Authorities in Tampa has been using the Microsoft Surface to visualize safety information for Raymond James Stadium, the spot for Super Bowl Sunday. The Surface will be displaying Microsoft Virtual Earth map for region tracking events, incidents, resources, and real-time tasks. All of the tracking using Virtual Earth will be done in real-time.

Check out the video below:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:286ccd43-a8c8-4fd8-be1f-f942d4da016f&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Super Bowl: Microsoft Surface helps police monitor security">Video: Super Bowl: Microsoft Surface helps police monitor security</a>

Google Inc. paid a good amount to become the default search engine for Firefox, but that didn’t stop Microsoft Corporation from creating an add-on for the competing web browser.  Microsoft has just created a plugin that adds Windows Live Search to the search box of Firefox and has built-in search suggestions.

“We’re happy to report that we’ve officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand,” stated Live Search managers Beatrice Oltean and Debapriya Ray.  The add-on uses Microsoft Live Search API 2.0 and is part of a project called Silk Road.

Microsoft Live Search is behind Yahoo! and Google in terms of the numbers of search queries made on a given day.  Microsoft is trying several marketing strategies to take away market share from competitors such as the Live Search Cashback program and building the internal search for Facebook.

Police in Switzerland have found a marijuana plantation using Google Earth.  Police stated that this discovery was part of a much bigger investigation.  This led to the arrest of about 16 suspects and a 1.2 tons of marijuana, cash, and $780,000 worth of Swiss francs were confiscated.  The Swiss police officers found the marijuana field in the state of Thurgau last year when investigating the drug ring.

The two acre plantation was hidden in a field of corn.  Officers also used Google Earth to locate the address of the two farmers involved in the drug operation.  The 16 suspects charged with managing the marijuana plantation has sold about 7.7 U.S. tons of marijuana between 2004 and 2008.  The turnover of these drugs brought in about 3-10 million francs per year.

Google Earth is rumored to be launching an ocean service later this week.

[via Wired]

Amazon.com has posted a 9% increase in fourth quarter net income and an 18% rise in sales.  As a result, Amazon’s shares rose to over $56 per share in after hours trading.  This past holiday season, Amazon had their best ever despite the challenges faced by all retail companies.  Amazon reported a net income of $225 million for the quarter, up from $207 million a year ago.  Net sales increased 18% to $6.7 billion.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com mentioned that the Kindle ebook reader helped with the increase in net income.  But Bezos did not disclose how many units were sold.  Amazon sold out of Kindles for the second consecutive holiday season.  Amazon expects their first quarter sales to grow about 9-19% or about $4.53 billion to $4.93 billion.  Wall Street projects growth to be about 11%.

Gross margin slid to 20.1% from 20.6%.  Amazon.com’s free shipping, lower prices, and expanded product lines provided Amazon the opportunity to gain market share from a lot of their competition.  Amazon’s international sales increased by 19% to $3.07 billion.  A lot of Amazon.com’s increase in profit is due to people favoring fixed price websites over auctions like eBay.com.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen invested $7 billion in Charter Communciations.  Fifty-one percent of Charter Communications, competitor of Comcast, is owned by Allen.  Charter is the fourth largest cable operations company in America with about 5.5 million customers across 27 states.  The stock of the company is about 8 cents per share.

Back in 1999, Charter’s stock was about $27.75.  This was around the time that they had their IPO.  Now the communications company may be facing bankruptcy.  Charter CEO Neil Smit stated that the company is negotiating with bondholders and will be trying to roll over debt into new loans payable.  This would swap debt for equity in Charter.  Charter missed paying their debt payment this month and will be seeing another $1.9 billion in debt coming in this year.  Charter has borrowed about $21 billion.  I think it is suffice to say that Paul Allen will not be investing anymore money into the telecomm company.
Other properties that Paul Allen has invested in is the Seattle Seahawks, DreamWorks SKG, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, USA Networks, CNET, Priceline, Egghead, and Value America.  In 1998, Paul Allen bought Marcus Cable Company for $2.8 billion and paid $4.5 billion for stake in Charter.  Charter ended up acquiring Marcus.

“For over 20 years, I have been talking about and investing in the `wired world,’ a connected future marked by the merger of high-bandwidth data channels, the power of the personal computer, and the availability of compelling content,” stated Allen at the time of the investment.  Charter has never made profit since 1999.

Four former executives at Charter pleaded guilty to inflating revenue, cash flow, and the number of subscribers.  Shareholder lawsuits costed the company $144 million in cash and stock.  Charter CEO Carl Vogel resigned shortly after the controversy.

