Internet turned into Sixth Human sense

Imagine you are in Crossword and you picked up “Inside Steve’s Brain”. Now you would probably take out your phone from the pocket-open up the browser-type URL for amazon-check the ratings and reviews for the book.
Wooh….*time consuming* task to do(atleast I would say that) when compared to Sixth Sense technology.
You might be thinking What the hell am I talking about. So let me answer your WHAT part here.
Almost two years ago a researchers from MIT medialab Pranav Mistry made a pendulum look-alike device that would make any possible physical interface a computer. You might have come across such topics in films. This device allows us to bring the digital information into the real world just by natural hand gestures. Hence making entire world your computer.
The SixthSense device consist of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are gathered in a wearable device(like pendant) Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’ s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer- vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers
(visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’ s fingers using simple computer- vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces.Thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi- user interaction.
As you can see his device has wide variety of applications. Lets say this device can convert your palm into keypad,you can draw 3-D pictures on the wall with the help of your hand gestures,it can turn your bare wrist into virtual wrist watch and any possible thing you can think of.
If you think this device must be really expensive then I say NO,its just $350 and if you are wondering to grab your hands on it then you will have to wait for some more years as the device is under-development. But you can make your own device(device is open source). Instructions on how to make your own prototype can be found here.

Samsung Omnia W:Definetly not a S II killer

The Samsung Omnia W is the latest Windows
Phone Mango handset to be announced ahead
of the bumper update ’s roll out in the coming
weeks. It looks like Samsung isn’ t giving up on
the OS yet as rumoured, but something’ s still
amiss here: why isn’ t this the top- end Samsung
Galaxy S 2 killer we were hoping for?
Just announced this morning, the Samsung
Omnia W sports a 3 .7 – inch 800× 480 Super
AMOLED screen, which is substantially smaller
than the 4 – inch Samsung Omnia 7 Windows
(Phone already on sale) . Rounding off the specs
are a nippier 1 .4 GHz single core processor,
512 MB of RAM , and a 10. 9 mm deep chassis .
On the software front, the Samsung Omnia W
runs Windows Phone 7 .5 “Mango”, as you’d
expect, with a few extra additions of Samsung’s
own volition: AllShare, Samsung’s DLNA
streaming app for Android and Bada phones
makes its debut here, along with a video calling
app and an e-
Reader.
I am bit surprised by the Omnia W : where
the Omnia 7 matched the Samsung Galaxy S
spec for spec, this update sits far below the still
mighty Samsung Galaxy S 2 phone in terms of
features and hardware. Between that and the
presumably upcoming iPhone 5 , it could have a
hard time standing out – HTC seems to have
taken a savvier approach with its own new
Windows Phone, the absolutely enormous HTC
Titan , giving it the USP of a 4. 7 -inch screen.

Why should one prefer this now?

Worlds first “true” HD smartphone

OMG, Samsung has been busy today. Not only
have we seen the launch of the Omnia W , today
also sees the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S 2
HD LTE Android super phone, in South Korea(at
least).
The LTE 4G connection is significant, but what’ s
most interesting is the 4. 65 -inch Super AMOLED
screen. It ’s a massive 1280× 720 resolution,
which is a record for both Android phones and
smartphones in general, and the first technically
“HD ” (720 p ) smartphone in the world . At about
316 ppi, that puts it at the same pixel density as
the much smaller iPhone 4 – but with Super
AMOLED skills, I think it will blow away all the compitition.
16 GB of storage, a dual- core 1 .5 GHz processor,
NFC and an 8 MP camera capable of shooting
1080p HD video round off the specs on the
Samsung Galaxy S 2 HD LTE, and leave it
shaping it up to be the phone to beat – so long
as it ships.

Atleast for now its just SAMSUNG v/s APPLE though.

