Pic of the Day - 18th May

This May 17, 2010 NASA handout image shows NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, STS-132 mission specialist, participating in the mission's first session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station. US astronauts on Monday completed the first of three planned spacewalks from the shuttle Atlantis a day after the craft docked with the International Space Station.

Astronauts Garrett Reisman and Stephen Bowen finished the seven-hour, 25-minute spacewalk after installing a second space-to-ground communications antenna and a spare parts platform on Dexter, the two-armed robotic device on the orbiting ISS. (Photo: AFP/NASA)

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Rumour has it -Apple Itouch with Camera and VOIP capabilities

We knew it had to happen maybe tomorrow, or day after tomorrow. It will surely going to happen. A Camera is becoming a basic need in a smartphone or i rather call it an entertainment phone.

with IPHONE missing a cut over all major MultiMedia Phones just due to the lack of a deccent camera and ofcourse the necessasity of a fully functional Bluetooth device. Nevertheless, saw this article on WIRED.COM.

According to a “well-connected Wired’s source,” Apple’s Chinese contractors are already churning out iPod touch units with integrated cameras and microphones. A classic rumor that may transform the smart media player into almost-an-iPhone, thanks Wi-Fi hotspots and 3G-to-Wi-Fi hubs.

According to Wired’s source, they will go on sale in “two to three months.” If I were AT&T, I would be very nervous about the prospect of Apple eventually gaining carrier independence with a 100% VoIP solution. The plot, boys and girls, is thickening.

If iPod Touches with cameras and microphones go on sale “in two to three months,” as our source expects them to (and which corresponds with our expected timeframe), they will transform the entertainment-oriented iPod Touch line into a voice communications tool wherever WiFi is available.

In addition to these voice-over-IP capabilities, which should have telephone providers quaking in their boots, the microphone (and camera) would enable the iPod Touch to understand voice commands, capture video and images, and work with a wider variety of programs in the App Store.

Well, the Rumour has it. Watch out for further updates regarding this progress.

Source : http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/apple-preparing-ipod-touch-with-camera-microphone-source/

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Microsoft upgrade aims to make Hotmail cool again

The free Web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.

The upgrade, expected to be available in July or August, will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users' key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.

Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to e-mail recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make is easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.

It's all part of the most extensive overhaul to Hotmail since Microsoft bought the service 12 years ago, said Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive who is overseeing the renovations.

"Our service wasn't doing the best job that it could," Jones said during a Monday preview of the makeover.

The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what's in the messages.

Microsoft is hoping the added convenience will help overcome the perception that Hotmail was growing stale as Google and Yahoo added more bells and whistles to their free Web mail services.

Even as it made relatively few changes, Hotmail remained the world's most used service with 360 million users, according to statistics complied by comScore Inc. Yahoo ranks second globally with about 284 million users followed by Google's Gmail at 173 million users.

Now Microsoft thinks it might have shot of supplanting Yahoo as the top Web mail service in the U.S. (Yahoo's e-mail service has 95 million U.S. users compared to 47 million for Hotmail and 43 million for Gmail, according to comScore).

Hotmail's most significant changes will provide new ways to look at photos and videos sent through e-mail. Microsoft expects this feature to be particularly popular because it says 55 percent of Hotmail's storage is consumed by photos sent as attachments.

The new technology will detect when an e-mail contains a photo attachment and automatically display a thumbnail of the image (or images) at the top of the message. Hotmail will provide similar previews when it detects links to photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug or to video-sharing sites YouTube and Hulu.

Other changes are designed to make it easier to send photos, video and other Web content. A new insert bar will allow users to send up to 10 gigabytes -- about 200 photos each containing 50 megabytes -- by uploading them to Microsoft's free online storage service Skydrive, where they can only be viewed by the recipients of the e-mail.

Videos and other Internet material can be found through a new panel that will connect Hotmail to Microsoft's Internet search engine, Bing. The videos and other Bing-generated content can then be inserted into an e-mail with a mouse click. The e-mail recipient will then be able to see the video or other material without having to click through a Web link.

