Monday 9 September 2013

Sony Smart Watch II



A man shows a Sony Smart Watch II at a Sony event ahead of the IFA, one of the world's largest trade fairs for consumer electronics and electrical home appliances in Berlin, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Facebook adds 60 new ‘frictionless’ sharing apps to timelines

Facebook is adding a bevy of new applications to let users share everything from photos of what they cooked for dinner, to details on what they are wearing, to what concert they scored tickets to.

The world's largest online social network unveiled more than 60 new apps Wednesday that let users share the tiniest details of their lives on their Facebook profiles, now known as their Timeline.

Ticketmaster unveils its Facebook "Timeline App" at the Facebook launch event at 25 Lusk restaurant in San Francisco, California January, 2012. - Ticketmaster unveils its Facebook "Timeline App" at the Facebook launch event at 25 Lusk restaurant in San Francisco, California January, 2012. |

Facebook users can already share the music they are listening to through apps such as Spotify (where available), or the articles they are reading through Yahoo News and other services. Wednesday's announcement expands the number of available apps to cover a range of topics including food, fashion, travel and reading.

Facebook is calling it “frictionless sharing.” It means once you sign up for the apps, they will automatically share your activity through Facebook. That said, users will be able to limit who can see this activity when they sign up for the apps, just as they can limit what friends or groups of friends can see their other Facebook updates.

The latest apps include Ticketmaster, reviews site Rotten Tomatoes, recommendations app Foodspotting and Pinterest, which bills itself as an “virtual pinboard” that lets people collect things they find around the Web. Facebook expects developers to create thousands more in the coming weeks and months.

Friday 23 December 2011

Ten things you should know about the Ice Cream Sandwich OS


Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version)
This increasingly nippy time of year seems an odd choice to be discussing ice cream sandwiches – unless said confection is the latest in a tasty-sounding software series from Google.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version). It’s not yet in wide release, but software developers are already hard at work adapting their apps to this major redesign.

Phones supporting Ice Cream Sandwich will be available from Bell and Virgin Mobile from early December. Rogers gets it in January.

Here are 10 things you need to know about Ice Cream Sandwich:

Google's goal was to unify the OS for smartphones and tablets, so regardless of screen size, Android will look the same. Because of this, the user interface has had a makeover, migrating the best of Honeycomb’s tablet features to phones and adding resizable widgets and a new, more readable font.
You will be able to unlock your phone by looking at it, thanks to Face Unlock, a new facial-recognition feature. However, Google does warn that this is not as secure as other authentication methods, such as passwords or PINs, since “someone who looks similar to you could unlock your phone.”
There’s no Flash player available for Ice Cream Sandwich yet. Adobe says it should arrive by year end, but that’s it – there’ll be no more mobile Flash after that.
New feature Android Beam uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to transfer data between devices – you can swap information by holding phones a short distance (maximum about 20 cm) away from each other. In addition, you can receive information from NFC-enabled displays, and Beam allows for e-commerce payment by simply waving the phone over a reader – or tapping it, as with PayPass. The phone must, of course, contain an NFC chip.
The redesigned calendar lets other apps add events and reminders. Multiple calendars and colour-coding let you keep business and personal schedules separate, yet you can still see what’s happening in your life at a glance.
Like Windows Phone 7, Ice Cream Sandwich now imports details from your social networks into contact records. When you first start up your phone, you’re prompted to join Google’s own social network, Google +.
Need a screenshot of a smartphone app? Ice Cream Sandwich includes the ability to take snapshots of the display, store them locally, edit and share them.
With all of these features, it’s all too easy to blow your data plan out of the water. Ice Cream Sandwich includes new monitoring tools so you can see how much data you’ve used, what application used it, and whether it was over cellular or Wi-Fi. You can set alerts to warn you if you’re approaching your plan’s limit, to help avoid expensive charges, and can define how much data apps are allowed to consume in the background (updating maps or sharing location data, for example).
Android’s camera system has had some serious polishing, too. Google says there’s now zero lag-time from shutter to shot, stabilized zoom while recording, and time-lapse settings. Face detection finds and focuses on faces in frame, and you can grab a still snapshot while recording a video by simply tapping the screen. The icing on the cake: There’s now a built-in photo editor, so you can tweak those shots before sharing them.
Audio file management is now much easier thanks to the new visual voicemail, which integrates messages, voice transcriptions and audio files into a single app. Third-party apps will be able to integrate with it as well.
There’s more, of course, for both work and play. Check out the Android site for your own taste of the Ice Cream Sandwich.

