Yachting Blog

Google Maps Sued for Being Free
A French court has ruled that Google should pay a 500,000 euro fine because by making Google Maps free they are abusing their dominant position. The action was brought by Bottin Cartographes, a French mapping company which charges customers such as Louis Vuitton and Airbus to use their maps. From looking at Bottin Carto's website I would be surprised if their maps were seen as a competitor to Google's. I am rather staggered by this ruling and wonder where it leaves other companies that wi...

Personal
A new startup called Personal is marketing itself as a secure data vault where you can store all your private information in groups called "gems" which you can access and share. For instance you can have a wifi gem where you can keep your wireless connection password or a dinner party gem where you can keep your food allergy information. They market the service as a way of saving time by not having to fill in forms again and again but this not only misses the point that not all users will...

Cool Datacentre
Verne Global have built a modular datacentre at Keflavik in Iceland. Its location near to the Arctic Circle will provide it with natural cooling for the servers in the same way as Facebook's proposed facility in Sweden. Iceland also sounds like a wise choice for a datacentre given that their abundant geothermal and hydroelectic power supply is both renewable and cheap. The company also claims that it is a great geographical position given that it is equidistant from Europe and America. I can'...

HTML5 Web Apps Coming of Age
It is great to see the increased impetus behind using HTML5 to develop smartphone apps rather than developing a native app for each manufacturer's operating system (e.g. Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile). We recently changed our yacht.mobi mobile development path from using Java to develop for Android, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry QNX to using HTML5 to develop for all platforms (including Apple and Windows Mobile). It is encouraging that companies are pushing the limits of the HT...

Windows 7 vs Windows XP
View our entry for a small competition where we had to create a short video response to say why we thought that using Windows 7 is more productive than using Windows XP.

Charity Bike Tracking
Tomorrow sees the start of a two week bike ride from Lands End to John O'Groats by four chaps to raise money for HOPE WorldWide. We are very happy to allow people to view their progress as they use new Yacht Plotter tech to track their progress. Please follow their progress on the map and support their worthy cause.

Windows 8 to Mount ISO Files
Microsoft's Windows Engineering Team have just announced that Windows 8 will natively mount ISO files. This is a great boon to users who download and install programs in that format as it saves messing about with third part devices to mount the ISO image. The new version of Windows will include a "Mount" button on Explorer's ribbon which you can use to mount the image as a new drive letter (making a virtual CDROM or DVD drive). Probably the best thing about this new feature is that it will al...

Ticketmaster Implements Facebook Solution
Ticketmaster have developed a feature which flags where your Facebook friends are sitting at an event so you can purchase tickets near them. We need more joined up projects like this to make Facebook useful.

Offline Google Maps
Yay, Google Maps is now available in offline mode on Android.

Cosmic Panda
Likes YouTube's slick new Cosmic Panda design but ended up turning it off again because it does not contain full functionality (such as the ability to post video responses).

Google Flight Information
It just got a whole load easier to find which airlines go where using Google (e.g. search for "flight edi sxf").

The Wall
At last I've found out why Facebook call it a "wall".

Government Site Prototype
Took a look at the new public prototype for the new singular government website and was shocked to see that the menu bar (News, Departments, Publications, etc) comes beneath the page fold (i.e. you need to scroll down to see it). That is one basic flaw!

iPhone Hype
iPhone hype never seems to end. Top tech news today is that the white iPhone 4 is 200 microns thicker than the standard version. Will consumers notice it is a fifth of a mil thicker?

Google Traffic Flow
Just noticed that Google Maps now has live traffic flow information on it. Nice!