party

Google is petitioning explorers to help it take Google Maps to where no roads go -- through South American jungles, into Africa's canyonlands, among Asia's thousands of islands, across Hawaiian lava fields, and more.

The tech giant announced Thursday that it's asking third-party organizations to strap on its Street View Trekker back-pack and contribute imagery to help the company "build the very best map of the world."

To kick off the new pilot program, Google first partnered with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau. People at the bureau have already started hiking around the Big … Read more

A Tesla fan is asking the White House for help. He wants the federal government to stop states from requiring that cars be sold only by third-party dealers.

In a White House petition he created, the fan asks the Obama administration to "allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states." He believes that states shouldn't be allowed to stop the electric car company from selling autos directly to customers.

"The state legislators are trying to unfairly protect automobile dealers in their states from competition," the fan writes in the petition. "… Read more

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a group that represents hundreds of Internet advertisers, has attacked Mozilla's involvement in a Stanford Law School privacy project to judge whether individual Web sites can be trusted to set behavior-tracking browser cookies.

The IAB doesn't like the Cookie Clearninghouse, which Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and Mozilla announced on June 19. The project aims to rate individual to bring privacy ratings for browser cookies -- the small text files that Web site operators can store on people's computers. Cookies can be useful for remembering that you're logged into a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook's latest acquisition, Parse, announced on Wednesday evening that it has grown 25 percent since the social network bought it two months ago.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar told an audience at a World Wide Developers Conference event that the platform has grown by 20,000 apps since last month.

"We agreed to have Facebook buy us to accelerate our vision," he said.

Facebook bought developer platform Parse in April, letting the social network dip into the back end of thousands of mobile applications. More apps, more data.

Third-party apps are important to Facebook because … Read more

Spin the Bottle - Party Games is a faithful digital rendition of the classic party game, combining a fairly accurate spinning bottle mechanic with a series of revealing questions. While options for changing questions or the spin mechanic are missing, the basic interface looks and feels like classic Spin the Bottle, perfect for anyone without an empty bottle on hand.

To use Spin the Bottle: Party Games, you place two fingers on the screen and twist them. The harder you twist, the faster the bottle spins. It will then stop on one of the four colored quadrants. While this is … Read more

I get all panicked when I have to put together music for a party. It's not because I hate music; it's because I love it too much.

Putting together a playlist is like putting my ego on the line. If someone doesn't like a song I picked out -- or just fails to love it as much as I hoped they would -- it has the power to send me into a depressive spiral of self-loathing.

I'm weird that way. I could never make it as a DJ.

That why I was excited to see CNET … Read more

STANFORD, Calif.--When I walked onto the Stanford University campus this week and into the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, I was greeted by a short, gray robot waving his two long arms -- he was looking for a high-five.

All around me robots of all sizes were roaming the floor. I was trapped -- in the future. … Read more

Police going undercover on social media to catch gangsters and murderers is one thing, but posing as punk rockers to catch bands playing illegal house parties?

That's just what Boston police are allegedly doing, according to Slate.

After a nuisance control ordinance (PDF) passed last year, the city has been working to squelch local punk and indie rock parties featuring loud bands. And to find out where these raucous festivities are taking place -- in order to break them up before they get started -- the police are supposedly sleuthing out party addresses via e-mail and social media.

Acting … Read more

Scare Party is the newest in a long line of "scary" apps released in recent months. The small design of an iOS device, the fact that you are almost always wearing headphones, and the fact that the touch screen offers new control schemes are all driving factors in the scary game movement. Some deliver while others are more demos of what the developer is working on. Scare Party is a mixture of the two, managing to offer the right amount of chills in a compelling package, but not quite enough content to keep a group of people happy … Read more