Mike Blumenthal

Texting, invented in 1992, has changed little over the past 19 years. In the absence of innovation on the part of the phone companies, a number of companies have stepped in and created this new class of texting product that adds a significant value layer to the basic texting function. Group texting is like adding a party …

The good news is that York Me, having been lost repeatedly, has once again been found. But the story of York is really the story of Maps and Places and it is in many ways bigger than the loss of a single geographic entity. Google has insinuated Maps and Places very deeply into our lives. …

Last week there were a number of new features that appeared in Places and in the 7 Pack including the inclusion of event information on venue Place pages and pushing the ppc hotel booking feature to the front page. There were several that I did not have time to report on that hit my radar: …

Google, having first introduced the hotel booking feature in November on a limited test basis, has now pushed the ability to procure a reservation to the front page of the main search results for both blended and 7-pack displays. The test from Google has included a limited number of travel sites and a few high …

The geography of the name York has an illustrious history in Maine. The Town of York was settled in 1624 and  the county of the same name was established in 1636. The  Town of York has four villages, York Village, York Harbor, York Beach and Cape Neddick, commonly known as …. The Yorks. So if …

It wasn’t clear why Google was deprecating MyMaps over the past several months; removing the ability to search them from Maps in January and removing them from Places last month. Now we know. It appears that MyMaps is being deprecated in the US in favor of Google’s much more robust community map making tool Map …

When a company like Google discontinues a product like Tags there is almost always more than one reason. Google’s publicly stated reason that they need to focus their efforts on which technologies they expect will yield the most benefit to users and businesses is very plausible. I think that the statement is accurate as far …