Business

Google just launched live traffic info for Bogotá, Panama City and San Jose (Costa Rica). In addition, Google is also bringing its real-time traffic data to 130 smaller cities in the U.S., including Kalamazoo (Michigan), Portland (Maine) and Tuscaloosa (Alabama). For the most part, this feature relies on data Google gets from Google Maps and Google Navigation users who share location data with the company. As Android becomes more popular and as more users use their phones for directions as they are driving, Google obviously gets more data. Thanks to this, it can now show live traffic for side roads and arterial roads that don’t typically see as much traffic as a highway or major urban area, for example. In addition to these new cities, Google also says it has expanded its live traffic coverage around the world, including in parts of “Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.” Google first launched this live t...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More In the newly crowded wedding space, Lover.ly has found a way to not only make money but also connect brides and grooms with the best possible vendors for their wedding. If you have yet to dabble on the platform, it’s much like a Pinterest for brides, offering a curated imagery-based interface to market wedding bloggers and vendors while helping brides plan for the big day. But founder Kellee Khalil had a broader vision for the startup: to become a bride’s one-stop recommendation platform. And that’s just what Lover.ly has done. The platform just got a brand new feature called My Style, which takes into account all of the user’s “l...

After just six weeks of hard work, Digg‘s new owners at Betaworks just flipped the switch and re-launched the site. The new Digg was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, but despite the tight deadline, the Digg team managed to get this completely rewritten version of the site out ahead of schedule. As promised, the new version of Digg puts a strong emphasis on images and is currently free of ads. With this relaunch, Digg is also shipping a new iPhone app and mobile web app. Over the last few days, the Digg team already provided a few sneak peeks into the thought process that went into redesigning the site. Earlier today, I talked to Digg’s new CEO John Borthwick who seemed genuinely surprised how much interest there still was in Digg. During our interview, he told me that one of the reasons why the team wanted to rebuild Digg as fast as it could was the simple fact that Digg’s old infrastructure was very expensive to run. According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of th...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Several weeks ago, reports started to trickle out that a number of Dropbox users were under attack from spam. Since then, Dropbox has been investigating those attacks (with some help from a third-party) and today gave the first update on the progress, saying that some accounts were indeed accessed by hackers, but that it is now adding two-factor authentication and other security features to prevent further problems. For some background: On July 17th, a number of Dropbox users begun noticing an increase in the level spam attacking their accounts. As Sarah reported at the time, the red flag appeared when users begun reporting that the email accounts receiving spam were in fact only tied to their Dropbox accounts, which indicated that the address leak had come from Dropbox itself. Many of those reports came...