Technology News and Gadgets Updates: 03/17/11

Thursday, March 17, 2011

FarmVille's new offering - the English Countryside

FarmVille, a farming social network game on Facebook that has 45 million active players across the world, has now come up with the English Countryside.

FarmVille English Countryside has plants and crops like foxgloves, redcurrants and King Edward potatoes that are native to Britain.

The crops in Britain part of the game will grow faster due to "the premium English soil", the Daily Telegraph reported.

The new version includes English cottages, traditional police call boxes and British animals, such as Shorthorn cows, Shire horses and Dorking chickens.

The players get to travel with an English Duke to his homeland where the village farms are in a bad shape. Then they receive new land on which they can show their farming skills so that the land becomes fruitful once again, the media report said.

One gets to access the new version after reaching level 20 in the regular version of the game.

Millions of people play FarmVille regularly with their Facebook friends.

The media report said there are currently over 45 million active players who create digital farms, trade goods with friends and invest in virtual tractors.

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HCL Technologies to send team to Japan: employees can work from home

HCL Technologies said it will send a senior level delegation to quake-hit Japan to support its employees, and the Indian software services firm will also give employees an option to work from alternate locations.

HCL's move follows Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS), announcement earlier this week that it was prepared to relocate its Indian staff in Japan. Infosys Technologies

also said some of its expatriate staff there had returned.

"There are contingency plans of quick evacuation of all employees and their families if the situation arises," HCL said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Several embassies advised staff and citizens to leave affected areas, tourists to cut short vacations and multinational companies either urged staff to leave or said they were considering plans to move outside Tokyo where low levels of radiation have been detected.

Lenovo says worried over supply impact of Japan quake

Lenovo Group Ltd , the world's No. 4 PC brand, is worried about the impact that the Japanese earthquake could have on its supply of parts in the next quarter, Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said on Thursday.

However, Yang told reporters on the sidelines of a conference that the company was currently seeing minimal impact on its supply chain from the earthquake.

Delivery of products and the Japanese PC market would be affected by the earthquake, though the firm was still conducting checks on the extent of the overall impact, Yang said.

Lenovo shares were down 3.4 percent at HK$3.99 at midday, under-performing the broader Hong Kong market, which was down 1.8 percent.

US lacks people, authorities to face cyber attack

The U.S. military does not have the trained personnel or the legal authorities it needs to respond to a computer-based attack on America or its allies, and a crisis would quickly strain the force, the Pentagon's cyber commander said Wednesday.

Gen. Keith Alexander , head of the Defense Department's Cyber Command, told Congress that he would give the military a grade of "C" in its ability to protect Pentagon networks, but said things are much better than they were a few years ago and continue to improve.

"We are finding that we do not have the capacity to do everything we need to accomplish. To put it bluntly, we are very thin, and a crisis would quickly stress our cyber forces," Alexander said. "We cannot afford to allow cyberspace to be a sanctuary where real and potential adversaries can marshal forces and capabilities to use against us and our allies. This is not a hypothetical danger."

The U.S. government has said its networks are probed and attacked millions of times a day, and that cyber criminals, terrorists and other nations are getting more adept at penetrating government and private networks to spy, steal critical data or affect critical infrastructure such as the electrical grid.

Facebook investor Milner sees founder exits as cue

Yuri Milner , who has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, said on Wednesday exits by founders of companies should be a cue for investors to do the same.

Milner, chief executive of Russia's Digital Sky Technologies , has defined a new style of investment in Internet companies in the last two years by buying stakes at a late stage and adding to them with employee and preferred shares.

DST bought a 2 percent stake in Facebook for $200 million in 2009, widely considered at the time to be an overpayment. Facebook's most recent fundraising round valued the social network at roughly $50 billion.

"I think you should at least wait until they go public," Milner said when asked at the Abu Dhabi Media summit about his exit strategy. His investment group has not yet exited any of the companies in which it has bought stakes.

"When the founder starts selling, you should start selling aswell," he added.

Laser diodes promise new age of Internet

A new laser device could make high-speed computing faster and more reliable, opening the door to a new age of the Internet.

Professor Dennis Deppe at the University of Central Florida has created miniature laser diodes that emit more intense light than those currently used.

The light emits a single wavelength, making it ideal for use in CD players, laser pointers and optical mice for computers, in addition to high-speed data transmission.

Until now, the biggest challenge has been the failure rate of these tiny devices. They don't work very well when they face huge workload as the stress makes them crack, according to a Central Florida statement.

The smaller size and elimination of non-semiconductor materials means the new devices could potentially be used in heavy data transmission, which is critical in developing the next generation of the Internet.