As it spruces up Hotmail, Microsoft also will try to make it more secure. Embracing a change recently made by Gmail, Microsoft is adding a so-called "secure sockets layer" (denoted by "https" before a Web address) that encrypts e-mail to make it less vulnerable to computer hackers.

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India on top again, among hottest outsourcing destination

India continues to top the list of outsourcing nations, with six Indian cities in the top 8 outsourcing destinations, according to a global study.

India is still the top destination for sales outsourcing firms who need to boost their productivity by using the country’s workforce, a new poll indicates.

A collaboration between CyberMedia subsidiary Global Services and advisory firm Tholons placed six cities located in the Asian nation among the top eight locations for sales outsourcing.

For the present, though, India continues to top the list with revenues of $40 billion in IT-BPO export services in 2008. Indian IT-BPO export services posted a 35 per cent year-on-year growth in the last five years.

Reconfirming the fact that Indian cities are the most preferred destination for outsourcing, six Indian cities — Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune — figure among the eight top global destinations for outsourcing of services along with Manila and Ireland’s Dublin city, according to the 4th Global Services-Tholons Top 50 emerging outsourcing destinations survey.

Here’s the list of the Top 10 Offshore Nations from Tholons:

1 : India
2 : Philippines
3 : China
4 : Ireland
5 : Brazil
6 : Canada
7 : Russia
8 : Mexico
9 : Vietnam
10 : Poland

Avinash Vashistha, chief executive officer for Tholons, said company directors must “consider location, risk mitigation for business, cultural affinity and scalability of the skilled workforce” when thinking about sales outsourcing.

India is undoubtedly the most mature and established offshore nation today, blessed with almost 3.5 million graduates (non-technology courses) and over 500,000 technical graduates being churned annually. More importantly, it possesses largely young population, many who continue to aspire to be a part of the outsourcing industry.

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YouTube exceeds 2 billion views a day

In honor of YouTube’s fifth birthday, the site announced it's now attracting more than two billion video views a day.

“That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined,” the YouTube team wrote in a blog post Sunday. “We certainly can’t imagine what the future will look like. But we do know there’s a lot more to be done ... We’re just getting started.”

To celebrate, the Google-owned site launched its YouTube Five Year Channel and a project called “My YouTube Story,” which features users talking about the ways in which the video site has affected their lives.

Among them are such high-profile users as CBS News' Katie Couric, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and late-night jokester Conan O'Brien.

In Couric’s video, she says “YouTube is kind of like New York City. Millions and millions of people from all walks of life co-existing in one small space. When you turn the corner, you never know who or what you’ll see.”

Adds O'Brien, "If you're like me, America, you spend an inordinate amount of time watching YouTube - and it's probably why our country's economy is in the toilet."

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Twitter for Android : Robots like to share too

When we tweet what’s happening around us, we share not only our thoughts, but also web pages, photos, videos, location...anything. Mobile phones are increasingly part of our lives, and we seem to be doing everything but making phone calls. Reading the news, watching a YouTube video, and taking photos at events like the World Cup are things we expect to do on mobile phones – sharing our experiences on these little screens should be just as easy and fast as on big ones.

When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening. Today we are excited to announce that Twitter for Android is available in Android Market!

Twitter for Android is a fantastic application to use, and sharing any link or photo is super simple too – just look for the share button in your favorite application and choose Twitter.

Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar.

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Group sets May 31 as 'Quit Facebook Day'

Frustrated by Facebook's recent privacy changes, a group is urging users to delete their Facebook accounts en masse on May 31.

The campaign comes amid complaints that the social-networking juggernaut is diminishing users' privacy with its "open graph" model that adds Facebook connections on other sites across the internet. A handful of glitches during the rollout of the changes have, in fact, put some personal info at risk, if only briefly.

It's clear that some folks are leaving the popular site.

But the organized effort to get people to abandon their Facebook accounts doesn't appear to have gained much traction so far among the site's 400 million-plus users.

