David Lidsky's Blog, page 4537

Bing Maps Re-Routed to Look Smarter and Calculate Your Cab Fare

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Microsoft's Bing Maps, like Bing Search and Zune, is one of Microsoft's great underrated surprises. It may seem like a ripoff of a better-known product (in this case, Google Maps), and that's not entirely inaccurate, but it's also unfair. Because Bing Maps is, well, pretty great.

Microsoft just rolled out a new aesthetic look to its maps, mostly involving tones, fonts, and colors. There's some interesting physiology and psychology behind the decision--for example, having cooler colors receded...

Social Network Game Can be Depressing Tree of Life

Campus life at Sacramento's California State University may be somewhat lacking.

Today it was reported that the school reached a deal to make an online game available to its 28,000 students and staff. Developed by Mindbloom, a startup founded by Amazon veterans, the "Life Game" will help the faculty and student body manage a healthy lifestyle and keep off that Freshman 40. The game normally costs $39 a year; California State is Mindbloom's first enterprise customer.

Mindbloom uses...

Facebook Introduces One-Click, Automatic Ad Creation

Facebook's ad creation and posting system is one of its biggest moneymakers. It's a way of building a community, not just sidebar ads to be ignored, and Facebook is continually adding new features and options to the process to make it more user-friendly.

The latest, as reported by Inside Facebook: "Suggest an Ad," a new feature in the Ads Manager tool. It's a step towards automated ad creation and posting, and it seems very promising in that regard, if not entirely polished yet. Instead of...

Eat Fish to Save Fish, Say Conservationists

Can we save the oceans with strategic dieting? Florida conservationists think so. That's why they're encouraging Palm Beach County residents to munch on lionfish--an invasive Indo-Pacific species that has the ability to eat 80% of a coral reef's small fish population in five weeks. Florida fisherman used to spot no more than five lionfish a year. Now they find up to 500 in a matter of months, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Lionfish have no predators in the Atlantic Ocean. So members of...

The Most Beautiful Way to Clean Up Space Junk: A Giant GOLD Balloon

Space junk is everything from spent rocket upper-stages that measure meters across, to lost bags of tools let go by careless astronauts, to shattered Chinese satellites to flecks of paint moving at 25 times the speed of sound. Under the wrong circumstances any piece of junk could kill a perfectly good satellite or even an unlucky space-walker. How should we prevent dead satellites from adding to this dangerous cloud of debris?

Dr. Kristen Gates has one idea, and it's beautiful and simple...

FBI Flashes Badge at Wikipedia, Ignores the Internet

If you were tasked with finding an image of the FBI's seal, where would you look? Likely, you'd head to Google or Bing, where a quick image search would return tens of thousands of results. But shhh, don't tell the FBI about those. Out of all the images of the seal sprayed across the Web, the FBI is faulting Wikipedia for displaying it, and even threatening legal action.

In July, the bureau wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding that its flagship organization Wikipedia remove the...

South Korea Braces for Sidewalk Smoking Ban

Seoul's no smoking rule goes into effect on August 28th, will it work?

A new smoking ban will take effect on the streets of Seoul this month, and the city is going all-out to sell the idea (as the Asian Correspondent reported with this photo).

Other major urban centers in Asia have struggled to implement smoking bans. In Hong Kong, loose guidelines on implementing the year-old ban on smoking indoors appears to have had little effect--in part because the law penalizes individual smokers rather...

Russian Court, Offended by One Problem Video, Bars All of YouTube

2010 certainly seems to be the year of oddly knee-jerk restrictions to Net technology around the world, and Adding to the effect now is Siberia, with a total ban on YouTube thanks to a single video.

Google's official European Public Policy blog explains what's been going on: A district court in the Russian far East city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur has ordered ISP Rosnet to block access to every single piece of content on YouTube, after a single user uploaded a video that the court deemed...

15-Year-Old Turns 1972 VW Beetle Into Electric Car

With a passion for electric cars, this Oregon teenager has turned an old Bug into a battery-powered ride DIY style.

Ashton Stark isn't old enough to drive, but he has already built himself a vehicle. It took him a year, but he just finished converting his grandfather's 1972 Volkswagen Beetle into an electric car.

"I was actually looking online with my dad at electric cars, because we heard a lot about them and thought they were kind of cool," the 15-year-old told NPR. "I decided I wanted to...

GM Ventures' First Investment: Electric Vehicle Startup Bright Automotive

GM may be banking heavily on the Chevy Volt for success in the electric vehicle world, but the automaker is still hedging its bets through a a $5 million investment in Bright Automotive, the startup behind the upcoming IDEA plug-in hybrid for commercial fleets. The Bright Automotive deal marks the first investment for General Motors Ventures, the venture capital arm of GM.

In a statement, GM Ventures president Jon Lauckner explained,
"Funding early-stage start-up companies is a new way of...