Back in April at CTIA, Microsoft was showing off a few new features on the way for their search application, Live Search for Windows Mobile. They announced this morning that these features would be available to users starting this day.

The new features:

• Map your friends: Grabs addresses from your contact list, puts them on the map, and provides directions.
• View Virtual Earth collections: Lets you check out maps of locations/events shared by members of the community.
• Web search: Launch web search directly from the client to find web pages, product price comparisons and reviews, news, images, etc.
• Weather: Check the current weather, or a 4 day forecast.

Yahoo! Go 3, which provides some of the same functionality as Live Search (though no virtual earth or friend mapping support, as far as I know), recently launched on the Windows Mobile platform. Anybody out there familiar with both and want to share some experiences?

Via Mobilecrunch

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As you know, after Feb. 17, 2009, all analog television broadcasts will end and the U.S. will go digital. Companies are competing with one another to set the standard for mobile TV, which will allow mobile phones to receive and display digital signals from local broadcast stations. Samsung Electronics and LG are joining the arena where only one standard comes out the winner.

Video technology company Thomson and Qualcomm are two other companies that are vying to set the standard. The TV industry’s technical standards-setting body will decide the winner.

The standard-setting body, Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), is expected to pick a standard sometime next year. The Television industry is hoping to set a standard quickly, so TV stations won’t have to invest in multiple technologies.

With things like broadband and cable slicing into broadcast TV’s customer base, mobile Television may be the automobile to return local broadcast Television back to prominence, at least while viewers are on the go.

ATSC

Via Mobilecrunch

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