Realtime automobile traffic data service Inrix on Monday released a major update to its freemium Inrix traffic app for Android. Now in its second year on the Android platform, Inrix has improved aspects both premium and free within the application.

Inrix Traffic utilizes live traffic data and scheduled event data to calculate the fastest routes immediately at the time of travel, or at some point in the future rather than strictly using distance calculations like Google Maps. Inrix incorporates school traffic, event traffic, and live traffic to generate trip lengths and live ETAs. This update adds recommended departure and travel times, personalized traffic alerts, and the ability to send out automatically-generated ETA texts and emails to contacts.

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When I opened Apple Maps in iOS 6 for the first time, I was struck by how basic the actual maps are. Zooming in shows the roads, and road names, but it’s all very simple. By contrast, when you zoom into Google Maps you often get to see the buildings on either side of the roads, which can help to get orientated and locate important landmarks.

Google today boosted this subtle but incredibly handy navigation feature by adding a further 25 million new algorithmically-created building footprints to the desktop and mobile versions of Maps.

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Android users running Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean can now take advantage of a new standalone version of Google Calendar. The move brings the product/service more in line with Gmail, Google Play and others that have been separate apps for some time now, and the split sees the introduction of some interesting new options that could well be enough to persuade users away from other calendar apps.

The calendar app previously was limited to a number of devices, notably Nexus, but now it is available to anyone running the right version of Google mobile operating system. While the standalone app is nothing groundbreaking, there are a few noteworthy tweaks, starting with the fact that there is now a snooze function for those occasions when you are busy with something else but still want to be reminded of an upcoming appointment.

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Registration for Microsoft's global Windows 8 hackathon began on Wednesday. The event, called Wowzapp 2012 despite the fact that there's never been another event called "Wowzapp" before, will take place in more than 60 cities across the globe on the weekend of November 9th to the 11th.

The event, previously listed as "Gen Appathon," invites students and aspiring app developers to bring a Windows 8 PC and their rough apps or general app ideas for one-on-one support from Microsoft and community experts, free food and entertainment, and prizes for best Win 8 app, best Windows phone app, and best use of Azure. Attendees will be given Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 and a free Windows Store registration code, and apps will be published straight to the Windows Store.

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Ever since a 2009 article in the Archives of General Psychiatry declared bullying may make kids psychotic, the topic of bullying online and in schools has become one of increasing interest among policymakers and parents.

Today, the Anne Arundel County Police Department in Maryland has rolled out an Android application called AACoPD Speak Out that lets county students and their families communicate directly with the Anne Arundel County Police School Resource Unit specifically about instances of bullying.

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Perennial Evernote runner-up Springpad on Thursday rolled out an update to its note-taking Android and Web apps, pushing them out ahead of the company's iOS app in functionality, and taking better advantage of the latest build of Google's Android, Jelly Bean.

The update brings some added functionality to Springpad users, including actionable notifications for Android users running Jelly Bean, notebooks and items that can be manually re-ordered, and a new Board view that lets users drag and drop content in a scrapbook-type interface.

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Music players are not exactly thin on the ground on the Android platform, and the battleground on which users are gained and lost is the user interface; noozy studio is a music app, which features a somewhat minimalistic look and feel, and bears more than something of a resemblance to Microsoft Zune. The interface is largely text driven, which helps to give the app a clean, modern look.

This is an app that can be used to listen to both locally stored and online content, and enables users to discover new music by browsing through what others have been listening to. Listening to music stored on your Android device is much as you would expect, with album art being displayed at the same time as playback controls. If you’re a music fan, the sound quality of what you listen to is going to be important – there are a number of processor effects included with the app that can be used to improve sound in various ways.

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Google’s panoramic, street-level maps feature -- recently added to its mobile web app -- received a massive upgrade today, in what Google calls its biggest Street View update ever. As well as allowing users to explore numerous new global sites of interest, Google has refreshed some 250,000 miles of roads.

