Google Maps version 2.0 rolled out Wednesday morning, almost a week after the updated Android debut. The update finally brings G. Maps to the big(ger) screen, plus a plethora of welcome features. Here are some you should keep an eye out for.

1. Explore

It seems like the big G is butting heads with rivals, Yelp and Foursquare with its Explore function. Instead of inputting a destination, you can pull down the touch keyboard to see the Explore panel. Explore gives you five different options of Eat, Drink, Shop, Play, and Sleep. Each Explore option will pull up related or nearby places.

2. Live Traffic and Event Reports

After the Waze buyout, we were hoping to see some of the social mapping app's features in the ... [Read more]

Over a 25-year career, multi-platinum rock band Barenaked Ladies built a dedicated fanbase on the strength of such memorable singles as the Billboard No. 1 smash "One Week," "Pinch Me, "Brian Wilson," "If I Had $1,000,000," and "History of Everything" -- the theme song for the hit CBS series "The Big Bang Theory."

Are we not men? We are Barenaked Ladies. (Ed Robertson stands second from right.)

The Canadian rockers are currently celebrating their silver anniversary with the release of their 12th album, "Grinning Streak" (which debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard Top 200) and their much-acclaimed "Last Summer On Earth" tour, supported by Ben Folds Five and Guster.

BNL's guitarist-vocalist Ed Robertson chatted with Download.com about the tour, recording with GarageBand, playing tour director with Google Maps, and which app he would use most on his last day on earth.

Tell us what fans can expect to see at "Last Summer on Earth 2013." Well, I think we're just hoping that the Mayans were wrong and this is actually the last summer on earth, so we want people to go out rockin'. So we're going out for one last, great summer party before the world ends.

Congratulations on your new album, debut... [Read more]

BitTorrent's Sync decentralized file-synchronization tool has entered beta status, and offers a number of enhancements, including support for mobile devices as well as a new versioning feature called SyncArchive.

Following months of closed testing, on April 23, 2013, BitTorrent released a public alpha version of its Sync software, a cross-platform competing service to online storage and synchronization solutions such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Apple's iCloud. Unlike its competitors, Sync approaches synchronization using the decentralized BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which avoids the need for hosted storage space as a transfer medium, and instead keeps paired folders directly synced between devices, regardless of where they are in the world.

Users got a taste of Sync's capabilities with the alpha release; BitTorrent saw wide adoption with over 8 petabytes (8 million gigabytes) of data synced across devices by users over the past three months. With the beta version released today, BitTorrent aims to expand its user base and has added a couple of enticing features to the program:

The... [Read more]