Techno-News Blog

By Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC

On a visit to the company’s headquarters, I had a chance to see some of the projects that Microsoft scientists at its laboratories in Redmond, in Beijing and in Cambridge, England, believe will change the way we see computers. And the striking thing about what Microsoft’s research chief Craig Mundie picked to show off to a group of technology journalists was that almost all of them involved Kinect. The system which turns a player’s body into a games controller was developed with the help of seven different research groups at the company’s three main labs, some working on voice recognition, others on motion sensors and a range of other technologies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12570045

By Dave Lee, BBC

In Tokyo, an advertisement designed by NEC can work out your gender and make a guess at your age before serving an advert designed specifically for your demographic. Cisco is working on technology that takes your image in store and lets you browse a store by virtually “trying on” clothes. Many brands such as Levi’s are experimenting with ‘Facebook Connect’ – inviting customers to share personal information in return for a personalised shopping experience. QR-Codes have become a popular system to enable people with smart phones to scan a part of a poster and receive extras – such as a voucher -immediately to their mobile. “It will be more advanced than the director ever imagined. Instead of just recognising consumers by name, technology such as gladvertising will allow brands to offer interactive experiences.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12582477

by the BBC

How companies talk about themselves on Twitter feeds or Facebook profiles is to be policed like adverts. From 1 March, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) gets powers to police the claims companies make on websites and social networks. The rules cover statements on sites that can be interpreted as marketing, even if they are not in an advert. Until now, the ASA has only been able to oversee paid-for ads online.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12597934

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, New York Times

For those who wish there were yet another way to connect with friends on computer screens, a new start-up called SocialEyes now offers video chatting through Facebook. SocialEyes, which made its public debut Monday, was founded by Rob Glaser and Rob Williams, who know a thing or two about digital video from their days as executives at RealNetworks. Mr. Glaser started RealNetworks in 1995 and stepped down as its chief executive last year after a sometimes stormy tenure. He remains chairman. People log in to SocialEyes using Facebook Connect. They see their Facebook friends and can begin chats with several of them at once, individually or in a group. If someone isn’t online, users can leave a video message.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/a-new-service-for-video-chatting-on-facebook/

By: Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

Microsoft is deepening Bing’s relationship with Facebook for U.S. users, extending the social network’s Liked Results to any URLs retrieved by its algorithmic search. “If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result,” Lawrence Kim, a member of the Bing Social Team, wrote in a Feb. 24 posting on the Bing Community blog. “You may not see Liked Results on every query, but when it does trigger it’s often a delightful experience.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Microsofts-Bing-Likes-Facebook-Even-More-172796/?kc=rss

By Bobbie Johnson, BBC News

Industries may change and brand names may come and go, but at least one tradition in the business world has remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years. The exchange of cards between two people who are meeting for the first time is a ritual that goes back as far as business itself. For most of us, the handing over of contact details is an important moment – a clear signal that a connection has been made. But as our lives turn increasingly digital, technology is attempting to provide a range of futuristic alternatives to the old-fashioned card.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12546403

by the BBC

Alan Turing is credited with a key role in breaking wartime German codes. A last minute donation from the National Heritage Memorial Fund has saved the papers of the computing genius Alan Turing for the nation. The collection of scientific papers and material relating to Turing’s work on wartime codebreaking was in danger of going abroad. He was one of the founding fathers of modern computing and a key figure in breaking the German Enigma code. The National Heritage Memorial Fund’s £200,000 donation filled the gap. The papers were put up for auction last year and an internet campaign swung into action.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12575029

by the BBC

This week web reviewer Kate Russell enjoys the sweet music of construction, with an interesting online toy that lets you create a tune by building roads and houses at Isle Of Tune. If you are the kind of person who would lose their head if it wasn’t screwed on, Lost Property Heaven could be perfect – a haven for lost property in the UK. There is also an iPhone app that has to be seen to be believed. Called Word Lens, it works using augmented reality in realtime for instant translations. Good news for those who like to tweet from their Blackberry – as we look at the official Twitter app that has had a facelift this week with version 1.1 released as a beta test.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9407893.stm

by the BBC

A knee-high humanoid has narrowly won the world’s first full-length marathon for two-legged robots. Robovie-PC crossed the finish line in the Japanese city of Osaka just a second before its closest rival after more than two days of racing. The 26-mile (42km) race involved 423 laps of an indoor track at an average speed of 0.77 km/h. Two other androids are yet to complete the course, while one pulled out after just one lap.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12589607