By using the tiny lasers in optical clocks, the precision of GPS and high-speed wireless data communications too would increase.

"The new laser diodes represent a sharp departure from past commercial devices in how they are made," Deppe said.

"The new devices show almost no change in operation under stress conditions that cause commercial devices to rapidly fail," he added.

Is India prepared to tackle earthquakes?

Despite the chorus of assurances from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh downward that Indian nuclear plants are safe because they are away from geological faults that can generate earthquakes or tsunamis, some of India's leading geologists voiced concern in the wake of the devastation caused by the 9-magnitude quake in Japan.

K.S. Valdiya, a renowned geologist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, is one of those who believe that complacence will be harmful.

It is true the Dec 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami did not result in any damage to the Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam except causing some flooding, but Valdiya says this was because the tsunami originated from the subduction zone near Sumatra some 1,400 km away from India.

"The same subduction zone (where two oceanic plates come together, one riding over the other), as deep as near Sumatra, continues north towards the Andaman Islands," Valdiya pointed out.

According to him, had the tsunami originated from near the Andaman Islands, instead of Sumatra, the waves would have lashed India's eastern coast with much greater ferocity and travelled much farther inland.

Many tsunami-generating earthquakes had taken place near the Andaman Islands and there is no guarantee that in future such mega-events will not take place there closer to the eastern shore of mainland India, he maintained.

Taiwan research releases one-touch disaster alert app

University researchers in Taiwan have released a mobile phone application, that with one touch can transmit to any number of people the location of users trapped in earthquake rubble or under mudslides, the professor behind the project said on Wednesday.

The app transmits the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of people stranded in disaster areas, said Liang Chih-hsiung, assistant professor of multimedia and gaming development at Lunghwa University of Science and Technology .

It went on sale in mobile application stores on Tuesday, following the massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan last week, Liang said. And with the Japan disaster reaching significant levels, the app's criticality is being put to test.

Users anywhere can download Mobile Saviour for US$2.99 in English, Chinese or Japanese. All proceeds from sales of the app will go to victims of the devastation either through Japan's foreign ministry or a Red Cross chapter, Liang said. The first instalment will be paid out within a month.

Thereafter, money made from the app will go to reconstruction and housing for people displaced by the temblor or the resulting tsunami.

Morpho helps issue unique identity to 3.5 million people

Safran group subsidiary Morpho, which is providing the technology for issuing the 12-digit unique identity numbers under the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Wednesday said that over 3.5 million people have already been covered under the scheme.

"Morpho's latest-generation technology deployed by the Mahindra Satyam has played a pivotal role in the programme for de-duplication of the biometric records, enabling issuance of unique identification numbers," the company said in a statement.

Officially launched in September 2010, this is the world's largest biometrics-based identity programme, it added.

The programme, also known as Aadhaar in Hindi, aims to deliver a unique number to each Indian resident which will provide highly secure access, using fingerprint and iris recognition.

"We are truly proud that our cutting-edge biometric technology has allowed the UIDAI authority to reach the two million milestone in this large-scale project," said Morpho chairman and chief executive officer Jean-Paul Jainsky.

"This achievement highlights the efforts and commitment of all the partners involved to make the Aadhaar program a success," he added.

The programme plans to issue 600 million Aadhaar numbers over the next four years.

Managing traffic through information technology

His sun-burnt face lit up at the sight of visitors. "Please have a seat," he said before turning his attention to the array of computer screens in front of him. Basanna Bajanthri, a Bangalore traffic cop for four years, has not had it so relaxed. Till the other day, he was guarding busy traffic intersections, changing signals manually and chasing drunk drivers.

But things have changed for the better. Two months back, he was deputed to the Traffic Management Centre (TMC) - the technology nerve centre of Bangalore traffic police - to join a small team of policemen remotely managing the city's traffic.

"We remotely monitor nearly 120 cameras put up at different junctions. When we see a violation at a signal, we zoom into the vehicle, capture images of its number plate and slap a fine on the registered owner of the vehicle," explains Basanna. The record of the offence is stored in a central database maintained by the police and an owner who has been fined can check about his offence on the traffic website and pay the fine at a citizen service centre, online or at one of the designated police stations.

Vehicle owners can check pending fines on their vehicle by messaging a given number besides getting traffic updates on their mobile phones. Besides cameras at junctions, there are enforcement cameras at five locations across the city. If a vehicle is seen speeding, its picture is taken and a fine is sent to the owners registered address.

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Thursday, March 17, 2011