Infotrade

Google has offered travel information in Maps for quite some time, but now it’s going real-time – in a handful of cities, at least. The company has just  announced  that live public transport information has been added to Maps for Boston, Portland OR, San Diego and San Francisco in the USA, Madrid in Spain and Turin in Italy. Departure times for buses and trains will be updated in real-time, meaning that if your ride is late, you should know about it. The service works on both desktop and mobile versions of Maps. In supported cities, when you click on a public transport station or plan a public transport route, you’ll now see “live departure times” (indicated with a special icon) and service alerts. While the roll-out is currently only for a few cities, Google says it hopes to expand to cover more locations soon.

Google’s Music: Beta cloud-based music service. On Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to announce a new product that allows iPhone owners to stream music from their personal iTunes collections to their phones. Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the  CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge  that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home. Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player which connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone. Google Music  is the ...

The US is set to publish plans that will categorise cyber-attacks as acts of war, the Pentagon says. In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently. The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin. A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks. "A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table," Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday. Col Lapan confirmed the Pentagon was drawing up a cyber defence strategy, which would be ready in two to three weeks. Cyber-attacks from foreign nations that threaten widespread US civilian casualties, like cutting off power supplies or shutting down emergency-responder networks, could be treated as an act of aggression under the new po...

In the battle to maintain the quality of its SERPs, Google is increasingly  tweaking  its algorithm. Since there are only so many on-page ranking factors for Google to consider, it's logical to expect that off-page ranking factors will only become more numerous and important over time. At least one website operator believes these off-page factors may now include email reputation. Jake Ludington, who runs JakeLudington.com, noticed a drop in his traffic in April, and after looking at his website, came to the conclusion that his email newsletter must have caused the drop. He  explains : When my traffic at JakeLudington.com suddenly dropped in early April, I thought I’d made some kind of change that was resulting in a technology failure. I was wrong. Everything appeared to load as it should. So why the sudden drop? I called around to a handful of friends and discovered I was not alone. Early April was the second round of Panda algorithm changes. With some additional digging...

Planely , the service designed to help you find out who else is on the same flight as you (thus maximising the chance to meet and network with new people) has just become more useful with the integration of LinkedIn. With Planely, you enter your journey details and it lets you know which other users will be on the same flight. Now, if your new matches have connected their Planely and LinkedIn accounts, a LinkedIn icon appears next to their name. When clicked, you get a neat summary of their professional life. Given that people tend to keep up-to-date CVs on LinkedIn, this is a great way of seeing just how worthwhile arranging a meeting with someone a the airport (or even on the plane!) might be. Planely CEO and founder Nick Martin explains, “The really interesting part is that if both you  and  your Match integrate, then as part of that summary we show you if your Match is 1, 2 or 3 degrees of separation away from you or in any of the same Groups.” Nifty. Planely already...

According to Rob McCray, President and Co-Founder of the Wireless-Life Science Alliance, we are just starting to uncover the possibilities that wireless healthcare will enable: “If this were the Internet commerce sector, we would be in 1995 when it was not clear what shape that sector would take.” In his 2009 TED MED talk, “The Future of Medicine,” Eric Topol, a noted American cardiologist, geneticist and innovator, spoke about the present and future of wireless healthcare. ”Why now he asked?” “We have the perfect positive storm. This sets up consumer driven health care. 1.2 million Americans have gotten a Nike shoe that connects the sole of the shoe to the iPod…A data driven health revolution promises to make us all better, faster and stronger living by numbers,” Topol said, citing a  2009 Wired article . At the time of his talk, nearly half of the American population had 1 or more chronic diseases. But he said, technology allows for convergence like we’ve never had bef...

More than half of UK consumers say they are not comfortable with businesses using location-based technology to pinpoint their whereabouts, even if it would improve their customer service, research from Ovum has revealed. According to a survey* by the independent telecoms analyst, despite the current hype about location-based services (LBS) and how they can be harnessed by companies, consumers remain wary. Sixty-one per cent of the consumers Ovum spoke to had concerns about the use of location-based technology in customer service.  Ian Jacobs, Ovum analyst and author of a new report unveiling the survey findings, commented: “Although many UK consumers use location-based services such as Foursquare in their daily personal lives, when brands use LBS it is seen in a very different light by consumers. “Consumers to date have very little experience with location-based services in the context of customer service. So, it is not bad experiences, but rather pervasive concerns about privacy ...

Sarah Townsend will no longer have to leave her 507 Facebook friends behind to buy the £35 ($55) baggy sweater she's been eyeing from Asos. On Jan. 27, the hip, London-based online clothing site became the first European fashion retailer to open an e-tailing outpost inside Facebook. Competitors such as Gap ( GPS ) and Inditex's Zara use the networking site largely to communicate with fans. Visitors to Asos's store on Facebook can shop the company's entire stock of 150,000 products without leaving the site. They also can post photos of items to their wall so friends can comment on potential purchases. "It's something I want to do more of," says Townsend, a 25-year-old marketing professional in London. Asos and other retailers are going after consumers that marketing pros call "moppers"—as in mobile shoppers. Britain's No. 2 online retailer, whose name stands for "as seen on screen" (it has no physical stores), logged a 54 percent re...

We've probably all done it at one time or another: emptied our pockets the day after a big networking event, found a wad of business cards, and tried to recall, "Now, who were these people again? And why exactly did I think I wanted their cards?" Collecting that fistful of cards is a reflex for many people who vaguely intend to make the most of such business opportunities. But taking more deliberate steps can yield better results. "Lots of opportunities are wasted at business gatherings, because people often don't know how to turn a brief conversation into a relationship," observed Arlene Isaacs, president of  Respectful Communications , whose coaching clients have included Fortune 50 CEOs, numerous entrepreneurs, a U.S. chief of protocol, and a Miss Universe. Ms. Isaacs' prescription for networking effectively: Start with a clear idea of why you're attending a gathering and what you hope to get out of it. If one of your goals is to introduce yourse...

Vodafone announced the opening of its  Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2011 , a contest to identify and develop the best, most innovative mobile internet start-ups. Open to seven markets, Vodafone Mobile Clicks allows any startup in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Turkey or the United Kingdom that has a mobile site, service or application to apply and compete for a €225,000 prize fund. Last year CardMobil, a service that allowed users to replace their points, membership and loyalty cards with a mobile app, won the competition, the year before that Layar scooped the prize. This year, top prize will be €150,000, leading us to speculate what sort of app would create with that kind of money. Here are a few apps that we would like to see made, we would also welcome your suggestions: Secure Card Details I don’t know about you, but I have a number of credit and debit cards with a few different banks, many of which sit in my wallet for that t...

A study has found that fonts which are regarded as ‘hard to read’ may actually increase readers’ retention of information. Researchers from Indiana University and Princeton have described two experiments they conducted that appear to demonstrate that reading retention improves when a ‘hard to read’ font is used. The reason is that the extra concentration required means that readers remember more of what they read. Whilst fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman are often cited as the best options for content producers to use, this study suggests that ease-of-reading is only part of the solution. Two studies were conducted, the first included 28 adults, and the second consisted of 220 high school students spread across 6 focus groups. Across both studies, it was found that those reading ‘ugly’ fonts such as Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva performed better in tests than those reading eye-candy fonts such as Arial. Comic Sans has had a bad press since it was launched by Microsoft in 1994....