Product Pulse - August 15th, 2008

Posted August 15th, 2008 at 5:10 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

Number of Comments No Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse, Uncategorized

What’s with August 15th and creature hoaxes? Thirty one years, a SETI scientist in search of extraterrestrial life received a radio signal from deep space… but he could never detect it again. Today, two guys claim to be in possession of a bona fide Bigfoot carcass… but sounds like the DNA sample was part human but mostly possum. Ok, no joke, here’s what we tracked down this week:

Olympic redux: If you missed last night’s one-two punch from the American gymnastics team (probably because you were getting eight hours of sleep as I piled on more Olympics-induced sleep deprivation), Yahoo! Search has come up with a tool that lets you get photo highlights of the biggest moments of the Games. Just go to Yahoo! Image Search, type “Olympics” plus an athlete’s name or a sport, and you’ll get an up-to-date photo carousel of images from Yahoo! Sports’ coverage. You can just toggle through the various images without leaving the page. So you can stay on top of the Games without bags under your eyes. More here.
Surfing Safari: If you’re a Machead and you want the speed and helping hand of Yahoo! Search from your browser toolbar, go install the Inquisitor plug-in for Safari. After acquiring the software in May, we’ve been quietly sprucing it up with technology from Yahoo! Search BOSS to make searching faster. We also gave it a design and interface facelift. And finally, we sent it to a few Berlitz courses, and now it speaks eight new languages — Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Smarter, faster, and multilingual. Not bad for a few months. More here.
Fire Eagle soars: The Web started out not really caring where you were. Now it seems like more and more services have found geographic religion. If only you had a digital switchboard that could update all of them with wherever you are — from state to neighborhood to street corner. Enter Fire Eagle, our new application for sharing, updating and managing your location information with Web services and mobile products. It also lets developers add location services to their applications. No more wandering clueless in a new city. No more missing out on a friend who’s just a block away. Check out some of the 50+ applications already running on Fire Eagle. More here.