-EP

Facebook: Beginning of new Era

Today at Facebook’ s f8 conference in San
Francisco , CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage
to unveil the next evolution of the service. The
first major change? The Profile.
Zuckerberg noted that the original Profile was
sort of like the last five minutes of your life. The
updated Proile from 2008 extended that to
show what was sort of like the last 15 minutes
or your life. The new Profile unveiled today is
“the rest,” Zuckerberg noted. He calls this
feature Timeline.
“It ’s the heart of your Facebook experience,
completely rethought from the ground up ,”
Zuckerberg says, noting that they’ ve been
working on it all year. “Timeline is the story of
your life.”
What Zuckerberg showed was a beautiful new
Profile that is much more visual than anything
Facebook has done before. To be honest, it
looks a bit like a really nice Tumblr blog. It has
three main parts:
all your stories
all your apps
a new way to express who you are
And it goes all the way back to when you were
born.
Trying to display all of this content was a major
design challenge, Zuckerberg noted. How do you
do it all on a single page? Well, all of your recent
content is shown in a new grid- view. But as you
go back in time, it ’s more about summarizing
your content to display the most important
content. The farther back you go, the less you
see — it’ s just the key moments. “This is the
magic of how Timeline works,” Zuckerberg said.
And it works on mobile too. While Zuckerberg
mainly showed off how Timeline looks on the web, he also showed it on the smaller iPhone
screen. It ’s the same idea, just more condensed.
“We wanted to design a place that feels like your
home,” Zuckerberg said.
Undoubtedly, this will roll- out over time (over
the next couple of months, CTO Bret Taylor
says).

-TC

I got 1 billion check-ins,bitch!

A location based social networking site Foursquare started out in 2009 with only avaiblity of 100 worldwide areas. In Jan 2010 foursquare changed there location model to allow check-ins from any locations worldwide.
Foursquare just announced in its BLOG about the milestone they achived.
Foursquare founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai(might be partying right now) reached 10 million check-ins in June 2011.
With this new achievement company launched a new app which includes the new “List” feature which was announced last month.
Currently it has IPhone,Android,WebOS,Symbian,Windows phone 7 and blackberry app availablev
In January 2011,foursquare was named Best Location Based Service in the TechCrunch Crunchies.
On August 8 2011, American President Barack Obama joined Foursquare, the white house will use the service to post tips from places Obama has visited.

With such great milestones achieved on its way to success,today is the day worth celebrating for them.

Ice Cream Sandwich 2.4 launcher out

If you have been following android very closely you might know what ice cream sandwich is. The news is there will be 2.4 version for phone devices and 4.0 for tabs.
XDA developers have bought Ice Cream Sandwich launcher in the market. Launcher is completely based on leaked screen shots of 2.4, So the launcher might be incomplete yet but soon will be updated as more info and screenshots come into picture,that’s what XDA said.
I have uploaded some screenshots of the launcher from Samsung Galaxy S2. It gives the feel of honeycomb as the launcher was developed from Honeycomb launcher.
Here is the link if you want to grab your hands and take a rough feel for ICS,like I did.

Windows 8: Why and Why Not

Windows as we all know comes from Microsoft family. It is a series of operating system programmed under various languages for use on personal computers,laptops,netbooks,tablet PC’s.
Windows 8 is the upcoming version for the microsoft windows. Now there are many questions asked about Windows 8 and  its advantages along with limitations.
Here are some WHY and WHY NOT’s about Windows 8 that you should take care of.
WHY-
There are drastic changes on the interface of Windows 8,which becomes its main feature compared to windows 7. It has made use of Microsoft’s Metro Design Language. As shown in D9 conference, A new “Start Screen” similar to one in Windows 7,includes live application tiles. Windows 8 is designed to fit touchscreen gadgets and the new interface is specially designed for 16:9 screen resolutions and for longer screens.
It features a new Desktop tile. Startscreen features the user name and avatar along with a lock screen which can be customized.
Windows 8 comes with HYPER-V Virtualization software. The software was offered on windows server but now will be available in client versions also.
It has got a very less bootable time(around 8 seconds) as shown in the conference.
WHY NOT-
Stunning success of Ipad series means there’s some urgency for microsoft to respond. But hasty response can be worse than none at all. “Well just ask HP about this”
Windows 8 wont support older version windows app(ofcourse unless some modifications are made)
Windows 8 tablets wont support Flash,This is again where Windows 8 will face difficulty.
When Julie Larson-Green showed off windows 8 at conference,the showed Excel 2010 running on the “legacy” windows desktop. When Walt Massberg asked why the office team didn’t rewrite office for the new touch interface?she replied-“well they may do something……in future “

Windows Store director Ted Dworkin is now known to have also told
 the audience that developers will be banned from offering Metro-optimized apps outside of the store. Hence Windows 8 wont allow any third-party browser in WinRT mode.

Operating System cannot be judged,Unless and until it is available at the market. Fight is obviously tough as long as it faces opponents like Apple and Google. Expectations are high though.
NOTE:Windows 8 BUILD tablets are on ebay for $2,700. Since the tablets were designed for testing purpose,there wont be any warrenties.
BEST LUCK MICROSOFT.