By Tony Austin, IT Wire

Cyber threat fighter, Damballa Inc., has released its ‘Top 10 Botnet Threat Report – 2010’ and it shows a dramatic increase in Internet crime and targeted botnet attacks. Damballa is a specialist in network security. Cyber crime is orchestrated using remote control communications via the internet, also known as command-and-control (CnC). Their aim is to help protect corporations, ISPs and telecommunications service providers from cyber threat attacks used for organized, online crime. They say they have a unique, global approach that rapidly isolates the command-and-control needed to launch cyber attacks. “Working ‘out-of-band’, so that network performance is not impacted and the bad guys cannot detect or evade our solution, they say, “Damballa sensors automatically detect and terminate the CnC communication that is required for the criminals to operate the malware or bot agents on breached assets. Once terminated, we provide the necessary forensics to track, plan and execute timely remediation.”

http://www.itwire.com/component/content/article/45302-botnets-increased-rampantly-during-2010-worse-to-come-damballa-report

Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Australian Policy Online

Opportunities for criminals to engage in transnational activities have expanded with globalisation and advancements in information and communications technologies. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the threat landscape. Cyber criminal activities will increasingly affect the financial security of online business. It is widely accepted that the financial and insurance industry is the ‘target of choice’ for financially motivated cyber criminals. Yet there is a lack of understanding about the true magnitude of cyber crime and its impact on businesses.

http://www.apo.org.au/research/cyber-threat-landscape-faced-financial-and-insurance-industry

by Cameron Glover, Evansville Courier & Press

About 80 percent of teenagers across the country own an electronic device with Internet access on it. In Henderson, more than 90 percent do. And it’s a good bet that parents don’t know the half of what goes on in those little boxes. It could be cyber bullying, a new form of pervavise teenage torment.

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/feb/26/cyber_bullyingsexting/?partner=yahoo_headlines

By Kathryn Bold, Physorg

Most people have just one question regarding Roombas: How well do the robotic floor vacuums suck up pet hair and dust bunnies? A few might even wonder if their Roomba could go rogue and chase the family cat or attack them in their sleep. Rebecca Grinter, a graduate of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, has a more academic interest in the smart, saucer-shaped devices. “Roombas are one of the first robots to leave science fiction and enter the home, so they’re an ideal subject for my research. It has nothing to do with their ability to vacuum,” says Grinter, associate professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “I’m looking at ways people become personally engaged with technology so we can design robots and other machines — particularly computers — to better fit into the social experience.”

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-closer-humans-interact-technology.html

By Jane Wakefield, BBC

A new generation of viewers is watching what has been dubbed social TV – a synthesis between TV and social networking. A recent study from marketing agency Digital Clarity found that 80% of under-25s used a second screen to communicate with friends while watching TV and 72% used Twitter, Facebook or a mobile app to comment on shows. Currently it is little more sophisticated than watching TV with one eye on Twitter or Facebook, but that is beginning to change as TV executives start to experiment with greater social networking integration.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12809388

By Clare Walla, Sag Harbor Expressz

As technology seeps into more sectors of our lives, the question facing the Sag Harbor School District is, how will digital technology affect the classroom? “No matter what walk of life you enter into nowadays, whatever material is presented to you is presented via some type of technology,” Sag Harbor Elementary School Principal Matt Malone said. “That is the way we’re headed.” “A paper book is going to be passé,” said School Board President Walter Wilcoxen, adding that he’s “all for” exploring ways to integrate laptops or e-readers into the curriculum. “The question is how do we do it, and how do we do it equitably?”

