Head on over to teachparentstech.org and you’ll find a little Web form, shrouded in faux brown paper, where you can assemble your virtual tech-support care package.

After selecting to whom it should be addressed, you can pick from about 50 very short videos to attach to the message that the form creates. The videos feature fresh-faced Googlers in brightly colored shirts using plain English and screen-capture video to explain how to do things like resize a photo, use Google chat, get driving directions or find the nearest pizza place.

And the tech subjects seem to be pretty expertly selected as well (we’ve been asked to help our parents on more than a few of these specific problems).

After selecting a salutation, the videos you want to send and an appropriate closing remark, the form spits out a page that can be forwarded to the email of the desired tech noob.

We spoke with Jason Toff, a product marketing manager at Google and the informal leader of teachparentstech. He said that the project was built on the 20 percent time Google gives some staff members to work on separate projects outside of their assignments, and that it was really born out of a need found among his youngish Googley colleagues.

“The idea of parents needing tech support around the holidays really resonated with our core group of about six people. We just sent some emails out to some internal list serves expecting to get a lukewarm response, and over 50 people responded wanting to be in videos explaining some simple tech,” Toff said during our phone call.

Toff said there weren’t any other plans to build out additional products on the teachparentstech domain right now, but he’s hoping to see how this first thing goes and learn from it.

The site went live as of about 9:30 PT this morning and by noon had sent out over 3,000 virtual care packages.

The one pro tip we got from Toff was that if you care to see all the videos available, maybe to do a power-training session, you can head to teachparentstech.org/watch where all the available videos are displayed together.

Now, if only Google would buy up santagr.am and santatracker.com, our very Google holiday would be complete.

Google’s view is that voice will be critical in making mobile devices with small screens and keyboards more useful. Already, it’s launched a number of services that let people use their voice to conduct a Web search, compose emails, play songs on a phone or get directions.

The acquisition of Phonetic Arts will help in the reverse situation–when the computer speaks to you, a.k.a. voice output, the company said in a blog post.

Voice interaction is a field in bloom. There are safe-driving applications that speak your text messages to you, so you can keep your eyes on the road, and Google’s own translation “speaks” text in multiple languages. Currently, Nuance Communications is one of the leaders in the voice-recognition space.

Google says Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers will focus on making the interactions less robotic and more natural by using small samples of recorded voice.

Terms weren’t disclosed, but Phonetic Arts will be joining Google’s engineering center in London.

In one of the more interesting battlefields of the multifront war between Google and Microsoft, Bing Maps today added what it calls its “largest imagery update to date, adding 6.7 million square kilometers of new imagery.”

That includes the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the United States where there is existing black-and-white imagery, as well as bird’s-eye imagery for Sweden.

The ongoing innovations to online mapping by both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have been a boon to consumers, who are getting increasingly cool and substantive looks at our world.

In February, Microsoft debuted a series of eye-candy features in its ongoing one-upmanship with Google with a new series of enhancements to its spatial search offerings.

Coolest new ones from Microsoft: Indoor panoramas to move mapping inside and real-time video overlays to maps.

Google Maps is also not resting, adding a series of features over the last months from Google Goggles (which takes pictures of an object or location and then identifies it via search) to spoken, turn-by-turn directions on its Android-powered smartphones.

I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next from these archrivals.

Here’s Microsoft’s blog on the improvements:

March 05, 2010, 09:00 AM by Chris Pendleton

Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water. You thought 1 million+ sq. km. was large? How about 6.7 million square kilometers! It’s pretty much unfathomable. The big winners? Aerial: The Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where we had black and white imagery. Bird’s Eye: Sweden. Deets:

Aerial

Australia 524,645 sq. km.
Botswana 61,433 sq. km.
Estonia 618 sq. km.
Hungary 3,369 sq. km.
Mexico 236,624 sq. km.
Morocco 13,303 sq. km.
Namibia 72,162 sq. km.
New Zealand 14,987 sq. km.
Poland 6,254 sq. km.
Romania 3,695 sq. km.
Russian Federation 553,244 sq. km.
South Africa 123,138 sq. km.
Turkey 16,148 sq. km.
United Kingdom 15,221 sq. km.
United States 4,961,758 sq. km.

Oblique (Bird’s Eye)

Austria 238 sq. km.
Belgium 898 sq. km.
Denmark 718 sq. km.
Finland 1,634 sq. km.
France 2,001 sq. km.
Greece 931 sq. km.
Ireland 1,340 sq. km.
Netherlands 1,709 sq. km.
Norway 2,425 sq. km.
Portugal 2,184 sq. km.
Romania 1,534 sq. km.
Spain 5,143 sq. km.
Sweden 6,747 sq. km.
Switzerland 424 sq. km.
United Kingdom 13,094 sq. km.
United States 56,007 sq. km.

Check out the Bing Maps World Tour for visuals. Also, Johannes has a sweet application for viewing imagery based on shape files. Niiiice.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton

Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about AOL’s efforts–including hiring investment bankers–to sell its ICQ instant-messaging unit.

But that’s probably not going to be the end of the shedding of assets at the online site.

In fact, according to sources inside and outside AOL, one of the next candidates for sale could be its MapQuest online map service.

Purchasers of the service that provides mapping and directions, sources said, are likely to be other mapping giants, especially Microsoft (MSFT).

