Best Buy ramping up its computer cleaning service.

Embolden by the growing demand of its consumer tech-support service through its Geek-Squad team and a gain in market share in the electronics retail field, Best Buy is pushing hard its computer cleaning service. The clean-up in question here is the one that consist of getting rid of all the non essentials pre installed softwares that come with a brand new PC and that can slow it down. Best Buy has been offering the service for some time, but now it has started to bring more publicity to it. To convince customers, it has started in some stores in California, to showcases how two same PCs, one with all the preloaded softwares and one without it, perform side by side.The service is available at most Best Buy stores for $30.
But like most of you already know, you can do that yourself by going to the Start tab, control panel, double click on the add or remove icon, scroll through the program you want to remove, highlight it by clicking on it and then hit remove.

Experts warn Arctic Sea ice is melting faster.

With three weeks left in the Arctic Summer, experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Denter are afraid that this year could break the record for the lowest level of ice measured there in September for nearly thirty years.

For more, see AFP

Free driving direction over the phone.

MapQuest and 1-800-FREE411 announced a free service last week that allow users to speak their current location and their destination and receive a text message with directions.

For more on this topic, see LBS-Zone.com

Intuit launches Quicken Beam.

Intuit, the company best known for TurboTax and QuickBooks softwares, launched a new free service last week that lets cellphone users check the balance of all their financial accounts or receive alerts whenever a balance reaches a certain level. The service is in a public testing phase and the company is soliciting feedback from users who can download it at Intuitlabs.com.

For more, see Web Cpa.

Search ads getting hit by slow economy.

A recent survey by marketing firm Covario, showed that search ad marketing is not immune to the slow economy. The survey of 12 large tech companies found that last quarter, search ad spending rose by the smallest percentage since early 2007 when the survey was first started. The surprising news was that search ad spending with Yahoo by those 12 companies, was up while down with Google. Experts attribute the Yahoo uptick to its emerging year old Panama search ad service.

Obama to text his supporters first with running mate choice.

Senator Obama is planning to announce the name of his running mate on Saturday at a big rally in Chicago. But before that big public announcement, some of his supporters who signed on by giving their cell phone numbers, will receive the news first via text-message.

Chrysler to make some cars Wi-Fi hot spots.

Starting Monday, Chrysler is making Wi-Fi an option for some of its vehicles. A trunk mounted router produced by a small company called Autonet Mobile, will turn some models , into a travelling Wi-Fi hot spot. Multiple users would be able to surf the net at the same time and the hot spot will extend up to 100 feet away from the vehicle. At $499 plus a $29-a- month subscription, the system will not be cheap.

For more, see Wired.com