The premium coffee retail chain Starbucks has announced today all Canadian company-owned stores across the country will have free and unlimited Internet access starting on July 1st.

The company already offered WiFi Internet access across locations, but customers required an account with login credentials to use the Internet in the stores. The preceding Internet access system even had a maximum time of two-hours to use the service.

There are currently over 1,000 Starbucks locations in Canada, with about 770 of them being company-owned.

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Many of us rely on Google daily to stay productive and connected, including gmail, and more recently, even Google Docs to keep important documents available anywhere thanks to the cloud.

Busy road warriors even stick view and edit documents on their mobile phones, in particular with the iPhone and Android based devices that offer more robust applications and bigger screen devices.

Today, Google announced an updated version of Google Docs, that will allow users to easily view various documents without downloading the files locally, including .docx, .ppt, and PDFs, among other formats, directly from their browser.

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Google today announced the availability of Google Earth 5.2, which boasts new features outdoorsmen will rejoice about.

In the latest version, you can connect your GPS device directly with the application to import your track, but now, new features will show you more information and statistics about your journey than ever before.

The latest version includes the ability to view elevation, speed, and graphs about your route in Google Earth. A new feature also records your route, so you could play it back later, with historical information including speed and slope.

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International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation today confirmed it would acquire the Internet-based marketing analytics company Coremetrics, with the financial terms being kept private.

Coremetrics has developed proprietary cloud-based analytical and tracking software to allow companies to gain intelligence from online social networks, including Twitter, and Facebook, among even regular blogs, to give firms insights as to what consumers are saying about their offerings, all in real-time.

The idea is as firms gain insights into what consumers thoughts are about their brands or offerings, marketers could better understand buying patterns hence deliver more targeted campaigns and capitalize by changing to better meet consumer wants faster.

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About a week ago, Google started allowing users to add a customized background picture on the Google homepage, or to choose a pre-designed background created by partners.

The company made the feature clear via a simple text explanation, but not everyone saw the tip as a result of a programming bug, causing people to think Google had permanently changed its home page background.

The feature also proved unpopular among many people, prompting the company to remove the auto background picture; going back to the original simple and white background for now.

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The world cup is set to launch tomorrow in South Africa, with the first games of the tournament starting the same day.

The hugely anticipated football event is taking place on the African continent for the first time, and is expected to help further advance the country with upgrades in information systems, transit, among other infrastructure to support the influx of tourists who will be attending the games, and the thousands of other personnel part of the tournament.

In anticipation of the event, the South African Tourism ministry has announced it has implemented new CRM technologies powered by Salesforce (Server Cloud 2) that will be used to handle queries.

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Adobe Systems today made new predictions about its popular Flash Player, saying it expects it to be installed in more than 250-million smartphones by 2012.

The optimistic comments come as Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said his company would not support the Adobe Flash platform on its iPhone and iPad devices, saying it is no longer relevant in the mobile space, favoring the more robust and opened HTML5 platform.

Steve Jobs’ argument is Flash is not efficient for mobile devices because of the high power consumption and security concerns, and largely the fact that the platform is proprietary.

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Google is expected soon to integration VoIP into its popular gmail email and instant messaging client.

Google has slowly been positioning itself into the VoIP space with a few acquisitions, including most recently of the company Global IP Solutions Corporation (GIPS) that develops technologies that process and deliver voice and video over Internet protocol, namely for service providers and developers to integrate with their platforms.

On May 18, Google acquired GIPS for $68.2-million in an all cash deal that also moved the top employees of GIPS to the Google camp.

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Google Corp. is planning to launch an online music store, simply named Google Music; with the service launching as early as by the end of next month.

The new product will be in direct competition with Apple’s iTunes music store, which is the biggest online music web store in the world.

Google Music works by allowing consumers to make purchases from the Google Market from their web-based PC, with the DRM-free music files being automatically pushed to their Google Android powered mobile device.

Google will also be offering a local application on your PC that would allow you to stream music from your Android device to your PC.

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Today the search giant, Google, updated its Google Maps application for BlackBerry devices to version 4.2 that includes support for Google’s latest mapping project, Google Maps Bike, which allows users to get directions optimized for biking.

The new program offers users the ability to plan routes based on bike trails (indicated by dark green), dedicated bike lanes (indicated by light green), or by regular roads that are good for biking (indicated on the map by a dotted green line).

Google firstly made the biking feature available for Google Android-based mobile devices, and today made the application available for BlackBerry devices as well.

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