December 2006 Archives

Here's an article from Canada's Globe & Mail about online buying behavior in Canada, which lags behind U.S. online purchasing. The article points out the "chicken and egg" conundrum that many Canadian retailers don't offer good online purchasing services because Canadians aren't buying. But of course...Canadians won't buy if services are not being offered.

One comment on the article posits that in the U.S., no tax is charged on most Internet purchases, which makes paying shipping costs more palatable, but that Canadians must pay both tax and shipping on online purchases.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061221.wretaill1221/BNStory/Technology/home

TES

It seems that Google would like to do for space what it has done for maps. Who does a company turn to as a partner when it wants to make all manner of space information available to the general public? NASA, of course.

The Financial Times (and many other media outlets) have reported that, "Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a “Space Act Agreement” with Google that would include collaboration on large-scale data management and massively distributed computing as well as focusing on making the most useful of Nasa’s information available over the Internet."

What kind of information would be available? Only the coolest stuff in the world (said she, a life-long science fiction geek). There are apparently plans afoot for, among things, real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

The full article is here.

TES