Are you tired of getting a computer when you call customer service?  Reach this artilce from The Consumerist to find “50 Ways To Get A Live Person When You Call Customer Service”

VoIP-News has posted 50 ways to get a live person when you call customer service (an increasingly rare occurrence). My favorite is no. 32:

Do nothing. By doing nothing, you can trick the PBX into thinking you have a rotary phone and force it to get you an agent.

from the Google Blog:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

When you do a search on Google, each result we give you starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text (what we call a “snippet”), which together give you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

via Techcrunch:

Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page?

It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username).

Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably big impact on how high Twitter pages will be ranked in search engines from now on.

via TechCrunch:

The iPhone now accounts for 50 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones in the U.S., according to an AdMob Mobile Metrics report released this morning. Over the past six months, the iPhone has taken share from Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In August 2008, the iPhone made up only 10 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones. During the same time, Blackberry’s share has gone from 32 percent to 21 percent (with the Curve and the Pearl coming in stronger than the Storm), while Windows Mobile has taken an even bigger hit, declining from 30 percent to 13 percent. Palm is also down to 7 percent from 19 percent six months ago.

via Gizmodo:

Leaks suggest that Intel will be dropping a new single-core Z-series Atom proc that will be the first of the family to reach 2GHz.

from jkOnTheRun:

A small but welcome feature should be in the Labs section if you use Google’s Gmail service. It’s called “Undo Send”, or as I like to call it: the “Uh-Oh” function. Once enabled, you’ll have a five-second window to stop a message from leaving after you hit the Send button. I tested it late last night between my two Gmail accounts and it worked flawlessly.

From Gizmodo:

Our beloved Eye-Fis (SD cards that add Wi-Fi to any digital camera) have finally gotten the bump from their 2GB standard. Now Eye-Fi cards hold 4GB of photos and upload videos to YouTube/Flickr.

4GB Explore Video ($100)
automatically geotags photos and videos; also offers hotspot access at more than 10,000+ Wi-Fi locations

4GB Share Video ($80)
sends photo/video to the Web and your home computer

Here it is:

As I noted earlier on Monday, Microsoft plans to start internal testing later this week of Kumo, the rebranded version of Live Search. Now I have a screenshot to share.

Also, here’s the text of an e-mail that search executive Satya Nadella just sent to his staff. Keep in mind, even though he talks about checking out the site, his e-mail is to Microsoft staff with access to it. Us outsiders will have to chew on the screenshot (see below). From this screenshot (and two others I have seen), it appears the biggest change in Kumo is the way that it shows in the first results the query narrowed by a couple of different things the searcher might be looking for.[via Cnet]

Finally the new Mac Desktops have arrived.

As expected, Apple announced long-overdue and, in certain places, eagerly-awaited refreshes of its Mac desktop PCs, including the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. There are two separate announcements–and no special event, as often happens with Apple–one for the consumer Macs, and one for the Mac Pro (which is still a luxury item and not worth discussing).

Here’s the consumer Mac announcement:

Apple today announced updates to its iMac® and Mac® mini desktop lines, including a 24-inch iMac that is priced more affordably than ever before and a Mac mini with powerful new integrated graphics. For the same $1,499 price as the previous generation 20-inch iMac, the new 24-inch iMac delivers a 30 percent larger display, twice the memory and twice the storage. [via the SuperSite for Windows]

Apple’s iPhone seems to be handily controlling the mobile web market at 66%.

Net Applications’ February results show the iPhone operating system having managed over nine times the usage of its next smartphone competitor, Windows Mobile, which had just 6.91 percent of the traffic measured across tens of thousands of sites.

Other smartphone platforms haven’t fared any better, according to the metrics. Google’s Android and Symbian were both locked in a tie for 6.15 percent. Research in Motion’s email-centric BlackBerry OS was used less often at just 2.24 percent and was even outmatched by PalmOS devices, which represented 2.37 percent of cellular web use last month.

Why the particularly wide gap exists between Apple and its rivals hasn’t been explained. However, the data backs up AdMob findings which showed the iPhone getting half of all US smartphone traffic and a third of smartphone use worldwide during the month before. The use has previously been credited to a spike in Apple device ownership after the holidays as well as to the relative strength of the Safari web browser. [appleinsider.com]