Atom-smasher shut down for two months

The world's largest atom-smasher has been shut down for two months following a helium leak, just 10 days after it was switched on amid great fanfare to probe the secrets of the universe.
“There has been an incident in a test. One section of the machine will have to be repaired,” James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), said Monday.
CERN said in a statement that a fault occurred Friday afternoon, resulting in a “large helium leak into the tunnel.”
“Preliminary investigations suggest that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure,” it said.
There was no risk to people, the centre added, saying that a full probe is under way.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started on Sept. 10, with physicists cheering the successful testing of a clockwise beam, comprising strings of protons, and then an anticlockwise beam in preparatory testing ahead of first collisions.
But the LHC had to be shut down a week later due to an electrical hitch that affected a cooling system for high-powered magnets designed to steer beams of particles around the LHC's 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel.
The cooling system is important as the steering magnets in the LHC tunnel are chilled to as low as -271 degrees Celsius (-456.25 degrees Fahrenheit), which is close to absolute zero and colder than deep outer space.
At this extreme temperature, electrical currents overcome resistance, thus making it easier and cheaper to power electro-magnets.
The LHC was only turned back on again on Friday, but the latest setback has once again forced operations to halt.
As the sector where the fault occurred would have to be warmed up from its extreme temperature for repairs to take place, the LHC would now be halted for “a minimum of two months,” resulting in further delays to the first collisions.
The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs ($5.46 billion U.S.) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.
It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged in the “Big Bang” that created the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.
Counter-rotating beams are whizzed around the tunnel and then are smashed together in four huge laboratories.
Over the 10-15 years in which the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by physicists around the world.

NASA spots Earth’s twin (or closest match yet) outside solar system


Bill Borucki, Kepler principal Investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, speaks during a news conference about the newly discovered planet Kepler-22b on Monday in in Moffett Field, Calif.
A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside our solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, expect for one hitch. It’s a bit too big.

The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard-to-find place that’s not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, doesn’t freeze or boil. Its surface temperature is near 22 C, scientists say.
The planet’s confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

That’s the first planet confirmed in the habitable zone for Kepler, which had already found Earth-like rocky planets elsewhere. Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither have been as promising.

“This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history,” Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside our solar system, said in an e-mail.

The new planet – named Kepler-22b – has key aspects it shares with Earth. It circles a star that could be the twin of our sun and at just about the same distance. The planet’s year of 290 days is even close to ours. It likely has water and rock.

The only trouble is the planet’s a bit big for life to exist on the surface. The planet is about 2.4 times the size of Earth. It could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean.

“It’s so exciting to imagine the possibilities,” said Natalie Batalha, the Kepler deputy science chief.

Floating on that “world completely covered in water” could be like being on an Earth ocean and “it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that life could exist in such an ocean,” Ms. Batalha said in a phone interview.

So far the Kepler telescope has spotted 2,326 candidate planets outside our solar system with 139 of them potentially habitable ones. Even though the confirmed Kepler-22b is a bit big, it is still smaller than most of the other candidates.


Chief Kepler scientist William Borucki said he thinks the planet is somewhere between Earth and gas-and-liquid Neptune, but that it has a lot of rocky material.

The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.

