Google said Wednesday it had updated its Maps service in more than 30 major United States cities to include real-time traffic information. A new "Traffic" button joins the Map, Satellite and Hybrid options already available, overlaying road conditions with green, yellow and red colors.

"If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing," explained Google software engineer David Wang. Supported cities include New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington DC among others.

Continue reading →

Not just recent statements from its executives, but recent actions by Sony have made it clear that the company is fully aware that its reputation suffered a beating in 2006. Once synonymous with innovation, Sony today conjures up images among CE enthusiasts of exploding lithium batteries, overpriced HD components, rootkits lodged on CDs published by a company that unfortunately bears the same name, and most recently, lines of hundreds of hopeful customers whose Christmas wishes last year were left unfulfilled.

Yesterday, Sony launched the next stage in a comeback campaign to reposition itself, not only in its key markets but in the public mind. The campaign involves some controversial moves, including expanding its high-end Bravia brand to smaller and less expensive HD displays - some of which are not 1080p; launching a new wave of less expensive surround-sound audio systems; and perhaps staking a good chunk of the company on a $300 set-top box that connects Bravia HDTV viewers to IPTV content supplied by AOL Video and others.

Continue reading →

In a move aimed at helping the company "focus on initiatives that enhance its top performing locations," CompUSA announced Wednesday it would close 126 of its 229 stores as part of a restructuring plan. The closures began last week and would continue into the early part of the summer. The decision would likely impact Apple the most, which stands to lose two percent of its retail locations.

"Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics market, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or non strategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation," CompUSA CEO Roman Ross said. In addition to the closing of stores, the retailer also said it received a $440 million cash infusion from an unnamed source.

Continue reading →

Those wishing to get their hands on Sony's PlayStation 3 should have no problem by May, as the company said it was on track to ship two million consoles by the end of next month, and be able to meet demand soon after.

Executives also seem to be disputing claims by some gaming sites that unsold PlayStation 3's are common across the country, pointing to locations that have been sold out since the console's launch in November.

Continue reading →

UPDATED with new information 9:45 am February 28, 2007

In an announcement Tuesday afternoon prior to the publication of the bill by the Library of Congress, Reps. Rick Boucher (D - VA) and John Doolittle (R - CA) introduced a bill that apparently would grant a new exemption for private, non-commercial copies of digital content, from violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - technically creating a new class of "Section 1201 exemptions."

Continue reading →

Book publishers are slowly warming up to the idea of putting their content online, with two companies announcing separate plans to offer web-based methods to search through their catalogs.

Random House said Tuesday that it planned to offer a service called "Insight" that would allow the consumer to browser through more than 5,000 titles from its archives. The company's authors include the popular Danielle Steele among others.

Continue reading →

4:55 pm ET February 27 – After BetaNews’ report yesterday about VMware’s open white paper accusing Microsoft of exercising underhanded tactics and schemes to lock competitors out of the virtualization software market, Microsoft general manager for virtualization Mike Neil re-assessed his earlier response to our inquiry, and decided a stronger rebuttal was in order.

The full rebuttal follows our original story from yesterday, which re-inserts some inadvertent omissions from excerpts of VMware's white paper:

Continue reading →

Last Friday, Polish researcher Michal Zalewski reported discovering an interesting little JavaScript trick that keeps a user stuck on a Web page even though he's trying to navigate somewhere else. His discovery involves the simple use of a JavaScript event to make it appear as though a browser is displaying any particular URL, when it's not.

When the exploit works, the onunload() event triggers the execution of JavaScript code the moment the user exits a Web page - which is how this JavaScript event is designed to work. But from there, the exploit would write information to the Web page without changing the contents of the address bar, potentially enabling a phisher to drop genuine-looking contents into a page to fool the user into thinking he's on a legitimate site.

Continue reading →

A partnership between the NBA and YouTube will allow users of the popular site to view original content from the league, as well as post their own videos to share with others.

The most popular videos will then be featured on a weekly show on the NBA's cable network called "NBA Top 10 on YouTube. The feature was launched on Monday, the league said.

Continue reading →

Parallels shipped a major update to its virtualization software for Macintoshes using the Intel platform. Although the upgrade would be provided at no cost to current users, those wishing to purchase the software will need to pay $79.99 USD.

Among the new features is Coherence, which allows Windows applications to operate like native Mac applications by appearing in the dock.

Continue reading →

Symantec on Monday introduced Norton 360, its new standard security suite, replacing the aging Norton Internet Security product.

Formerly known as "Genesis," Norton 360 is intended to compete with offerings from McAfee and Microsoft. Like OneCare, the application contains a suite of products that traditionally had been sold separately by the antivirus makers.

Continue reading →

AOL is rumored to be close to a deal with Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising startup, The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday. The company had previously been in talks with Microsoft over a possible deal, however negotiations fell apart. The AOL deal is said to be worth some $80 million, and is "fairly advanced," the paper reports.

The purchase of Third Screen would make sense for AOL, as it has transitioned away from a subscriber-based to an ad-supported business model. While at the current time the market for mobile advertising is small, it is expected to grow over the next several years. Neither AOL nor Third Screen would comment publicly on the latest rumors.

Continue reading →

Both XM and Sirius reported their full fourth calendar quarter results this week, showing that while both companies were making progress at narrowing losses, true profitability is still a long ways away.

XM was first to report on Monday, and said that it had accumulated a loss of $256.7 million on revenues of $257.1 million, up 45 percent over last year. The company ended the year with just over 7.6 million subscribers, adding 442,679 subscribers in the fourth quarter.

Continue reading →

Last month, Intel's announcement of its discovery of the formula and design for producing stable, more miniaturized transistors for future 45-nanometer CPUs beat IBM's announcement of its own such discovery by mere minutes. But what may distinguish the two developments is how quickly the two rivals will put them to use.

Late yesterday afternoon, Intel announced it plans to invest as much as $1.5 billion in the retooling of its Fab 11X production site in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, so that it can produce 45 nm CPUs with the HK+MG technique during the second half of next year.

Continue reading →

Corel made a play for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie on Tuesday, releasing WordPerfect Lightning in beta, a free, compact version of its standard word processing suite that combines both online and offline functionality.

The company is referring to the product as a Google Writely, Adobe Reader, and Microsoft OneNote competitor rolled into one. At 16MB, the entire program can be placed on a USB stick or burned to CD to allow for maximum portability.

Continue reading →