But it is not clear if the software giant or anyone would fork over a huge sum of money for MapQuest.

That would include the $1.1 billion in stock that AOL paid for MapQuest in 1999.

AOL is set to spin itself off in less than a month from corporate owner Time Warner (TWX), and sources said selling off peripheral properties is part of becoming a smaller, more focused company.

MapQuest, like AOL’s Bebo social networking site, fits this description.

While it does have widespread distribution across the Web, reaching over 40 million users monthly, MapQuest lags well behind aggressive efforts being pushed by both Microsoft and Google (GOOG).

• Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
• Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
• An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
• Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

But what about when you need directions and you’re unable to get to a computer? The same companies that you look to for directions on your home PC are eager to help out on your cellphone, including Google, Yahoo and MapQuest. But while the mobile versions of these services are improving, the user interface of a cellphone isn’t ideal for inputting addresses and extracting directions. Even smart phones with larger screens and full keyboards can be hampered by slow Internet speeds.

This week I tried a service that cuts the time it takes to get directions from a cellphone. It’s called Dial DIR-ECT-IONS, and it works as it sounds: You dial the word “directions” into a cellphone (347-328-4667) and speak the address, name of business chain or event to which you need directions. Step-by-step directions are instantly sent to your phone via SMS, or text message.

This isn’t a substitute for phones that have GPS and can give real-time directions, and it may not be ideal for those who need visual cues, like turn-by-turn maps, but it is very convenient on the go and works on any basic cellphone.

The service, from a determined start-up called Dial Directions Inc., is free — except for the cost of receiving text messages on your phone. After the first 30 days of use, a one-line advertisement will start appearing at the bottom of the last text message sent per set of directions (some take multiple text messages to include all of the steps).

In many instances, I found using Dial Directions to be helpful and efficient, a welcome change from squinting to see miniature maps on cellphone screens. It’s smart enough to ask you if you know how to get to the highway, thus saving you from reading directions you already know. I tried the service with a few different cities — you don’t have to be in the city to use it because GPS isn’t involved — and valued the instant gratification of returned results with so little effort.

Dial Directions is still a work in progress. The service prides itself on superb voice-detection technology, but in one instance, it interpreted “New York City” as “Newark, N.J.,” and didn’t stop to check the accuracy of this, forcing me to hang up to restart. And the two other aspects of the service, finding business chains and events, need just a little more time to include a better variety of businesses.

The service was launched in July, but this week marks its expansion to nine metropolitan areas, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento, Calif. The service still isn’t in major cities like Boston and Philadelphia, but these cities and others will be included within the next month, in the company’s attempt to take the service nationwide.

Dial Directions also plans to add landmarks in the next month. I tried asking for directions to the White House and Yankee Stadium without any luck. General terms will also be better integrated into the service. I tried saying “movies” but Dial Directions thought I was saying “Mervin’s” one time and “Arby’s” the next. Just 40 terms, including “hotel” and “gas station,” are usable right now.

I called Dial Directions from a Motorola Razr cellphone, a Research In Motion BlackBerry Curve and an Apple iPhone. All worked well. Since SMS messages are limited to about 160 characters, regardless of your phone, none of the directions came through in just one message; most directions required from two to five text messages. Symbols help to shorten the messages, like using “L @ Maryland Ave. SW” to tell a user to turn left at Maryland Avenue Southwest.

To receive these directions, you must first tell the service what you’re looking for. The female voice representing Dial Directions is friendly and doesn’t sound stiff and robotic. She offers to give instructions on how to use the service if you don’t know how. After telling her what you’re looking for, she asks what city you’re in and where you’re trying to go.

I tried a variety of addresses and intersections; the system suggests not saying “Street” or “Avenue.” In certain instances when a highway was involved, I was asked if I knew how to get on the highway, and if I did, that extra text wasn’t included in my directions. Once I confirmed what I was looking for, the voice said directions would be on the way in a couple of text messages. Each time, they appeared on my phone almost instantly.

In the case of business chains or general terms like “hotel,” the voice told me first of the closest one it knew, asking me to confirm whether or not it had found the right place. If I said no, it suggested four more that were the next closest. This worked well in most cases, including searches for McDonald’s, Bloomingdale’s, Starbucks and pizza. However, in a hunt for the closest Dunkin’ Donuts, it couldn’t find four stores that were located a mile from my office in downtown D.C.; instead, it thought the closest one was in Arlington, Va.

The company pledges that this and other faults will be improved over the next month as its database is improved and as more users report issues that can be corrected.

Directions to local events can be retrieved as long as the event is posted on DialDirections.com. Then anyone can just say the name of the event (like “DC Shorts Film Festival”) to receive directions to that event. But this feature, too, isn’t what it should be right now. On my way to a Washington Nationals game, I couldn’t get the service to recognize the name of my event, which was frustrating.

If the company can correct some of its hit-or-miss aspects, this free service could be a big help, especially for people who don’t own smart phones. But even if you do own a smart phone, it’s faster than typing in data and waiting for a Web browser to retrieve the directions. If this service can improve its ability to find nearby businesses, this alone could be really useful.

When it knows about more locations, Dial Directions will be a great service. As it stands now, it’s helpful for directions from one address to another in certain areas. Sometimes, the most straightforward solutions really do work best.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com