Things You Need To Know About Google's New Friend Tracker A.K.A The Latitude

New York, NY - Wanna find where your friends are? Search engine pioneer Google Inc. has added a mapping or a tracking feature to allow the users to track the locations of their friends, family and colleagues via Google Maps on a PC or mobile device.

The Latitude program, which is a feature in the mobile version of Google Maps (but not on Apple's iPhone yet), will start tracking after you and your friend have opted in to the program. With this feature enabled on your wireless devices, you can track friends in 27 countries and 42 languages, according to Google.

It can also work with iGoogle on your laptop or personal computer. The list compiled by PCWorld of compatible phones are:

*Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1

*iPhone and iPod touch devices (to be enabled soon)

*most color BlackBerry devices

*most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices

*most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)

*many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (to be enabled soon).

If you do not have a smartphone, don't worry. Visit google.com/latitude on your desktop or laptop to install the Latitude iGoogle gadget and share your location right from your computer.

The new Latitude program can be used through your Google account. Once you sign in and you can easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses.

According to Mountain View, California-based Google, "Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you.

So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather."

Check out this video to learn more about the privacy features. For your mobile, visit the Google Mobile blog for more details. There you can upgrade the mapping software.

With the Latitude program, you can see your friends' Google icon displayed on Google Maps. By clicking on their icon allows you to call, email or IM (instant messenger) them. Moreover, you can even use the directions feature on Google Maps to help you get to their detailed location.

“It really enables a new type of social interaction,” Steve Lee, product manager for the mobile version of Google Maps, told Bloomberg. “It increases our user base and also increases the amount of usage per user.”

Google's Latitude program can only keep the most most recent shared location by you on its servers at any time. So if you decide to not to share your location with a particular person, then Google doesn't hold any information on your locale at all.

For instance, if you are flying from New York to California, but you don't want your friend on the West Coast to know about your surprise visit, you can manually set your location for elsewhere — perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls.

"Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis," Google said. "So for each person, you can choose to share your best available location or your city-level location, or you can hide."

Everything is under your control, the company claims. What I wonder if some time it can get annoying. What if the federal authorities ever try to force Google to track your exact location?

"Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application," Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google’s mobile team, wrote on the Google blog. “You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see.”

More Updates To Follow

Microsoft Extends Windows 7 Beta Download Period

Redmond, WA - To gain more from the popularity, Microsoft has extended Windows 7 beta download period to February 10.

The software giant has been trying to allow as many Windows Vista OS users as possible to get hold of the free version. But it is still hard for Windows XP users to upgrade.

Windows 7 beta is certainly more stable than Vista version by Microsoft. Looks like, the company has put more efforts to earn higher revenue from the new and complete version of Windows 7.

10 Things You Need To Know About Microsoft's Windows 7 Beta Version

1. Upgrade Options: Windows 7 beta will upgrade a Vista installation on your PC/laptop, but it will not directly skip Vista for Windows XP users. All XP users have to erase the existing operating system and start over. So make sure that you have back up all data and documents on a CD or an external drive before upgrading Windows XP machine. Windows 7 also runs on netbooks and performs well enough.

2. Dual Booting: For Vista users, you can also try Dual booting Vista and Windows 7, instead of completely erasing Vista from your system. You can always switch back to your original copy of Windows Vista, if you don't like Windows 7. Here is the link that can help you with step by step procedure to create dual boot for Windows 7 and Vista. Option 1: Click Here. Option 2: Click Here. The Windows 7 download comes as a file with a .iso extension, which can be copied to a DVD using any DVD writer.

3. Compatible Antivirus Solutions: Don't fall for the rumors that Windows 7 has problems with the installations of antivirus solutions. Microsoft is still working on the latest version of Operating System, so it is in trying to iron out these issues. One of the options that you can use is beta of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows 7, which is the latest release of of a "technical prototype" by Kaspersky Lab. The product is optimized for multi-core systems and will be available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. Microsoft has also recommends to try solutions by other Antivirus providers including Symantec's Norton 360 3.0 Beta, AVG Internet Security and AVG Anti-Virus.

4. Higher Bit Versions: You can now download either 32-bit version (about 2.3 gigabytes file size) or 64-bit version (about 3.3 gigabytes file size) of Windows 7 at through at least Jan. 24. Choose 32-bit version as it would also run on 64-bit processors, if you're not sure what you have. If you have an Intel Core 2 Duo or newer processor, which means you have got a 64-bit CPU, and you should install the 64-bit version of Windows 7. You may be limited on hardware, but Windows 7 will scale to support as high as 256 processor cores, which was not found in Vista OS. Vista was limited at 64 cores with the high-end 64-bit version. So Microsoft is promising a faster experience with Windows 7.

5. Driver Usage: You must have had issues with the installations of drivers from older versions, but Windows 7 has a great compatibility tool. Every driver from Vista can be used in Windows 7 and it works including video drivers. It is reliable and impressive. It will not fail your installations by freezing up on you or flash yellow screen.