Expanding and maintaining all its Street View imagery is a massive task, but Google makes it look easy, casually adding extra coverage to the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Macau, and doubling its number of "special collections" in a single update. Some of the highlights now available to explore include:

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If you use, or have ever used, a multi-monitor computer, you’ll know just how useful a setup it can be. Have the extra space afforded you by double the usual number of monitor enables you to see more at once, work more quickly and be more productive -- but it can also be expensive and requires you to have a desk large enough to hold two monitors comfortably. If you have a mobile device, however, you can use iDisplay to gain an extra monitor from your existing hardware.

The name of the software might imply that this is something that will only be of interest to Apple hardware owners, but in fact it can be used in conjunction with an iOS or Android phone or tablet. Your mobile device does no need to be physically connected to your computer -- the desktop version of the client software is available for both Mac and PC -- which opens up new opportunities.

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If you're a fan of British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs then you're going to love this. Today, BBC announced the new iPlayer Radio for "PC, mobile and tablet" devices.

BBC iPlayer Radio promises to act as a dedicated radio platform that focuses on making it easier to listen to live, catch-up and archived content across all three types of devices on which it runs on. According to the BBC, the feature set will expand in the coming months, but at the moment includes downloads, clips, live radio alongside videos and social media feeds as well as other features. The spotlight is the new iPlayer Radio app for smartphones, which momentarily is only available for iOS with Android support to follow soon according to the announcement.

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QR Codes are pretty much everywhere these days, but few companies really make the most of the possibilities they offer. TagMyDoc is a great example of what can be done with them, and lets you add a QR Code to your own physical documents, directly from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. When someone scans that code, they’ll get a full copy of the document on their device.

It saves on printing costs, and means you don’t have to worry about how many copies of a document or presentation to output for a meeting, for example, because anyone with a QR reader can get a copy of their own. It’s a great service, but TagMyDoc has just been made even more useful, as it now lets you connect to popular cloud storage services Box and Dropbox, and tag and securely share documents you store there.

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Halfway through its short appearance on Kickstarter, the little white device known as Hiku is just under halfway to its goal of $80,000. Led by former Palm product manager Rob Katcher, this deceptively simple device carves out a niche of its own by making an everyday task easier than even a smartphone could.

The world of consumer technology is dominated by Swiss Army Knives; moderately powerful computers that handle dozens of different tasks ranging from communications to productivity to the creative arts. But, as the age-old colonial American saying goes, the jack of all trades is the master of none.

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Google has introduced Street View into its web app, bringing back one of the most sorely missed features lost when Apple swapped Google’s popular mapping app for its own much poorer solution in iOS 6. I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the whole sorry tale that led Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue an apology, and our own readers saying they wouldn’t be buying an iPhone 5 because of it, so I won’t dwell on the subject here.

If you followed my advice and added a shortcut to Google’s web app, you’re all set to start using Street View. Its rollout seems to be complete, so you should now have access to it, wherever you happen to live.

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Do you find the standard Android maps app to be lacking? There is a solution -- the popular navigation software TomTom is now available for Android smartphones.

Unlike cloud-connected software solutions, TomTom relies on offline maps to offer guided navigation on Android smartphones and considering the 2.3GB free storage requirement the download is consistent to say the least. The app comes with a number of useful features, such as live traffic information via HD Traffic, lane guidance, spoken street names, eco routes to save that extra bit of gas or electricity, automatic day and night modes, as well as other features. There are maps for United States, Europe, United Kingom as well as other geographical locations.

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Software company Intuit on Wednesday announced Quicken 2013, the latest version of its long-running financial management software, will have mobile companion editions for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android smartphones and tablets, and the Kindle Fire. The application gives users mobile access to their checking, savings and credit card account information, budgeting and expense management information, and projection data.

Intuit says these are the first-ever mobile versions of Quicken, which is technically true. However, the company had a number of apps that offered an approximation of Quicken's functionality. In 2009, for example, the Web-based version of Quicken, appropriately named Quicken Online, launched its own iOS application. Additionally, Intuit's Mint provides elegant budgeting and account management apps for iOS and Android.

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