google earth

Imagine this: You go to your local 7-11 convenience store, and you’re at the counter to buy a coffee. You realize you forgot your wallet or pocketbook in the car and all you have is your phone on you.

Your phone happens to be a smart phone with the required software to communicate with the contactless terminal to read your phone.

Success! You paid for your coffee and you go back into your car.

As if Google Earth wasn't cool and useful enough -- like helping find a new apartment in a faraway city or taking a little tour of a foreign place -- Google's latest version of the program just upped the ante.Now you can view live weather patterns of rain and snow.

So far the precipitation data covers parts of North America and Europe, according to a Thursday Google Earth blog post by software engineer Quarup Barreirinhas.

You could call it Santa 6.0.

In what's becoming a regular product cycle, Google announced today the new features that Santa-tracking kids of all ages could expect starting on Christmas Eve at 2 am EST: primarily, support for the Google Earth plug-in, meaning that users will be able to watch Santa from within a browser rather than having to run the Google Earth software.

If you've ever had Google Maps literally send you up the river or down a sidewalk, you may have wondered whether the company ever actually sees the areas it maps.

Now, it does, through an increasing number of volunteers who make corrections and add more detail to maps, according to an article in the New York Times.

Yesterday, Google announced that they are entering the Netbook operating system market with the Google Chrome OS--a Linux-based, web-oriented effort.

On the surface, I see this as yet another ploy to take my Netbook from me. No, Google won't realize any direct profits from taking over my little blue Netbook but it's another attempt at making me remove Windows from it once and for all.

Now, why would they want me to do that? Maybe I can answer that question with the following list: 1. Google Chrome 2.

Google Docs 3. Google Calendar 4. Google Apps 5. Google Books 6. Google Earth