British Airways Flies With Google Earth

Forbes writes:

On Thursday, British Airways (nyse: BAB) became the first airline to pin the technology to its Web site, allowing visitors to not only book their flights, but find nearby hotels and car rentals on a 3D map. Once users have zoomed in on their chosen locale, the Google (nasdaq: GOOG) service provides a link through which they can make a booking back on the British Airways site.

“People have always enjoyed finding their own home on Google Earth and now they can see where they’ll be laying down their beach towel or enjoying après ski before they fly,” said Obi Felton, Google’s head of consumer marketing.

David Soskin, chief executive of the airfare comparison site Cheapflights.com, said BA was making its Web site more functional in order to lure its customers online. “Margins in flights sales are not enormous,” he said. “So in order to keep profits up it’s very lucrative to go into higher margin areas, like car hire and accommodation.” The airline’s strategy of cross-selling such related services via its Web site is one that travel agents have already enacted.

Cookie-free and history-free browsing with Browzar

via digg.com

Browzar launches no-installation browser which enables cookie-free and history-free browsing.

Browzar does not require any installation or registration and does not save information from any websites visited while using it. Cache, history, cookies and auto-complete forms are all automatically deleted, protecting your privacy while online.

As mentioned at Browzar.com:

With Browzar you can search and surf the web without leaving any visible trace on the computer you are using.

Apple launches new site for open source projects

MacsimumNews writes:

Apple has launched Mac OS Forge, a new community development site hosted designed to support Web Kit and other open source projects focused on Mac OS X.

In addition, developers can create and browse third-party open source projects that are closely related to the Mac operating system. Current projects on Mac OS Forge include source code to the new iCal Server in Leopard Server, and Apache-licensed versions of Bonjour service discovery and Launchd process management.

The Broadband Game

Robert Cringely writes why Google will win:

Parked at the peering point, sitting on the same SONET ring as the local telephone company, Google will have done as much as it possibly can to reduce any network disadvantage. By leveraging its own fiber backbone Google not only further avoids such interference, it has a chance to gain a step or two through better routing or more generous backbone provisioning. What’s stored IN the data centers is important, but how they are CONNECTED is equally important.

The other part of the strategy is the gBox or gCube or — how about this one, the gSpot? — Google’s interface device, which might be Google’s version of the “Home Gateway.” Another example would be France Telecom’s Livebox (or the number two French ISP Free’s Freebox, which is even better), integrating video, Internet, and VoIP. And if you check out the latest Xbox or PS/2 releases, you’ll see everyone is heading that same way, from different starting points in the home. But the gSpot strategy is completely different. Where the company is deliberately deciding NOT to compete against the infrastructure builders on the street corner, they plan to overwhelm all players inside homes and businesses.
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Who is going to win the triple play? It doesn’t matter. Who is going to win the game? Any player with deep pockets and no particular technological dependency. At this point that could be Yahoo or Microsoft or AOL or some new player altogether, but it probably means Google.

Social Web Apps

Bokardo writes:

In general, computers and software are taking an increasingly social role for us. Our behavior hasn’t become all that much more social (although it certainly has for some) but we’re learning how to effectively model our social needs in software. Three years ago the social aspects of software was email and chat messaging. Now, it’s forging online identity as profiles and embedded messaging within applications. It’s become always-on, which means that there is no distinction between “offline” and “online” anymore. We are not just modeling messaging, we’re modeling presence as well. This is a big shift…and our language reflects it. I’m “on MySpace” means that we are figuratively and literally on the site.

I quoted Wil Wright recently, and I think he’s (pardon the pun) right on. First thought of as super calculators, computers are now part of the social fabric of our lives. They are becoming integral to how we communicate with our family, friends, and colleagues. They’re still doing calculations of course, but the software that we’ve designed for them is all about human-to-human contact. Social contact. And since we’re social animals in the end, the trend of modeling this in software won’t be reversing any time soon.