' activities on various sites. This may hurt Flock, the browser company that was about to release a version with similar features (we saw a demo several months ago).

And if it reminds you of Friendster, it should. Though it works with Friendster, not against it.

According to the ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.4.07       Comment

What’s the hottest company in Silicon Valley?

Ok, Facebook. But what's the next hottest company?

A year ago, we asked readers which company they thought was the hottest, i.e, offering the biggest chance of making them a millionaire, either through a pending sale or an IPO. Key question for job-seekers. Two companies that came to mind were Facebook, and YouTube - but in comments, readers listed almost every company of note.

If you'd have gotten into Facebook or YouTube around the time of that post, you'd be very fortunate right now. YouTube snagged at a huge $1.6 billion acquisition offer from Google, despite doubts about its business ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.4.07       11 Comments

Baynote peeps at user Web behavior, and says it boosts revenue

Baynote is yet another company boasting that its customer behavior-tracking technology can boost revenue for Web sites.

It says it has increased revenue for some customers by up to 20 percent.

It recently raised $10.75 million in venture backing, (see our recent coverage), but we only yesterday got to see a demo of the site.

Baynote's technology seeks to quickly get people to pages they're most interested in. Example: One of Baynote's customers is StressCenter.com, a site centered around advice given by stress counselor Lucinda Bassett. If you type "StressCenter.com" in your browser ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.4.07       Comment

Zillow opens up Q&A on every home

Real estate Web site Zillow.com continues to show momentum.

The Seattle company has released a new feature called Home Q&A, letting people ask questions and get answers about each of more than 70 million U.S. homes. Zillow demonstrated the feature to VentureBeat two weeks ago. If Zillow can leverage the traffic it is getting from its controversial home price estimates -- and signs are that its traffic is robust and growing (see Hitwise rankings in spreadsheet below) -- and thereby get enough people to make these Q&As lively, it could be a breakthrough feature.

This appears to ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.4.07       2 Comments

The dirt on Amazon, Steve Jobs, Topix, Fatdoor, MySpace, VC tax and more

Here's the latest action:

Amazon's odd and scary patent -- First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn't perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in history, and the people still ruled. But the latest Amazon patent puts the machine in charge, breaking down tasks, and commanding the human to do them. According to the patent, just awarded, "the humans perform the subtasks and provide the results back to the server." Note that the inventors are the guys who ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.3.07       4 Comments

Chinks in the stem-cell monopoly

The U.S. patent office has invalidated some key stem-cell patents, a significant move that could shake up a potentially huge market for embryonic stem-cell therapies that may one day restore all kinds of body parts for the sick and injured.

Yesterday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced a preliminary decision to invalidate three fundamental stem-cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the technology-transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin. Last year, two public-interest groups asked the patent office to re-examine those patents, arguing ... » Continue reading

David Hamilton 04.3.07       7 Comments

Google extends into TV, signs deal with Dish Network

Google will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) a deal to deliver ads to Dish Network, the nation’s second largest satellite TV company, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

This confirms rumors of such a deal we first mentioned at VentureBeat three weeks ago. The deal is significant because it extends Google's empire to the huge $54 billion television market -- and points to a new kind of ad: Since Dish is the nation’s leader in high definition and interactive TV programming, Google will eventually allow advertisers to target specific groups of viewers, based on ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.3.07       3 Comments

BritePic — photography may never be the same

Advertising start-up AdBrite has launched an elegant way to put ads on digital photos, a potentially revolutionary way for photographers to make money.

The feature, called BritePic, was released five days ago, and 144,000 pictures have already been uploaded to AdBrite's system to claim it, co-founder Philip Kaplan tells VentureBeat.

BritePic uses software to implant ad code directly into digital photos, and provides a host of other nifty tricks that will make the photographer's trade easier, and more creative. It lets them insert watermarks, add captions, and more. Until now, most photographers have a difficult ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.2.07       8 Comments

Thefind, the search engine, not as clean as we thought

Thefind is cleaner than most comparison shopping engines, we wrote last week, because it doesn't ask merchants to pay for their products to show up in Thefind's results.

However, Thefind is not as clean as we were led to believe.

In conversations over the past two weeks, the Mountain View company told VentureBeat that its rising traffic (the company says it will soon hit a million unique visitors) stems from an appreciation of the supposed clean results. Turns out, Thefind is buying some of its traffic with ads on Google. Some of its competitors pointed this ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.2.07       9 Comments