Free Google product listings expand to knowledge panels   Following the significant move of bringing free product listings to Google’s Shopping tab results in April, Google is starting to extend them into the main Search results. The company announced Monday that the product listings in Search knowledge panels will now …

Google positioned to dominate the ‘O2O economy’ Google is the company in the strongest position to capitalize on the massive online-to-offline (O2O) economy. I discussed Google’s dominant position linking the digital and physical worlds, Google My Business’ evolution and the future of local search as a more distributed phenomenon in …

Karen Robards’ The Black Swan Of Paris Is Historical Fiction At Its Best New York Times Best Selling author Karen Robards’ latest novel, The Black Swan of Paris, is full of intrigue and heart-pulsing suspense, while taking place in Nazi Germany. It’s both heartbreaking and touching, and will stay with …

Microsoft Is Closing Its Retail Stores Permanently Due to COVID-19 Microsoft has announced it will close all of its physical store locations. Officially, this is due to COVID-19. The memo announcing the change is long on PR-speak, short on actual information. We are told, for example, that “As we look …

Astronomers Find Two Super-Earths Orbiting Nearby Red Dwarf The hard work of astronomers around the world using instruments like the Kepler Space Telescope has shown there’s no shortage of planets in the cosmos. Most of those exoplanets are far away, but a handful are right next door (on an astronomical …

Giant Wombat-Like Marsupials Roamed Australia 25 Million Years Ago Paleontologists have identified a giant wombat-like marsupial that lived 25 million years ago (Oligocene epoch) in what is now Australia. Named Mukupirna nambensis, the prehistoric creature was at least five times larger than living wombats and so different that the researchers …

Sled Dogs Emerged Over 9,500 Years Ago in Siberia: Study An international team of researchers has sequenced the genomes of 10 modern sled dogs, an ancient sled dog and an ancient wolf, both from Siberia, and analyzed their genetic relationships with other modern dogs. They’ve found that sled dogs represent …

Social Shorts: TikTok for Business, Instagram Reels, Audio Tweets TikTok’s new advertiser hub TikTok debuted its new studio hub for brands and agencies Thursday. TikTok for Business is available globally across the app’s 20-odd markets and will host services and ad formats for advertisers. It also debuted Brand Scan, an …

CPG giant Unilever announces no more Facebook, Twitter ads through 2020 Yesterday Verizon announced it was joining the “Stop Hate for Profit” Facebook ads boycott. Today Unilever said it will stop all advertising on Facebook and Twitter through the end of the year. The company issued a statement explaining its …

Cox Claims It Can Reduce Your Gaming Lag, but Only If You Pony Up the Cash After over a year in beta testing, Cox is rolling out its Elite Gamer add-on for new customers. The ISP claims it can improve your latency by up to 32 percent if you subscribe …