Google to Sell Billboards on Google Maps

CNET's Natali Del Conte has all the latest tech news including: how google will sell billboard space on google maps, why the company is coming to blows with China and how to communicate with the future via text message.

Google To Sell Natali Del Conte: We have a lot of Google news today including how the company is coming to blows with the entire country of China and how to communicate with the future over text message. It’s Wednesday, January 13th. I’m Natali Del Conte. It’s time to get loaded. Google in China are not exactly simpatico these days. Google is now threatening to stop doing business in China all together after it claims that its systems were hacked and attacked last week. Earlier this week, Google issued an apology to Chinese authors for scanning books without permission. Now Google believes that Gmail accounts of Chinese rights activist were attacked and they consider that to be crossing the line. Pulling out of the country altogether would be a huge move though more than just a gesture. Google is typically a pretty tolerant company and if they’ve had it with Chinese censorship, well hope is there. Google has increased file storage size in Google Docs. You can now upload any file up to 250 MB each and your storage total will go up to 1 gig. And if you need more storage, it will cost 0.25 cents per gig per year which is super cheap. The hot buzz around the Google Nexus 1 Phone has started to die down and now complaints have started. We heard that customer’s report hasn’t exactly been up to snuff. People want to talk to an actual human being rather than wait for an email when their cellphone doesn’t work. Further inferiorating New Nexus one customer is the double termination feature. If customers cancelled their account, they must make up the difference of the purchase with Google which would be prorated over two years. In addition, users maybe charged an early termination fee from the provider. That’s not one but two early termination fees that could total over $500.00. Google is getting into the billboard business but not in the real world. The company hopes to sell ads on billboards in Google Street View, that’s right in Google Maps. Advertisers will be able to reclaim wasted ads based that may or may not have become out of date. Don’t worry, they’ll Google not start plastering ads across your business or property without your permission. They hope to work directly with property owners. Finally, Facebook lets you reply to wall post comments, photos, and videos in email. Before this new feature, users would have to launch Facebook to reply to a message but now you can do this simply by hitting reply in your email client. Unfortunately this new feature doesn’t work with messages in your inbox which is kind of a big mission. Someone those phone users are getting text messages from the future, from the year 2016. The texts are not actually coming from the future though. It’s a glitch in Windows Mobile that’s causing this to happen. It has been happening since January first. If you are one of those users and by some small chance, the texts actually are from the future. Ask the future who wins the Super Bowl this year, and then tell me so that I can place bets. I know this is Apple Tablet rumor season about some rumors about a fourth generation iPhone are starting to pop up too. According to Fast Company, Apple and Korea Telecom have reached a broad consensus to introduce advanced models as early as possible. So maybe better graphic chips, dual core processors, OLED screens which of most new phones have these days, video chat perhaps. I’d be surprise if that was the January announcement that Apple is planning but you’ll never know. A new study from the National Safety Council estimates that 28% of all traffic accidents can be attributed to cellphones. That includes talking on the phone and of course text messaging. The council estimates that this amounts to 1.4 million crashes per year, 200,000 which are blamed on texting. I know I’m always saying this but I’ll say it again, put your phone down when you’re on the road, it doesn’t worth that your calls and text messages can wait. Those are your headlines for today. We will be back tomorrow with more. Thank you for watching. I’m Natali Del Conte with Cnet TV and you’ve just been loaded.