Facebook’s Smart list V/S Google+ Circles

It looks like some people at Facebook are at least a little concerned with Google+, or at least Google+‘s Circles feature. Today Facebook announced it’s own version of Circles called Smart Lists.
Facebook’s Smart Lists are a bit different from Circles in that the first few Smart Lists will be auto-populated. Those first few lists are: School, Work, Family, and City. To populate those lists Facebook will what your relation to your friends is, so those who went to the same college as you will be put in the School list. Of course Facebook could make a few mistakes, so you can change those lists manually so your boss who want to the same college as you decades before doesn’t end up in your School list. Or you can put your boss in a Restricted list so they’ll only see your public posts.
This definitely seems like a shot at Google+‘s Circles, though it’s strange that they’re called lists. Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that users don’t want to create lists, which is probably why the first few lists populate themselves, making it easier on uses. There might not be much use beyond that, however. Sure, it’ll be easier for some to share information with who they want to share it with, but there were also groups for that use. Facebook and Google+ serve different purposes, so it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to copy too many Google+ features, nor the other way around. Facebook is best used for your real friends, and Google+ seems to be like something between that and a full-on blog platform.

Photo source:Google

How big is internet?

It seems like an answerable question, right?
But no one really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly
infinite digital universe that is the internet.Kevin Kelly,founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a Trillion web pages in existence,”The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human
brain holds about 100 billion neurons. ” Kelly
writes in his 2010 book “What Technology
Wants .”
Wild , huh?
Well, at long last, an answer may be coming.
A group called the World Wide Web Foundation founded by Tim Berners- Lee, who pretty much created the internet is on a quest
to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the internet really is.With a $ 1 million grant from Google ,the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, the foundation’s CEO, Steve Bratt,said in a recent interview.

Here’s how the foundation described the project
in an e- mail to CNN(Source:CNN):”The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries,allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries.”  Bratt stressed that it won’t answer every question people have about the internet, but he hopes the index, which will be presented as a series of annual reports, will go a long way toward filling in some of the gaps.
“We want to be really careful about what will happen (as a result of the Web Index ) because
we just don ‘t know,” he said. “But this will be
probably the best opportunity to quantify” the
Web.So, what kind of tools does one use to try to measure the internet? Certainly not yard sticks and rulers, right?
Bratt said the Web Foundation will conduct surveys of internet users,interview relevant people and try to gather data from internet service providers, national governments and search engines such as Google to come up with its findings. In addition to looking at how big the Web is, the group wants to use data to tease out the role social media sites had in sparking revolution in the Middle East this year. And it wants to find out what kinds of websites people all over the world are looking at; what websites exist; and how internet trends differ from country to country and region to region.

The International Telecommunications Union digs
into some similar questions, publishing reports on the number of internet users in various countries and how fast connections are around
the world (South korea is so far the fastest,in case you were wondering . The United States is
super- slow in comparison).
Bratt said the Web Foundation’s work will supplement, not replace, what the ITU does.The foundation is starting work on the Web Index soon and is still seeking funding for the project,
he said. The first of five annual reports will be
available early next year, the group says.

Iphone: I am the leader of this world

At the end of fiscal year 2010 a total of 73.5 millions  of Iphones were sold, Wow now thats a huge amount,boy!
Lets make this simple,wondered how apple manages to sell this huge figure and why is there never ending line outside every Istore for Iphones? This is due to its amazing and countless features apple keeps on adding to its phone for every model,in other words Iphone gives you the world in your hand. Just name it:speed,interface, 425000(approved by apple)apps and the list goes on.
Lets come to some technicality-Iphone runs on a basic variant of Mac’s OS X operating system,which is Unix-based.Iphone is also popular for its design which is designed by Jonathan Ive.
IPhone is unique for its apps,this is where Appstore comes into picture. Do you know how much apple earns from appstore? A wallstreet journal article estimates around $150 million. Appstore is a master stoke from apple it has not only accelerated the revolution of touch but also helped in keeping the Iphone at top position.
But due to the “Paid apps” thing and many-many other restricted behaviour of Iphone Jailbreaking was introduced.(I have linked an article on how to jailbreak for intrested readers)
Jailbreaking gives you features and power to customize your Iphone the way you want. Jailbreaking has made Iphone more intresting for developers as well as users.
Jailbreaking and the iOS together has made the world go after apple and may be the main reason why iphone is still the leading smartphone.
Now I guess whenever you buy your next cellphone I am pritty sure you might have made your mind clear.