People who don’t like the Apple maps that came with the new iPhone–quite a few–can finally go back to Google Maps, which seem to do a better job getting you where you’re going. The iPad version is also here soon. But the map battles are not over.

You could believe the advertising about who has the fastest Internet connections or you could believe Netflix. The company’s movie streaming service generates useful data about which data service providers are fastest. Now it’s sharing its latest list. Plus, General Electric has come up with a new way to cool down electronic devices that’s quiet and thin. Dual piezoelectric cooling jets that quietly inhale and exhale. Think fireplace bellows or when you gently waggle the blankets for a bit when the bed overheats.

Call it a sign of the end of the world, or a sign of new beginnings…the Pope will likely be trending on Twitter today. Benedict the 16th will be tweeting official answers to followers’ questions in 8 different languages. And Facebook maybe a community but it’s no longer a democracy. Members were given the chance to vote on changes to the company privacy policy, and though the overwhelming majority did reject the changes–it wasn’t big enough.

Researchers in Baltimore have just begun experimenting with a kind of pacemaker for the brain. One patient has the system in already. Meanwhile, it’s gotten to the point that life in America may be practically impossible without a phone. A federally funded program that helps bring telephone landlines to low income people at little or no cost may soon be to bringing super-cheap cell phones to homeless people, among others.

When tech becomes the best friend of the elephant, and the rhinoceros. The World Wildlife Fund is working on electronic systems in its worldwide fight against poachers. An e-book was sold on Twitter this week. Not Amazon…Twitter! 

The first cycle of headlines were about Apple’s CEO promising to make some iMac desktop computers in the USA. But a day later, some experts are realizing that a $100 million investment does not equal a manufacturing revolution. And a reason to love the tech beat: Where else would you meet a guy who used to be a senior official with the Russian Central Bank, who later moved into currency trading, but now is in Seattle trying to convert not rubles or dollars, but fake gold and diamonds from video games.

A Stanford study has found that you would think harder about saving for retirement if you could see just what you’d look like when you are older. If you just noticed your Instagram photos started looking weird on Twitter, you weren’t alone. It’s not a software glitch — it was more like “shot’s [being] fired” between the two social media giants according to Slate technology blogger Will Oremus.  

Facebook would like to become that set of shoeboxes in the attic: A place to store all your photographs, even ones you have no intention of sharing with any of your friends. It’s called Photo Sync and Google-Plus already has something like this. To be clear, you have to opt in. And while we’re talking privacy there’s this new patent, filed by Verizon.

We could be soon enterting a world with no more neon. Wake Forrest phyics professor David Carroll has just come up with a better way to replace energy-wasting light bulbs, using plastics and nanotechnology. And he’s bullish about buy in from consumers. Carroll’s plastic lights can be made into rectangles for office ceilings or bulb shapes for home, none of this loopy corkscrew business you see with compact fluorescents. When you factor in the energy savings, he believes they could be 25 percent less expensive than bulbs of the Thomas Edison variety.