Ben Charny

Joga is an invite-only online community for exchanging videos, photos, scores, news and other items about football. When switched on in the next few days, it’ll be the first tangible results of Google’s partnership with Nike Inc., the athletic apparel maker. This is kind of new for Google. The search company may rake in billions […]

Worried about the Internet’s erosion of your privacy? Take a look at Loki. The free, Web browser toolbar from Boston-based Skyhook Wireless automatically determines your lattitude and longitude, with an accuracy of about 30 meters. Then it mixes that information with commonly-found Internet features. It works by borrowing your laptop’s Wi-Fi antenna to scan for […]

A new search engine provides a free look at The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Financial Times, The New Republic and other providers of premium news and information usually not found in Internet search engine results. Congoo began distributing a Web toolbar this week thats necessary to view the material. Once downloaded, visitors to Congoo get to […]

Porn has helped Google dodge quite a bullet. Google was facing a potentially catastrophic request from the government for a random sampling of the search terms its users enter. The government wanted the terms to test porn filters, and to use the test results as evidence in another case. While it sounds innocuous enough, the […]

“Up-to-the-minute” sports scores and schedules are now available via Google SMS. Check with your service plan before trying this out. Cell phone operators usually charge a few pennies to send and/or receive text messages.

Our Google translator finally arrived in the mail! Now lets see just how good it is at decoding Googleish. We fed the contraption this story written by my colleague Michael J. Miller at PC Magazine. His work is based on an interview with Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt. Schmidt: Personally, he wouldn’t support an […]

Google says it plans to let the U.S. government examine a miniscule snippet of its stockpile of indexed Web sites. The company was ordered to do just that on March 17 by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware. Ware has given Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., until April 3 to hand over a randomly […]

Google seems to be getting its lunch handed to it in a very lucrative front in its battle with chief rival Microsoft. According to some figures Microsoft released today, in January 20 million or so people made a phone call using either Microsoft’s MSN Messenger instant messaging feature, or its heir apparent Live.com. Also that […]

Several news reports suggest Time Warner plans to resurrect its once high-flying Netscape division by turning it into a social networking hub. Media tracker Paid Content.org says the Netscape name is soon to be attached to a social networking Web site, in which news stories and other items can be freely traded. In order to […]

A teen-ager has managed to point out Google News’ credibility problems. Sixteen-year-old Tom Vendetta says he was motivated into devilishness by an article on fooling Google News he found on the Digg Web site. Using a free newswire service, he circulated a fake, typo-riddled press release claiming he’d been hired by Google. In the release, […]