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Microsoft folds-in Multimap for ‘$50m’ | The Register

This one both confuses me, and makes sense. It confuses me, because Microsoft are saying buying Multimap will somehow make their offering better. I’m not sure how, as the Live maps interface is actually very slick. It’s fast, easy to use, and I just like it! I used to use Google Maps a lot, but the Live maps are far better now, as far as I’m concerned. I stopped using Multimap long ago, as it was so slow and clunky it was unbearable. In this age of Web 2.0, it felt more like Web 0.1 Beta.

It makes sense to me because Microsoft apparently aren’t pulling many people into Live maps. Fair enough I suppose, many people are saying they’re basically buying Multimap’s customers, which by Microsoft’s standards is pretty much usual fare.

So what do I reckon will happen? As a guess, I think MS will start redirecting users to their own live maps after a while. They’ll probably also move some of the map data across, and start using that, and some of the search technology probably, but otherwise it’ll spell the end of Multimap as we know it.

Cisco have been producing various little videos to show off their products of late. They’re quite simple – pick a product manager, plonk them into a small studio behind a desk, and get them to point at some bit of kit whilst talking about it.

The trouble is, these guys are techy types – not marketing people. So their wooden performances are more entertaining than anything else. It has worked before with other companies using their own people for ads (Halifax, springs to mind), but these guys are the best of the bunch I think.

Go see for yourself.

I went to Microsoft Live Local recently to search for something. Buckinghamshire’s satellite images is in much better resolution than Google Maps, and to be honest, I’ve found Live Local to be a bit better to work with.

I got to the site, and started typing in my search term, and this little thing popped up:

So, unless my eyes are deceiving me, it would appear that the GOOGLE toolbar is offering to add a MICROSOFT site to its search locations?!

I wasn’t aware hell had frozen over.

I found this useful Firefox addon today through a site on Digg. Basically, all it does is make your tabs in Firefox turn different colours. BUT, it’s based on the domain name. So every time I go to the BBC News site, it turns up a light green; Digital Spy is a dark blue (appropriate given their colour scheme) and so on.

There’s plenty of people dismissing it as not all that good, based on the fact that you can’t customise the colours – you can adjust their intensity, but otherwise that’s it. Well, that’s fine with me personally. It’s useful to just have them pop up randomly coloured like that. It saves a lot of thought with having to set up the colours in the first place, and then it just takes care of itself.

I’ve been using it all afternoon, and I must say, I’m quite taken with it. It’s a very tiny, elegant piece of code, and it works incredibly well.

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