Google adds new feature to its Map application

The Internet search giant Google has launched its web version of Foursquare on a new version of Google Maps.

Maps offers to share check-in with your friends connected with Latitude and possibly publish your position in your Google profile.

While updating its Maps application for Android , it took the opportunity to add a function of its check-in location-based service.

It offers a variety of locations corresponding roughly to where you were located.
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Facebook, Skype in talks over video calling

Facebook Inc , the world's biggest social-networking company, is holding talks with SkypeTechnologies SA about offering Web video calls to its 500 million users, two people familiar with the discussions said.

Video calling between friends on Facebook was first discussed by the two companies last year, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. The feature wasn't offered in an October update to Skype, which did include voice calling between Facebook friends.

As Web users adopt new ways of communicating, such as video and mobile messaging, Palo Alto, California-based Facebook has added features to give members more ways to keep in touch. Bringing video calls to its social network would ramp up competition with Apple Inc., which introduced the feature on its iPhone in June, and with Google Inc., which offered Web calling through Gmail in August.

Video calls accounted for more than 41 per cent of all Web calling between Skype users in the second half of last year, the company said in January. Luxembourg-based Skype registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in August to sell its shares to the public.

Apple's Jobs wants iPhone for China Mobile

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has expressed interest in developing an iPhone based on China Mobile's fourth-generation telecoms standard, the chairman of the Chinese telecoms operator said on Friday.

"Jobs has said he's very interested in developing an iPhone that will run on TD," China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou said on the sidelines of the Chinese Communist Party's consultative meeting.

Apple officials were not immediately available for comment.

China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, is currently testing a fourth-generation network that runs on its homegrown TD standard, and is looking to smartphone operators to design phones that support the system.

The company has been talking to Apple for years to develop an iPhone that runs on its homegrown 3G TD-SCDMA standard, but rival China Unicon remains the only operator to sell the phone as it runs on the global data standard.

The smartphone's exclusive availability through China Unicom has crimped sales of the device in China because of China Unicom's smaller subscriber pool, and number portability is not allowed in the country.

Sony to appeal Netherlands PS3s seizure in LG dispute

Sony Corp said it will appeal the seizure of Playstation 3 game consoles by customs officers in the Netherlands following a court injunction initiated by LG Electronics over a patent dispute.

The Dutch customs authorities notified Sony at the end of February that an inspection would be made into Sony products imported into the Netherlands, which has now resulted in Playstation 3 game consoles being temporarily withheld, Sony said late on Friday.

Sony added that this preliminary injunction was related to a petition made by LG Electronics, alleging that Sony may be infringing LG patents related to Blu-ray technologies .

South Korea's LG Electronics said it would not comment on pending legal matters.

Sony said it disagreed with LG's allegations and would file an appeal to the courts in the Netherlands.

According to media reports earlier this week, tens of thousands of the consoles had been seized in the Netherlands in line with a 10-day import ban ordered by a Dutch court.

New robotic hand types like human

Engineers in US have developed a robotic hand that is capable of performing human tasks such as opening doors and typing.

The researchers have been trying to create robots with the manual dexterity to operate the machines people regularly encounter in everyday life, whether they are plain old computers, drinks vending machines, bus/tram/train ticketing machines or shopping mall info kiosks.

Shashank Priya and Nicholas Thayer of Virginia Tech have now designed a robotic hand, called "dexterous anthropomorphic robotic typing hand" (DART), that they hope to optimise for keyboard work, reports New Scientist.

"DART is being optimised for use by the humanoid robots being developed to assist elderly people who want to operate computers and other machines. And they will be able to do this by giving the robot voice commands,” they said.

As a first step, Thayer and Priya ruled out pneumatic artificial muscles, shape memory alloys and electroactive polymers as either too bulky or too inefficient to drive their keyboard-clacking digits.

Soon, computers to understand how you feel!

A Binghamton University researcher wants computers to understand inputs from humans that go beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse.

Lijun Yin and team have developed ways to provide information to the computer based on where a user is looking as well as through gestures or speech.

Yin says the next step would be enabling the computer to recognize a user''s emotional state.

"Computers only understand zeroes and ones. Everything is about patterns. We want to find out how to recognize each emotion using only the most important features,” said Yin.

Yin is also considering use of photographs, and even three-dimensional avatars that are able to display a range of emotions.

"We want not only to create a virtual-person model, we want to understand a real person''s emotions and feelings. We want the computer to be able to understand how you feel, too. That''s hard, even harder than my other work,” said Yin.

"This technology could help us to train the computer to do facial-recognition analysis in place of experts,” added Yin.

Disclaimer: All information on this news has been compiled from their respective official websites or through public domain sites and leading newspapers. Although, we have taken reasonable efforts to provide you with accurate information, but we assumes no responsibility for the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the Information and would advise you to verify it from the official product provider. We cannot guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct. If you would like to advertise on our site please contact us