More than 2,700 people had pledged to quit Facebook on the group's website Monday morning. The Quit Facebook Day site asks, "Sick of Facebook's lack of respect for your data?" and calls on users to quit the site all at once on May 31.

And about 1,090 people had "liked" the site's Quit Facebook Day page - which, ironically, is on Facebook - as of Monday morning.

By contrast, more than seven times that many people are fans of former "Top Chef" contestant Kevin Gillespie's beard. A fairly random user-created page called "I Love Facebook" had roughly the same number of members as the "Quit Facebook" page.

On Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle's Business Insider blog poked fun at the effort, albeit when the fledgling site had only a couple hundred people signed up. The post's title? "Uh-Oh, 0.00000068% Of Facebook Users Promise To Quit On May 31."

Facebook doesn't provide the number of people who delete their accounts. But the overall numbers are clearly going the other way. A spokeswoman told CNN.com last week that Facebook had added 10 million active users since late April.

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Plastic Logic's QUE e-reader

Plastic Logic's QUE e-reader




The QUE ProReader is built using our unique plastic electronics technology. The result is a stunning form factor that is sleek, lightweight and incredibly easy-to-read. Its touchscreen-based interface is elegant and easy-to-use.

The QUE ProReader is available in two models. Visit QUE.com to find the one which is right for you.

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Flip SlideHD camera

Pure Digital Technologies spawned a revolution in 2007 with its first Flip Video pocket camcorder, which made it quick, cheap and easy for anyone to shoot and upload digital clips to the Web.

The latest version, the $280 Flip SlideHD, offers improved playback while retaining the simplicity that made the original a hit. But the finicky touch controls and higher price may make it a harder sell than cheaper models that can do many of the same things.

Now sold by Cisco Systems Inc., which bought Pure Digital last year, the SlideHD sports a touch screen that slides into an upright position. It also has a headphone jack so you can watch video on the go without disturbing others.

The SlideHD's screen, 3-inches diagonally, is quite larger than those on other available models, which have 1.5-inch and 2-inch screens. You can't use the whole screen as a viewfinder when shooting videos, however, as the bottom portion is taken over by the SlideHD's touch-screen controls.

Like earlier Flip cameras, the SlideHD has a few simple options for making and playing back videos. There a big, red "record" button, along with controls for volume, zooming and other features.

Although the touch-enabled buttons seemed like a cool idea, they were often tricky to control. Several times I found myself tapping the screen over and over, unsuccessful in efforts to zoom in on a subject. Other times I had to tap the "record" button so forcefully to stop recording that I would jostle the camera, screwing up the end of a video.

When I wanted to share my videos with friends, or just play them back for myself, I could simply slide the screen up. The main body of the camera acts as a kickstand for the screen. The screen is not very bright or sharp, but it was nice to have a bigger screen for viewing compared with previous Flip cameras.

In this sharing mode, I could swipe through different videos and folders with a finger and choose one to view. But I had issues with the touch-screen controls here, too. I often accidentally opened the ones I didn't want. And during playback, I had to press down on the screen for a while to get options for volume, fast-forwarding and rewinding.

Fortunately, the SlideHD includes another option: When you slide up the screen, it exposes a touch-enabled black strip on the camera. This gives you another way to flip through clips and access such things as videos you've tagged as favorites or have been shared with you. Unfortunately, you couldn't use this strip to fast forward or rewind.

One other potentially useful addition: The SlideHD is the first Flip camera with a headphone jack. It could be useful for playing videos while on the go, though when proudly showing my videos to friends, I preferred watching together with the sound on.

As with other Flip products, the quality of the videos I took were good (despite my video-making skills well below average). The camera adjusted well in bright light at a local park, and it wasn't too bad in the low light of a club where a friend's band, The Orange Peels, was performing.

There's plenty of storage space. The camera can record four hours of high-definition video, or store up to 12 hours of lower-quality videos you put on the device. The SlideHD's rechargeable battery lasts up to two hours, which I found plenty for each recording session.

