SAN FRANCISCO – With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed “Latitude,” expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

“This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun,” said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.

It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users’ movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google’s computers, Lee said.

The software plots a user’s location — marked by a personal picture on Google’s map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people’s travels in the United States and 26 other countries.

Read Full Article…

Know where your kids are? Check Google maps – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com.

Last year the champagne still flowed, but in 2009 angst will dominate the Berlin Film Festival. Cutbacks by studios, concerns about financing and a big-budget thriller about an evil bank — even the silver screen can’t ignore the world economic downturn.

Every movie gets the villains it deserves. Bandits attacking Indians? It’s a western. Hit men shooting police? A crime story. And when psychopaths try to achieve world domination, it’s either a terrorist drama or a film about Adolf Hitler. Those are the usual suspects.

Since the financial crisis, though, a range of unexpected villains has started parading across the screen. Werner Schulz, a politician from Germany’s Green Party, summed up the current mood a few days ago: “Now people are more afraid of their financial advisors than of al-Qaida.”

One German director seems to have anticipated this development. Tom Tykwer, known for his bank robbery fable “Run Lola Run,” will premiere his new thriller “The International” on Thursday, when it opens the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale. This time the bank itself is the villain.

The bank in the movie, in fact, is a criminal organization that commissions murder and homicide — a “bad bank” worse than anything from the current nightmares of the world’s finance ministers. The hero in “The International” is not a crusading protector of the public interest but British star Clive Owen (“Inside Man”).

The financial crisis will set the tone at this year’s Berlinale, the most important international film festival after Cannes. It will be the main topic of conversation at the parties and receptions, the festival’s speeches, press conferences and in the haggling over film rights and new productions.

Complete Article…

Worry Lines Through the Botox: Berlinale Reflects Leaner Times for Movie Business – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It’s good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.

It’s especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.

John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook–not yet one of Sentinel’s clients.

“As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” a statement from MySpace read. “As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations.”

Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as “refugees,” and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a “safe haven” for them, you’d think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it’s safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.

Facebook’s representatives weren’t thrilled by the “safe haven” allegation, to say the least.

Read More…

MySpace, Facebook, spar over family safety | Webware – CNET.

CAMDEN — Jeffrey Jones spent the first 10 years of his life in Camden, raised by his mother, a tutor, and his father, who held several jobs at a time to make ends meet.

Even as a boy, Jones said he was keenly aware of the poverty that ravaged the city. And when his family moved to Mickleton several years ago, Jones immediately realized there was a huge disparity in the opportunities available to Camden’s children and those in his new school.

He particularly noticed what he called the technological shortcomings of the city’s schools, and that thought stayed with Jones until he enrolled at Rutgers-Camden.

In September, Jones, 20, started a student group that initially focused on mentoring sick children in Cooper University Hospital’s pediatric ward. Its focus quickly shifted to education.

In December, Miracles became Miracles Global Inc., a nonprofit organization that’s independent of the university. Jones is the president of the organization, which has grown to include 25 members and a group on the social networking Web site Facebook.

The group’s aim is to collect money or computers that will be given to Camden schools and eventually, Jones hopes, to other ailing districts in the state and throughout the country, Jones said.

“We’re living in a globalized economy, a globalized world, and inner-city kids are being disconnected,” he said. “They’re at such an informational disadvantage.”

“We don’t need top-of-the-line equipment,” he said. “We pretty much just need to be able to word process and access the Internet. Those are the skills that we’re trying to focus on.”

Jones wants Miracles Global to reach students who otherwise would have limited to no access to computers and other technology.

“Hopefully we can bring these technologies into the classroom and eliminate some of the pressure these kids face,” he said. “They’re at a disadvantage and just can’t compete with other students in the region.”

“We’re all human beings and our environment shapes a lot of what we become,” Jones said. “I lived in Camden for 10 years, but there are a lot of others who lived in the city who didn’t turn out as well as I did.”

“That’s not because they’re any less of a man or a woman,” he added. “If they had been given access to the same tools, they could’ve been as great as anyone.”

FOLLOW on Twitter @MiraclesGlobal

Computers sought for city’s kids | CourierPostOnline.com | Courier-Post.