IT Buoy

Well, I did call myself a “sparkly vampire” recently, due to my late-night blogging hours, but now it’s in a cartoon. I am not quite sure what to make of the comic by Newsvetter’s Andrew Fowler , who also created Guhmshoo cartoons, but it is definitely worth checking out. So, here is “All Things Digiphobic,” which you can click on to make larger:

Well, I did call myself a “sparkly vampire” recently, due to my late-night blogging hours, but now it’s in a cartoon. I am not quite sure what to make of the comic by Newsvetter’s Andrew Fowler , who also created Guhmshoo cartoons, but it is definitely worth checking out. So, here is “All Things Digiphobic,” which you can click on to make larger:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. [ UPDATE: Google confirmed the deal in a blog post, which you can read below, as well as in interviews BoomTown did today with execs at DocVerse and Google.] Continuing its acquisition spree, Google has snapped up DocVerse , a start-up that allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web, said several sources. Sources said the price was in the $25 to $30 million range. Founded by two ex-Microsoft (MSFT) execs in 2008, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, San Francisco-based DocVerse has raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant. It’s yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow by Google (GOOG), along with a range of other digital arenas such as cloud computing and mapping . Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs, but it struggles against the Office juggernaut. Thus, a link with Office via DocVerse is a smart move.

In one of the more interesting battlefields of the multifront war between Google and Microsoft , Bing Maps today added what it calls its “largest imagery update to date, adding 6.7 million square kilometers of new imagery.” That includes the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the United States where there is existing black-and-white imagery, as well as bird’s-eye imagery for Sweden. The ongoing innovations to online mapping by both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have been a boon to consumers, who are getting increasingly cool and substantive looks at our world. In February, Microsoft debuted a series of eye-candy features in its ongoing one-upmanship with Google with a new series of enhancements to its spatial search offerings. Coolest new ones from Microsoft: Indoor panoramas to move mapping inside and real-time video overlays to maps. Google Maps is also not resting, adding a series of features over the last months from Google Goggles (which takes pictures of an object or location and then identifies it via search) to spoken, turn-by-turn directions on its Android-powered smartphones. I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next from these archrivals. Here’s Microsoft’s blog on the improvements : March 05, 2010, 09:00 AM by Chris Pendleton Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went all misty in a speech at the University of Washington, declaring in his strongest statement that cloud computing was mission critical for the software giant. “This is the bet for the company,” Ballmer said. “For the cloud, we’re all in.” And that’s also pretty much all the language you’ve been hearing from Google of late. In a press event in Silicon Valley in December, in fact, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, when talking about mobile search, noted that the future of computing depends on one thing. The “missing ingredient,” he said, is the cloud. (Here is his slide showing that.) Google CEO Eric Schmidt said much the same at the Mobile World Congress in Spain last month. And as recently as yesterday, in fact, one of the company’s execs–Europe head John Herlihy–said the desktop computer was finished because of the combination of smartphones and the cloud.