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Google began offering free turn-by-turn navigation with Android 2.0 in late 2009, and Nokia announced at the beginning of 2010 that Ovi Maps navigation would be free on all its future handsets. Today Microsoft announced that it is following suit with free turn-by-turn navigation for Windows 6.x and up phones, powered by Bing Maps.

When getting directions with Bing, there will now be a “Navigate” button which starts the turn-by-turn voice navigation. The voice navigation feature was developed by the Microsoft Tellme team.

Phones initially compatible with the new free navigation service include: HTC Fuze, HTC Pure, HTC HD2, HTC Tilt 2, HTC Touch Diamond 2, HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro, HTC Touch Pro 2, Motorola Q9c, Samsung Jack, Samsung Omnia II, Samsung Propel, and T-Mobile Dash 3G.

With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year’s time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed a change in Google online, the addition of a column on the left side that lets you narrow your results to just images, videos, blogs, shopping and other categories. That change has come to Google mobile as well, although it is concealed.

When you use Google on the iPhone or on an Android phone, you may notice two small arrows on a button to the left of the field where you type in your search terms. Touch that box and a column will appear.

The box lets you sort by type (videos, blogs and so forth), time period (24 hours to a year or custom dates), or just images. If you don’t want the menu on the left, touch the arrows again to remove it.

As simple as it is, it is a useful tool, once you know where to find it.

Google has added another tool as well, specifically for Android phones running systems 1.6 and higher. Google Goggles, the image recognition software, can recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and can translate those languages into several others as well.

To use it, point Google Goggles at the text you want to translate, draw a box around the words you want to translate and press the shutter button. If it recognizes the text, it will offer to translate it for you. Google said its eventual goal was to also translate non-Latin languages like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

The Facebook OpenGraph Search API is experiencing an outage that began last night somewhere between 7 PM EST and 8 PM EST, as best we can tell. After receiving a tip from a Facebook developer who noticed that his social search engine built on top of the Facebook platform, Booshaka, stopped updating with fresh content, we began investigating. This morning, we performed several searches against the API including queries for popular words like “graduation,” and found that although the results displayed show a recent “updated” timestamp, the “created” timestamp is now pushing 15 hours old. Surely, someone on Facebook has mentioned “graduation” in a Facebook update after 7:18 PM EST last night? Read the rest of this entry »

After blaming an internal technical glitch, Google now says it’s not sure why people in China have had trouble using its search service.