After Charter introduced their triple play package, subscribers rose once again.  The subscribers paid about $106 per month and the company double operating income to $208 million, but that was all wiped out by $478 million of interest on debt.

Microsoft ended up investing $1 billion in Charter’s biggest competitor in 1997.  Comcast became the nation’s biggest cable company which encourage Microsoft to buy more stock in Comcast in exchange for $5 billion stake in AT&T Broadband in 2002.  Within the last year, Microsoft liquidated all of their shares in Comcast.

[via AP]

Craig Ramsden is a 19 year old kid from the U.K.  Recently he left a Facebook status saying “I’m twisted at home. My head’s up my ****. I feel like killin some1 need to stay off the hard stuff ha —- it it’s Saturday ha.”  Shortly after writing that he went to a bar and stabbed Paul Gilligan, 31, to death.  Yesterday Ramsden was sentenced to over 17 years in jail.  This is the same punishment that was given to Edward Richardson for murdering his wife, Sarah for changing her Facebook relationship status to Single.

The Facebook post that Ramsden wrote was shortly deleted after the stabbing, but police were able to find it by examining the laptop used by a witness that visited Ramsden Facebook page after hearing about the stabbing.  The judge dismissed the idea that Ramsden was provoked because he actually returned to the bar and committed the act after writing about what he was intending on doing.

Facebook has about 150 million users.

[via CNET]

Facebook has removed a group that calls for ‘Global collection to hire a sharpshooter to liquidate Evo Morales.’  The group was formed this past August and over 8,000 members joined.  Morales is the President of Bolivia.

“We need to get the money to inspire someone to do it,” stated the group creator Hony Pierola, 20.  Pierola created the group “to laugh a little and wouldn’t be so stupid as to do it with serious intentions.”  But as more people joined, the group got really heated.  One of the postings from August 10 called out for torturing and suffering of Morales “like he’s doing indirectly to many Bolivian people.”  Morales has caused a division in Bolivia regarding policies for empowering Native Americans in the country.  Ivan Canelas, a spokesman for the government of Bolivia did not know about the Facebook group, but officials will be looking into it.

Jaime Schopflin, spokeswoman for Facebook stated that the group was in violation of TOS and was removed within 90 minutes of the first complaint.

[via Telegraph]

TechCrunch is one of the leading technology blogs that has a lot of influence on venture capitalists and web startup companies alike.  Basically TechCrunch is the middleman between an up and coming web startup company and gaining enough publicity to get funding or acquired.  Being the middleman of such a powerful tool isn’t easy though.  People have tried to break into Arrington’s house to get publicity and most recently, someone at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany spat in his face.

Arrington believes that allegations from other bloggers directed animosity at him.

“Whoever is the top blog will get attacked by everyone else and that’ll just be the way it is,” stated Arrington in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We really need to think about, the community of bloggers, if we’re going to continue to slay our own for competitive reasons.”

Arrington believes that other bloggers allege that TechCrunch accepts payments or favors for publicity.  A couple of sites he blamed for damaging TechCrunch’s reputation for allegations includes AllThingsD.com and Valleywag, a technology gossip blog under the Gawker Media network.  Both AllThingsD co-founder Kara Swisher and Gawker founder Nick Denton personally responded to Arrington’s blame game.

“Our site is trying to raise ethical and reporting standards in the tech blogosphere but is in no way responsible for people stalking Michael Arrington. To say so is truly unfortunate on his part,” stated Swisher. “I am appalled he is being stalked, which is scary and disturbing, and am sorry for the strife it has clearly caused him and his family.”

Nick Denton stated that Arrington’s decision to step down for a month “says more about his emotional volatility than it does about anything more meaningful — like the pressures on tech journalists or Internet publishers.”  He added “Gawker titles have made many people’s lives uncomfortable, but I’ve never received a death threat.”

Arrington isn’t worried about TechCrunch’s traffic going down at all since he has many other writers maintaining the site.  Last month, TechCrunch received 650,000 unique visitors, up from 397,000 the year before.

“Did Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates or Bush take any break when they were attacked with eggs, cakes & shoes? Then why should Arrington do so,” wrote Labnol founder Amit Agarwal on his Twitter account.

I feel sympathetic for Arrington, but he was wrong for blaming his competition for the attacks on him.  Especially when TechCrunch publishes stories criticizing the livelihood of many others too.  This includes Dare Obasanjo and Ted Murphy.