It was also easy to plug the camera into my computer via its built-in USB dongle and use the included FlipShare software to snip clips, stitch them together into longer videos and share them online. You can also grab still photos from your videos with the software.

Still, the price tag was pretty steep considering it was difficult to manipulate the touch controls and the screen is less than crisp. The Flip UltraHD is $80 cheaper, and the Flip MinoHD costs $50 less, yet both can record videos at the same resolution as the SlideHD. Though both have half the storage space, smaller displays and mechanical controls, they seem like better deals.

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Gold-and-diamond iPad could be yours for $190,000

Got an extra $190,000?

Then you could have an Apple product that you REALLY don't want to leave behind at a California beer hall.

Stuart Hughes, a British company that bills itself as a purveyor of "ultimate luxury," is offering a 22-carat gold iPad encrusted with more than 25 carats of flawless diamonds (including a diamond Apple logo).

The company has made 10 copies of their Gold iPad Supreme.

"This most luxurious iPad's appearance is outstanding even down to the precise polishing to reveal its most beautiful harmonious appearance," the company's website says in a curiously worded sales pitch.

The tablet computer costs 129,995 British pounds - roughly $190,000, depending on the exchange rate at the moment. No word on whether that price include personal hand delivery by Steve Jobs.

And, for the record, Stuart Hughes shelled out the extra $300 or so to get the top-of-the-line 3G, 64GB version. You know ... ultimate luxury and all.

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5 ways to reduce cell-phone radiation

There's lots of news today about a long-awaited study on cell phones and brain tumors.

The study, to be published Tuesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, turns out to be inconclusive: It found no evidence that making calls with a mobile phone against your ear increases your risk for brain cancer, but it also couldn't prove that no such link exists, according to CNN's report.

"The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation," the study says. Some people, including GQ writer Christopher Ketcham, who recently published an in-depth look at research in this area, are skeptical that such a probe will take place, in part because of the cell phone industry's lobbying influence. Several European countries have issued precautions about mobile phone radiation.

But we'll put the debate aside for now. If you are concerned about mobile phone radiation, here are a few ways to keep these potentially damaging waves away from your brain.

Not all are 100 percent effective, and several carry a significant geek factor. (If a Bluetooth earpiece can make Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt look creepy, what will it do to you?) But who knows. If hipsters latch on, maybe these add-ons will go the way of bike helmets and become socially acceptable.

Let us know what you think of these tips, and please offer up your own in the comments below.

1. Use the speaker phone: This keeps the phone away from your ear and, if your phone has a decent speaker function already, doesn't cost you anything. Downside: Everyone in the office hears your partner yell at you for forgetting to record last night's episode of "Dancing with the Stars."

2. Don't talk. Text: This will win you younger friends and social cachet, as long as your fingers aren't too fat to navigate a QWERTY. If you're new to texting (like omg!), wikiHow has a smart guide to get your started. You probably can't send all of your communiques in 140-character bites, though. Well, unless you're this girl.

3. Buy a lower-radiation phone: CNET and the Environmental Working Group have published guides to radiation by phone model. You can use this information to guide your next cell phone purchase. The downside: This doesn't eliminate exposure. But, as they say, knowledge is power.

4. Use a headset: Some earbuds are wired to the phone; other options, like Bluetooth ear pieces, are wireless. Both put less radiation on the side of your head than a phone, according to EWG. Downside: Since there's no phone in sight, it will look like you're talking to yourself while you're walking down the street. Unexpected bonus: People in music videos do that all the time. And rock stars aren't bothered by onlookers, are they?

5. Talk less: Take this as literally as you will. You could simply limit your phone conversations, choosing to - gasp! - meet up with people in real life instead. Or, according to EWG, simply speaking less during a mobile-phone conversation can reduce your radiation exposure, too. From that group's guide: "Your phone emits radiation when you talk or text, but not when you're receiving messages. Listening more and talking less reduces your exposures." So, moral of story: less Jay, and more Silent Bob.

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