Mike Blumenthal

From google Maps at 5:00 pm EST: The Google Local Business Center is unavailable for the next hour We appreciate your patience as we perform some routine system maintenance. More specifically, we’re updating ‘the backend’ (to employ that catchy, catchall moniker coined and lent to us by engineering folks who work on all of the …

Last week I spoke with Marc from podestabaldocchi.com, one of the florists in San Francisco that was hijacked in mid September in Google Maps. Two things struck me in the conversation. The first was that he estimated that his business was off 30% for the weeks of the hijacking. That is a significant number that …

Miriam at Solasdesign has been doing a series of blog posts about the process of updating erroneous underlying map data from TeleAtlas and Navteq. Miriam’s client had a business on a street in Hayward, Wisconsin that was not shown in Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo or MSN. Currently Navteq provides map data to MapQuest, Yahoo and MSN while …

Going West:(thanks to Martijn)

My son just got his progress report in school and I am proud to say that he got very good grades. It wasn’t always that way, and in fact last year he spent most of the time either on restrictions or with extra chores. He has grown up a lot over the past 6 months …

Svetlana Gladkova of profy.com had an interesting piece on ShopSavvy, one of the first and most popular Android Apps downloadable from the Android Market. She noted that despite some roll out difficulties that by 2 p.m. ShopSavvy had 3096 installs and 3033 users actively scanning barcodes (97% usage rate)and usage was growing 20% an hour …

Wikipedia defines an Ambulance Chaser thusly: Ambulance chaser is a derogatory phrase sometimes used to describe a trial lawyer who specializes in representing accident victims. It typically refers to attorneys who solicit business (sometimes called barratry) from accident victims or their families at the scene of an accident or disaster (or immediately thereafter). In the United States, such conduct violates Rule 7.3[1] of …

Greg Sterling reports on SEL that the G1 Arrives, So Does Android Market. It marks the second inning in the game of mobile search uptake and promises to open up the market for end users and developers. These are exciting times for mobile search. The development of powerful hand held mobile computing devices with a choice …

In late September, Google Maps rolled our Map.Google.com/Vote to provide a single source of voting information for every location within the United States. However, two critical pieces of the voter information program, polling location and directions, were promised for a mid-October rollout. The polling information is now live in Maps, and the Voting Maplet. Google …

Verticalized mobile search wins over horizontal mobile search – Dev Khare, devkhare.com Since (2005/6), I think Google and Yahoo! have cemented their lead in the horizontal mobile search space and Nokia has appeared as a strong contender, especially outside the US with its D2C strategy.   Google and Yahoo! have been duking it out across the world …