Alan Buckingham

The Google Drive team on Tuesday announced a new Chrome extension called "Save to Drive," which ties browser activity directly into the user's Google Drive cloud storage account and eliminates the need for third-party extensions to provide the functionality.

Prior to today's release, an extension from the prestigious MIT going by the name "save to drive" was available. Now, Google has borrowed the name and made it available in the Chrome Web Store. The search giant takes the concept a lot further though.

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It's no secret that Microsoft sees its Xbox platform as much more than just a gaming console. It wants the device to act as the digital hub of our living rooms, and today the company took another step in that direction, announcing more than 40 new entertainment apps.

Xbox Live's Larry Hryb, AKA Major Nelson, posted the news this morning that "more than 40 new global entertainment partners [are] coming to Xbox LIVE, including new apps launching this week."

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NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, has been tracking Santa since 1955. In the old days, it was an AM radio broadcast that began on Christmas Eve and purported to track the jolly old fellow as he left the North Pole and began his flight around the world. With technology's advance, NORAD has also pushed into the future.

These days, you can keep up with Saint Nick's journey with more than just a transistor radio. There is a special website and even mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow parents and children to track Santa's flight.

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While many of you wring your hands over the whole iPhone versus Android thing, Microsoft is quietly building a mobile platform that has also caused some hand-wringing -- late release, no upgrade path for previous users... not a great start. There has been a lot written about Windows Phone 8 since it was released. With some people saying it's good and others that it's a failure. The truth is, in my opinion, it's just really too early to tell. However, one thing is certain, the Windows Phone Store is growing quickly, with new apps being added all the time.

Today, two prominent new apps appeared in the Store that many of you may want to add to your new handset -- Vimeo and Insider.

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New Zealand millionaire and owner of the defunct MegaUpload site, Kim Dotcom, has been active on Twitter on a number of topics lately. When he isn't busy disparaging the United States government, he is promoting his new and improved Mega site, which is set to launch in January.

Today, Dotcom took to his social media platform once again, this time to unveil the first screenshots of the new Mega. In all, three images were posted with little detail -- not that 140 characters allows for much detail in any case.

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Google Labs used to be a destination within Google where users could find new and experimental applications the search company was creating. Today, Labs are quietly woven into the Settings menu of several Google properties, including Gmail and Reader.

This is the place where you can find the app's experimental features. Like the old Google Labs, there is no guarantee that any project will succeed -- in fact, it is just as likely to disappear. However, sometimes a feature works well enough, and becomes popular enough, that it "graduates" to become a full-fledged part of the app.

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Despite recent competition from Nokia Here, Google remains largely unchallenged when it comes to maps, understanding that there’s more to them than just driving directions.

A new European update adds walking paths, ferry lines, building outlines, park boundaries, university campuses and a few other goodies to 10 countries -- Andorra, Bulgaria, Estonia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

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Can Google get further into the business world by combining Apps and the popular Play store? We are about to find out because the company has announced just that approach. Google has been making inroads for sometime now with the information technology crowd thanks to its Apps offering and, with some high profile conquests in the corporate and government realm, has made real progress against Microsoft and the powerful Office 365 offering. Now Google is taking a mobile approach in hopes of getting even more attention from big business.

In this case the search giant is looking to its growing Android success and the attached Play store to get a better foothold. The company has announced a new "Private Channel"  for the Play store that will allow for the distribution of internal mobile apps.

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"Merry Christmas". Those were the two words that Neil Papworth, an engineer in the United Kingdom, sent to Vodafone's Richard Jarvis. The world has come a long way since that very first text message sent on December 3, 1992. With that simple holiday greeting the world changed and a generation of kids began to cause headaches for their parents in a whole new way.

There are lots of numbers and statistics out there surrounding the amount of messages sent, the data costs of SMS, and every other subject under the sun. I won't waste your time with a bunch of boring numbers though. What's much more interesting is the many creative uses that texting has been put to, and the funny and memorable stories that surround the technology.

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If you live in the Dublin area, or are looking to move there, cloud storage service Dropbox may have a job for you. This morning the company announced it will be opening its first foreign office and has chosen Dublin, Ireland as the location. Until now, despite having customers in more than 200 different countries, the company's operations were all handled via its offices in San Francisco.

Aside from the obvious job creation benefits, Mitra Lohrasbpour writes that there will be numerous upsides for customers as well, including user support in more languages and extended hours of support for Dropbox for Teams.

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To Microsoft's credit, it knows it has to be constantly vigilant with its public image. Internet Explorer has been raked across the coals for years, and no matter what Microsoft does, people seem to be unhappy. This is not to say the browser hasn't earned a lot of this criticism with security vulnerabilities and web standards problems, but sometimes the relentless onslaught of negativity in web comment sections is too much to handle.

Microsoft's latest video shows that sometimes the best a company can hope for is for people to hate them less.

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In the beginning there was English and it was good. Okay, not so much. Honestly I found YouTube captions early on to be pretty darn bad. The Google speech recognition tool wasn't up to snuff and it sometimes led to hilarious results. But, to it's credit, the company has made strides to improve. In fact, if you have used Android lately then I think you will find speech-to-text to be pretty solid.

YouTube, a Google property, introduced captions back in 2009. At the time it was English only, but as the technology improved other languages were added -- Japanese, Korean and Spanish were next to appear. Now the service offers an additional six languages.

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It's another cloudy day in the technology world. No, I am not referring to the rain-snow event we are experiencing here in my beloved mid-Atlantic region, but instead to the IT version of the "cloud", the buzzword with which you should all be well familiar. Dell, formerly a leading hardware provider, is also a player in this game.

The Wyse PocketCloud service isn't new, but its name may not be as well known as other cloud services. With today's announcement, Dell is trying hard to make PocketCloud more recognizable so it may capitalize on the "BYOD" trend.

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Today Amazon kicks off the first-ever AWS (Amazon Web Services) conference in Las Vegas. Sure, it is too late to get to AWS re:Invent now and the Technical Bootcamps are all sold out anyway, but that doesn't mean you need to miss everything. Some of the event will be live-streamed right to your computer. The show kicks off today and runs through November 29th.

This conference is tailor-made for those looking to integrate the Amazon cloud services into their business. There are workgroups surrounding the use of AWS in building web-scale apps, a talk given by Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix, AWS cloud security and a whole lot more. In fact, there will be over 150 different sessions.

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Sure Windows Phone may have Office and the iPhone may be  increasingly acceptable to IT departments, but that doesn't mean that your Android device can't be an excellent travel companion. Thanks to the open nature of Android there is a wealth of apps that can cover most anything you will need on that big business trip.

If you use Android then you are probably familiar already with the plethora of travel apps that are available, not only on the Google mobile OS, but also on other platforms as well. There are ways to book your hotels and restaurants as well as track your flight. Those are all nice, but what can Android  do that the average non-techie business user may not be aware of?

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