Yahoo to weigh deals for Asian assets


The "Yahoo" sign, which overlooks the I-80 freeway from 6th St. is dismantled,2011 in downtown San Francisco.
Yahoo Inc.is discussing a plan to slash its stakes in China’s Alibaba Group and a Japanese affiliate in a complex deal worth roughly $17-billion (U.S.), sources familiar with the matter said.

The deal – the latest proposals put forth in recent months to resuscitate the once high-flying Internet company – is expected to be considered by Yahoo’s board on Thursday, one of the sources said.
The board was uninterested in entertaining offers for the entire company at this point, the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added.

Yahoo’s increasing difficulty in competing with Internet heavyweights such as Google Inc. (GOOG-Q629.703.880.62%) and Facebook have forced it to explore proposals to revamp its business. The former Internet powerhouse, which fired its Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, has a market value of around $18.5-billion.

The company’s board has come under fire from prominent shareholders for its seeming lack of movement and for putting its own interests ahead of those of shareholders.

Alibaba chief Jack Ma has said several times he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his company, one of Asia’s largest Internet corporations. Investors have long said Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba, along with its 35 per cent slice of Yahoo Japan, are far and away the U.S. company’s most prized assets.

Last week, sources told Reuters a consortium consisting of private equity group Silver Lake, Microsoft Corp. and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz were reworking a bid for a minority stake in Yahoo.

In the latest deal, Yahoo would effectively transfer most of its 40 per cent of Alibaba back to the Chinese company and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp. in return for cash and assets, one of the sources said.

The exact value of the deal would depend on how the assets are valued, one source said.

Yahoo shares, which languished in the red along with much of the technology sector on Wednesday, reversed course and ended the session almost 6 per cent higher at $15.99. It inched further upward in after-hours trading to $16.09.

China passes U.S. as top patent filer in 2011


Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed. Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province in this May 26, 2010 file photo.
China became the world’s top patent filer in 2011, surpassing the United States and Japan as it steps up innovation to improve its intellectual property rights track record, a Thomson Reuters research report showed on Wednesday.

The report said the world’s second-largest economy aimed to transform from a “made in China” to a “designed in China” market, with the government pushing for innovation in sectors such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals and technology.
However, legal experts said China would need to do more before it can lead the world in innovation as the quality of patents needed to improve.

The government provided attractive incentives for companies in China to file patent applications, regardless of whether a patent was eventually granted, they said.

“The idea of subsidizing patents is not bad in itself, however it is a blunt instrument because you get high figures for filings, but it does not tell you anything about the quality of the patents filed,” said Elliot Papageorgiou, a Partner and Executive at law firm Rouse Legal (China).

“One thing is volume, quality is quite another. The return, or the percentage of grants, of the patents is still not as high in China as, say, in the U.S., Japan or some places in Europe,” he said.

The Thomson Reuters report said published patent applications from China were expected to total nearly 500,000 in 2015, following by the United States with close to 400,000 and Japan with almost 300,000.

Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed.

During the period, Japan had the highest volume, followed by the United States, China, Korea and Europe, the report said. It did not give figures for 2011.

“The striking difference among these regions is China – it is experiencing the most rapid growth and is poised to lead the pack in the very near future,” it said.

Of total patents filed in China, the percentage of domestic applications rose to nearly 73 per cent in 2010 from less than 52 per cent in 2006, indicating that Chinese companies have outpaced foreign entities in the patent boom.

In terms of patents overseas, Chinese companies have also been climbing in the rankings, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).

In 2010, China’s No.2 telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp was second on the list of applicants, ranking just behind Japan’s Panasonic Corp.

U.S. chip maker Qualcomm Inc. came in third, while China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, the world’s second-largest telecom gear maker, was fourth, according to WIPO.

Chinese companies have been trying to be more innovative as they transform from contract manufacturers to regional and global brand names producing higher end products to improve margins.

Patent filings have also increased among Chinese companies due to legal battles that they have had to fight, especially in the telecommunications sector. For instance, Huawei and ZTE have been embroiled in patent disputes over fourth-generation wireless technology.

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