Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to add new privacy features to web browsers

Updates to the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which include a "do not track" feature, are due to be rolled out early this year.

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce Trade and Consumer Protection concluded that more transparency and consumer control regarding the practice of tracking users' activities are needed to protect consumers. 

Mozilla have been working on implementing the recommendation, but believe that for a do-not-track option to work, tracking companies would need to agree not to monitor surfers who have the feature enabled.

Google recently announced an extension called ChromeBlock which gives you an easy way to shut down around 90 different web tracking networks. The extension prevents the networks from personalising their ads which are delivered to your PC and from tracking data about your usage for online advertising.

On the Chrome Web store site Google wrote.

"We recognize that some users are uncomfortable with the personalization of ads that they see on the web and we offer many levels of control over this personalization. Two years ago we launched two ground-breaking innovations, the Ads Preferences Manager and the industry’s first persistent cookie opt-out. Now we’re giving users who don’t want their ads personalized the same permanent, one-click control for advertising-related cookies across our industry."

Microsoft have said that Internet Explorer 9 will include "do-not-track" functionality when it is released early this year, but they are said to have backed out of releasing the option in Internet Explorer 8 after advertisers became concerned about the impact on their business.

Larry Page replaces Eric Schmidt as Google CEO

CEO Eric Schmidt has been replaced by google co-founder Larry Page after 10 years in the job.

In a blog post on the Official Google Blog, Eric Schmidt stated that the change was planned over the Christmas period and timed to avoid wild speculation over the latest financial results, (revenue was up 26%.)

The reasons for the change are unclear, but it follows a number of problems with Google's execution and strategy over Android, Google Buzz, Google Wave, the accidental collection of personal data via Wi-Fi and their failure to purchase Groupon, the discount voucher company.  The latest rumours suggest that Google is developing its own clone of Groupon called Google Offers.

Google Goggles Upgraded

Google has released version 1.3 of Goggles, the mobile application which uses a phone's camera to search the internet by taking a picture.

Search speed has been improved and a number of new features have been added too.

Point your phone at an unsolved sudoku puzzle and your phone will show you an image of the solved puzzle within 5 or 10 seconds.

Barcode scanning of QR codes and EAN13's is now faster.

Contact details from a business card, newspaper or magazine can be quickly imported into the phone as text. 

If you are in a bar or at a dinner party and you like the bottle of wine on the table, take a picture and you'll still be able to remember the name of it the next morning.




Google Goggles also allows you to translate text from English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and translate it into many more from Albanian and Catalan to Swedish or Portugese.


The tranlate feature works by taking a picture and drawing a box around the words to be translated then choosing the source and destination languages.







Start thinking about Google Goggles and SEO

Google states that taking images from a computer monitor may not work perfectly, but thinking about Goggles when planning an SEO strategy for retailers is now essential.

Ranking well in Google's image search is the key, so in addition to images of products on a website, a clear   image of the product's label, along with good alt tags and a well named image name should be spiderable by the Googlebot.

A user who finds your product in a shop or at a friends house and searches for it using Goggles should then be taken straight to your website.

Changing the UK VAT rate in Magento

Login to your Magento Admin interface.

Goto Sales > VAT > Manage Tax Zones & Rates.  You should see your VAT rate listed.

Click on the relevant entry and simply change the value from 17.5 to 20.