6. Better Performance: Windows 7 Beta beats Windows Vista in all tests, including Access time and CPU usage. So it is possible that the final version of Windows 7 will perform better. Hardware website TweakTown carried out solid state drives performance comparison tests for Windows 7 beta and Windows Vista SP1. TweakTown ran some tests with the Patriot Warp2 128GB SSD SATA drive for both RAID 0 and single drive setups. Access time was impressive under Windows 7, while the CPU usage of W7 blew Vista to pieces scoring -1% usage under every test, according to TweakTown. It concludes: "Based on our testing, we can see that obviously Microsoft have spent some time improving SSD performance under Windows 7, as it managed to beat out Vista in all but one test and that might have only been a slip up."

7. Productivity Enhancer: Windows 7 saves a lot of clicks, so that your tasks become easy and fast. For instance, in Windows 7 try clicking right on Internet Explorer’s taskbar icon and you’ll see a list of recently visited Web sites; right-click on the desktop and the Screen Resolution menu is right there; there is a direct option to save all your data in a backup drive and it can be found under "Autoplay" once you plug in an external hard drive.

8. Revolutionary Applications: Microsoft taps into the latest technology and provides sleek features with Windows 7 that cuts down on mouse-clicks. It has made significant changes to the desktop and taskbar. Taskbar is bigger by default. Then there is Aero Shake, which is useful in shaking a window to minimize other windows that are visible. Aero Peek is also a new tool that will allow you to seek your desktop without minimizing open windows. Windows 7 also has new ways of maximizing and tiling windows. Most of these tools can be used by just hovering mouse pointer over them.

9. New Files For Older Version: Windows 7's WordPad, which comes free with Microsoft's word processing bundle, can supports Office 2007's or 2008's XML-based Word docs. Microsoft has restricted the installation of near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of Internet Explorer version 8.0. The reason being the both Windows 7 and the IE 8 RC are beta versions, which means that they are still in the building process and are being tweaked for final versions through the feedbacks they receive.

10. Windows 7 Shortcuts: If you are not prepared to upgrade your XP or Vista machine to Windows 7, try this lightweight application for Windows 7 Shortcuts that will give you the feel of what you can expect from the latest release. You can also try the updated Windows 7 Shortcuts release history.

More Updates Soon.

Global Financial Firms To Slash IT Spending In 2009 Despite Moderate Growth, Analysts Say

New York, NY - Although the global financial services have experienced some growth, they are expected to cut down on their information technology spending over the next 12 months. Technology companies are expected to experience further slowdown in demand as other sectors will follow the suit.

A report released by Jacob Jegher from Celent indicated that global information technology spending by financial services institutions will be down by 1.3 percent to $353.3 billion in 2009, compared to the IT spending recorded at $358 billion in 2008.

The growth in the sector was at 4.5 percent in 2008, compared to 6.4 percent reported in 2007, the research report showed.

In a separate report by Forrester Research, technology spending by both business and government on computer, software and communications products and consulting services is expected to drop by as much as 3 percent, which is the first drop since 2002 when the spending was sharply cut by 6 percent from the prior year.

So the next couple of years for the IT companies will be challenging, further affecting their sales revenue.

"While the financial crisis, economic conditions, regulatory issues, competitive pressures, and customer needs have all contributed to the changes, a more fundamental area has truly revolutionized the industry—technology," Celent's Jegher said. "Technology’s radical implications in the financial services industry have grown exponentially."

Jegher, however, expects the financial firms to increase spending by 0.9 percent to $364.5 billion to 2010. While, Forrester anticipates the spending to surge by as much as 9 percent next year.

As the economies continue to sink deeper into the quicksand of recession, the current IT investments by the financial services institutions in Europe and North America account for 37.7 percent and 33.5 percent, respectively.

The small difference in the spending is due to the dollar parity. Strengthening U.S. greenback is expected to slow down the growth rate of technology spending in European region.

The analysts at Forrester Research also expect the similar consequences. The technology spending in Western Europe will decline by as much as 7 percent in 2009 due to the currency discrepancy. But tech spending in euros will be up 1 percent.

Spending by financial firms in Asia-Pacific represent 23.3 percent. Growth will continue to rise in this region, and total spending in Asia-Pacific is expected to reach $90.3 billion in 2010, Celent's Jegher said. While, Latin America and Africa reflect the remaining 5.6 percent.

Technology is a crucial operating requirement for the banking industry and the IT spending accounts for the biggest potion (50 percent) of the total purchases.

The sum of bank IT spending across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific will grow to $160.4 billion in 2008, which is around 4.7 percent higher than 2007, Jegher noted. However, Celent expects total IT spending by banks in these regions to fall to $158.9 billion in 2009 as North American and European banks will not fare nearly as well in terms of growth.

"IT dollars will be hard to come by after compliance/regulatory spending and maintenance expenditures." Jegher wrote. "Banks will be forced to be creative with their funds to make investments go as far as possible."