This product is combination Foursquare & Facebook Places into. It will allow you to see where your friends are right now. I know some of you are concerned about the privacy and being seen where you are but Google Latitude has that covered as well with their share, set, or hide your location at any time. I look forward to using yet another Google product and I hope you have fun with as I am.

You can view the full release here.

Team Strategis at the Boston Step Out.

This week Steve Jobs of Apple published long open letter on Flash in which he goes over all the reasons why Apple does not support flash.

This letter goes through 6 reasons why they have decided not to use flash.

Here is a short list of what was said.

• Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe along with their future enhancement, pricing, etc.
• Almost all the videos are available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
• Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.
• H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
• Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.
• We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

If you would like to check out the full letter click here.

Looking over this list there are few good points but also couple really bad ones. I understand the battery life, that is very important with the smart phones, no one wants to have a 5 hour phone. As far as security I disagree, I have been using flash since it first came out and I have yet to have an security issue. No one really watches flash videos anymore, that’s why there is YouTube. The whole thing about flash being proprietary, which business isn’t, Apple? Issue of the mouse rollover, that is not the Flash problem that is Apple developers problem, due to the fact that they have to figure out how it works. So overall in my opinion I think this letter is pretty useless and full of excuses. Me as a user would like to see flash on it just because most of the major websites are created partially using flash, so it is a inconvenience to me as a apple iPhone user.

Let me know how you feel about this.

Who in a right state of mind sits behind a computer and says to him self “I believe I will give you my credit card info, no problem, what’s the worst it can happen.”  Well the worst has happened and its out there for everyone to see.

This is what Blippy had to say:

“Blippy is very concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. We employ administrative, physical and electronic measures designed to protect your information from unauthorized access. We will make any legally-required disclosures of any breach of the security, confidentiality, or integrity of your unencrypted electronically stored personal data to you via email or conspicuous posting on the Services in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, consistent with (i) the legitimate needs of law enforcement or (ii) any measures necessary to determine the scope of the breach and restore the reasonable integrity of the data system.”

Sharing your credit card and online purchases with friends on the web was not a good idea and I don’t think it will ever be no matter how secure they say it is, just because there is always that one person that is waiting to crack the code.

If you are interested in reading more click on the link below.
http://mashable.com/2010/04/23/blippy-credit-card-numbers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

How often is there a product that with every version comes a great deal of excitiement. There are few but one that comes to mind is Adobes CS5. With every version comes something new that just blows your mind away. I am curious what they have in store for us deisgners this time around. Some improvements I heard about were the paint tools & filters are nothing like before (simpler & faster), content aware filling (wow) and that is just
Photoshop.

Cant wait to see what else they have up their sleves. Guess Monday, April 12, 2010 at 11am we will find out. I am personally looking forward Illustrator & Flash improvements. Let me know if there is anything you might have heard and would like to share.

We all know that Apple computers cannot be compared to as a graphic design tool. One thing that Apple has not done yet is dual screens on a laptop, but Lenovo did. They have introduced Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds. It may not have the sleek and elegant look of an Apple or HP but its functionality is amazing. Just imagine the possibilities, Creative suite on one screen, controls on the other, internet on one movie on the other. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it. This notebook comes with 17” screen and additional 10.6” for the second one. It comes with all the bells and whistles as far as the processors, hard drives and memory go. Couple things that could improve down the line would be the weight and quality of a second screen, but for a first generation dual screens this better than great.

Currently it is selling for $3,663.00 which is a little pricy but worth it in many aspects.

 In my mind this notebook is a great step forward in the computer world as well as a Dream Machine for graphic designers. Do you think something like this could overtake the Giant Apple?

If you go to YouTube these days, you will find a ton of these videos. People are shooting everything from video diaries to podcasts. Companies use it to sell products or services. Employees use them to show-off their working environments. They are easy to use and you can upload videos within minutes to any social networking site. As with any new technology, there are bigger and better models to get such as Canon 5D MK II. Why spend $4,000 when you can achieve similar, if not, the same results with a $200 FlipCam camera.

In a way, this is simply awesome.

My colleague stumbled upon this post that I thought would be worthy of breaking news in Scoops world, even when taken with a grain of salt. Robert Scoble posted yesterday about shift away from SEO in regards to small business marketing. His reason–Because Google and Bing keep changing the rules so frequently, that they are  figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Below is the video George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson,  co-founders of ROI.works, a search marketing firm,  that have been doing search engine and online marketing:

With social networking becoming more and more relevant in the same of SEO, I agree that business will have to continously change their methods which may ultimately lead to the demise of  SEO. Maybe not this year, but I am sure somewhere down the road.

Why do all the suits and ties behind NFL always try to find a way to make a buck and ruin the game for the rest of us. I am not sure if you have heard the latest but here it is. “…if a home game has not been sold out within 72 hours of its start time, the game cannot be televised locally…” Really? As it is the economy has taken its toll on everyone, but why would you take out one of the few things that we all look forward to?

So the NFL jumped onto all of the complaints and said “they will be offering delayed replays (after midnight) of blackout games to viewers for free via NFL.com.” Well I will definitely not stay up and watch that, and by the time tomorrow comes around ESPN will give me all I need to know anyways.

Ever since its 1998 launch, Google has become something like an online library- A really cool library, that does not smell funny, and doesn’t make you get a membership card or pay late fees. Anything you need or want, Google has. It is so easy to use and find what you are looking for, no other search engine comes even close (not even Bing – I know – I’ve been using Bing for three weeks now and I am ready to throw my computer out the window. I would love to see the number of people who have tried a search on Bing and ended up using Google. )

Any idea how many keywords you type into Google on a daily basis? Why would you – unless you have nothing better to do? My guess is that you search so often, you don’t even realize that you are a Google search term pro. Good enough to recognize the search term if you are shown only a bunch of pictures????

Let’s see just how well you know how to Google – http://grant.robinson.name/projects/guess-the-google/

Once you spent few addictive hours on this game, let us know your high score.