This week....Cruise ship disaster, EasyJet raises fees and Google are in trouble again.

Hello and welcome back to this week! Cruise ships were in the news this weekend but not for a good reason as the Costa Concordia crashed and sunk off Italy’s coast this Saturday. Google also came under fire last week from several different sources after being heavily criticised for monopolising search. For all this and more read on!


CWT Digital News:

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Travel News:

Costa Concordia-16th Jan- The crash and sinking of the Costa Concordia dominated the news this weekend, with the death toll up to 6 and 15 passengers still missing this disaster will in no doubt damage both cruise reputation and sales this month. Costa Cruises have released several statements in which they have apologised for the distress caused to passengers and have admitted that ‘the captain’s judgement in handling the emergency appears not to have followed standard Costa procedures’. It is believed that the disaster will cost parent company Carnival over $95 million in compensation, insurance and investigation.

Easyjet adds in admin charge-12th Jan- EasyJet were in the press last week due to their announcement that they will be adding in a admin fee of £9 to every booking made. In addition to this the no frills airline has decided to remove the free charge from Visa Electron bookings. There will still be a charge of 2.5% on both credit and charge cards. The news of this additional fee has caused a mixture of reactions with the public but many see this as a negative change and that EasyJet are simply just trying to add more charges in. The charges were added in after EasyJet received criticism from the Office of Fair Trading over the lack of transparency with prices.

Technology News:

Google and Twitter at war-12th Jan- Last week a very public battle with Twitter and Google was launched after Google announced the release of the ‘Search your World’ feature on Google+. The new feature simply means that websites which your friends have selected for +1 will now take priority in your search results. Twitter instantly spoke out against this stating that Twitter is a vital source of news information and with the new Search your World are now ‘concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users’. Google instantly reacted to this statement and said they were ‘a bit surprised’ considering Twitter did not renew their agreement with Google last summer. To add further salt to the wound it later came out in the week that Google doesn’t index the @ symbol, meaning that tweets using the @ symbol won’t be picked up by the search engine. Google was also criticised last week for using black hat SEO methods to push its browser, Chrome, as well as being openly slated (on Twitter funnily enough!) by News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch for their free movie streams and profiting from illegal ads. All in all not a good week in the press for Google.

Google’s done it again!-13th Jan- Continuing our focus on Google it emerged last Friday that Google’s team had improperly accessed a Kenyan rival’s database to undermine and poach its business. The company, a business listings site called Mocality, noticed that Google staff had illicitly entered its database and contacted the businesses listed to offer Kenyan businesses a website build. Recorded calls also revealed that Google employees were slandering Mocality, making false claims that the site charges for listings. Google has since apologised for this and released a statement saying ‘We are mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data’.

That’s all from us this week, we hope you enjoyed our update and of course if you do want to keep up with the all the top news in the week then make sure you are following us on Twitter and you like us on Facebook! Have a great rest of the week.