China has launched an official online mapping service as US Internet giant Google continues to hold out on applying for a licence to provide a similar service in the country, state media said Friday.The government-backed service Map World is free and allows users to search for two and three-dimensional images across the globe, the China Daily said."In the near future, Map World will grow to be a famous Chinese brand for online map services with proven reliability," Xu Deming, director ...

In 2008 the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with YouTube in an attempt to better connect with the public and "reach the widest possible audience". The result was YouTube Play - a showcase of exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Anyone could submit creative video for the contest and would stand a chance of having their work displayed in the hallowed halls of New York's Guggenheim museum. The creative video biennial finally came to an end on ...

Facebook fans tend to lurk instead of play when they tune into the social network while at their jobs, according to a report released on Thursday by computer security firm Palo Alto Networks.While many workers link to Facebook on company computers, 88% of the online traffic consists of people watching what friends are up to in the online community, the report found.Use of social games such as "Farmville" popular at Facebook accounted for only five percent of the traffic, while ...

Game developers Blizzard have announced the release of Cataclysm, an expansion pack to the wildly popular game, World of Warcraft (WOW). The anticipated release was showcased with a rich and enticing cinematic trailer during a NFL game in the USA -- a clear signal of how seriously Blizzard is taking the marketing campaign behind the expansion.The clip was additionally posted on YouTube where it has gone viral, accumulating over four million views within the first four days of its release, and proving that ...

It’s no surprise to me that brand after brand make the same mistakes when responding to online, and especially social media, attacks. From the famous Dell Hell, through the Kryptonite lock fiasco to the more recent Nestle and BP protests. The latest saga was the extremist Christian response via Facebook to the Woolworths' management decision to no longer stock certain Christian religious magazines in its stores.The standard corporate reaction is predictable and certain to meet with failure. It’s based on ...

The world's top mobile phone maker Nokia on Thursday said it would cut 1 800 jobs after announcing stellar third-quarter results one month into the mandate of a new chief executive.Also announcing a major strategy shift, Nokia said it would now focus on developing applications on the Qt framework, which essentially removes the somewhat conflicting two-headed approach of developing for both Symbian and MeeGo."Historically, the company had said, here's Symbian 3, and there will be another big thing called Symbian ...

At the core of every culture is "storytelling", says Shel Israel, a San Francisco-based social media strategist and author of the book, “Twitterville: How Businesses can Thrive in the New Global Neighbourhoods”.Speaking at the WTF conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Israel spoke about how social media is simply a new toolset that capitalises on this age-old impulse to tell stories. To illustrate this, many of the examples of social media he used have little to do with commercial ...

New buzzwords and job titles abound in the world of online marketing and web development. This is partly due to savvy (and not so savvy, but very irritating) people inventing titles and catch phrases by the minute in an attempt to conjure up an atmosphere of uniqueness, expertise and even celebrity.It is also, however, partly due to the complexity of the web increasing at such a rapid pace, resulting in more specialised fields and more specialised people. I’m expecting to ...

Facebook, Amazon and Zynga have announced they have teamed with a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm to create a US$250-million fund for entrepreneurs making the Internet more social.Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) announced the "sFund," an initiative to invest in new social applications and online services."We're at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites," said KPCB partner John Doerr."There's ...

Nearly a quarter of a million Germans have asked Google to block images of their houses, the US Internet giant said on Thursday as it prepared to launch its Street View service in the country.Google has already rolled out its navigation service in 20 countries but exceptionally, due to heightened privacy concerns in Germany, has offered to pixel out buildings before the pictures are published online."We're now close to launching Street View imagery for the 20 biggest cities in Germany ...