http://sagharboronline.com/sagharborexpress/page-1/growing-pains-for-technology-11383

by BenZinga

Education’s first classroom curriculum based on “augmented reality” technology attracted huge crowds at just-completed educational technology conferences in Florida and Texas. Pioneered by Logical Choice Technologies, Letters alive (TM)—a new phonics curriculum for children learning to read—has seemingly-alive animals popping up in the hands of students and even responding to student questions and actions. Teachers and administrators in attendance were taken aback by the mind-blowing interactivity and intelligence of the virtual animals. Educators recognized the profound impact the curriculum could have on learning not only with pre-k and kindergarten students, but also with English Second Language (ESL) and Special Needs students.

http://www.benzinga.com/press-releases/11/02/p882939/augmented-reality-wows-educators-at-florida-texas-conferences-kindergar

by fox news

A cell phone developer in Singapore is taking a leap in medical technology with a cell phone that can check your pulse and send an ambulance if needed, Agence France Presse reported. The new EPI Life mobile phone comes with a mini electrocardiogram device. The phone can take a users pulse by pressing fingers on a built-in receptor, then sends the results to a medical call center that is working around the clock. “We think it’s a revolution. It has clinical significance,” EPI medical chief Dr. Chow U-Jin said at the mobile industry’s annual conference in Barcelona. “Anywhere in the world you can use it as a phone but you are also able to transfer an ECG and get a reply.”

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/02/18/new-cell-phone-check-pulse-send-ambulance/

by Mark Gurman, 9to5 Mac

Not the Apple TV, but an Apple television. Apple has posted a new job position looking for people to work on next-generation power supply technology. Apple needs people to to “work on the forefront of new power management designs and technologies with the exemplary company consistently bringing innovations in the industry.” Although some mind find that fascinating, we find what Apple needs this new power management technology to power even more interesting… TVs!

http://www.9to5mac.com/52624/apple-television-in-the-works-apple-job-listing-hints

By Gregg Keizer, ComputerWorld

Google yesterday released the first beta of Chrome 10, touting the new version’s faster JavaScript engine. According to tests run by Computerworld, Chrome 10 is 64% faster than its predecessor on Google’s own V8 JavaScript benchmarks. Google shipped the stable version of Chrome 9 earlier this month. Google maintains three separate “channels” of Chrome — stable, beta and dev — that denote increasingly rougher-edged editions. But in another JavaScript benchmark — WebKit’s widely-cited SunSpider — Chrome 10 beta was no faster than Chrome 9. WebKit is the open-source project that develops the browser engine by the same name; both Chrome and Apple’s Safari rely on the WebKit engine.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9210299/Google_ups_speed_of_Chrome_10

By Boonsri Dickinson, Smart Planet

Radios can receive or transmit a signal. Not only is the communication one-way, the signals that are transmitted are noisy. It’s like shouting in a crowded room and having no way of knowing if the person in the middle can hear you. But researchers at Stanford University have discovered that it’s possible for a radio to do both. After testing two radios designed for the two-way communication, the researchers measured how well the radios communicated. Philip Levis is pleased with the results so far. Levis is a computer science and electrical engineering professor at Stanford, and he thinks his full-duplex wireless device could really help wireless communication networks.

http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/science-scope/new-radio-technology-double-wi-fi-speeds-and-reduce-plane-crashes/6801/

by Dallas News

IBM Corp.’s Watson computer has already mastered the TV show Jeopardy. Maybe it’s time to move on to House. In the wake of Watson’s much-hyped victory this week on the quiz show, experts say such machines could soon be used in a variety of real-world applications where humans need help answering all sorts of questions. Many of those applications will come from Dallas-area research labs and corporations.

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/headlines/20110217-dallas-area-companies-developing-computers-like-ibms-jeopoardy-winning-watson.ece