Tech news: Rehashed Google pigeon jokes and Apple Store rumors

As is the tradition, each year Google creates a rumor or a hoax that is designed to give the internet community a bit of a giggle. This year Google rehashed an old theme especially for us Chinese "fools."

The Google Pigeon, the latest hoax, is based on an extension of Google's street view. It explains that a flock of pigeons embedded with neural technology will take sky view images of locations to be viewed on the Chinese version of Google maps.

This would be the second time that Google have brought out the pigeons on April Fools Day. In 2002 they enlisted the feral birds to explain Google's page ranking system in what was called Pigeon Rank.

The rest of the world got a more subtle and original hoax that focused on the actual neural technology that Google is supposedly developing that will allow your mobile phone to search your brain. We wonder why they created a different one just for China - perhaps someone in Beijing actually is developing brain searching technology, making a "neural scan" joke not much of a joke? Oooh boy... suddenly yesterday just got a lot scarier.

Apple on the other hand managed to make 20% of their retail staff at their flagship store in Sanlitun disappear for All Fools Day.

Rumor has it that the staff have been relocated to Shanghai for a surprise appearance by Steve Jobs for the opening of their first Shanghai store. We're iffy about this piece of news being an April Fools prank.

While we're not sure why Apple would feel the need to keep the opening of a store secret (or if Steve Jobs is actually healthy enough to travel), we hope that there is some truth to this rumor because retrenching that much staff on April first would be a pretty sick joke.

Image by disney den