Car Makers Add Apps to Their Dashboards

Automakers from General Motors Co. to Hyundai Motor Co. are using the Consumer Electronics Show to announce plans that will transform dashboards into mini-computers running Internet-connected programs.

For example, Ford Motor Co. debuted an app that will allow owners of its new Focus electric car to schedule charging times from a smartphone. Toyota Motor Co. unveiled a program that lets motorists make reservations via booking site OpenTable.com.

The auto industry's embrace of apps comes as carmakers look for new ways to differentiate their vehicles from the competition's. "Internet-connected autos will be among the fastest-growing segments in four years," said Gartner Inc. analyst Thilo Koslowski.

Mr. Koslowski forecasts more than half of all new premium vehicles in the U.S. will support apps by 2013 and mass market cars will reach that level in 2016.

Carmakers first started experimenting with apps about three years ago, when Ford announced its SYNC system. The technology allows drivers to use voice commands to control smartphones.

Now, the technology is advancing. Some new apps for cars will allow motorists to stream Internet radio, while others will let them update their Facebook pages from the driver's seat.

At the show, Toyota demonstrated its new in-car system, dubbed Entune. A relative latecomer to apps, Toyota said the system will connect cars to the Internet using a smartphone. When connected, Entune allows the car to stream music from Pandora Inc., book seats through Movietickets.com or conduct Web searches with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing.com.

The current apps were all designed by Toyota partners. Jon Bucci, who runs Toyota's technology initiatives, said the company will open the system to outside developers this year.

Ford is releasing a host of smartphone apps that allow car owners to keep closer tabs on how the vehicle is running. One in-house app, called Sync Destinations, allows drivers to enter their route in a smartphone and then beam it to the car, providing turn-by-turn directions. Another app, Sync AppLink, allows users to have their Twitter streams read to them. "It's all about using the right technology and the right application for our customers," said Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally.

General Motors has expanded its onboard OnStar system, allowing car owners to access it via their iPhone and Android handsets. Nearly all of GM's newest cars can send diagnostic information, such as when the oil should be changed.

OnStar is beginning to let motorists update their Facebook status by speaking commands directly to the car. The feature is integrated into OnStar's system, which also offers directions and emergency services.

Currently, the OnStar system doesn't accept apps written by third-party developers. But apps written by outside developers could be available later this year, according to two people familiar with company. GM is planning to create an app store for outside apps later this year, the two said.

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T-Mobile Smartphones to Head Down Market

T-Mobile USA is aggressively heading down market with its smartphone business, a move that could put further pressure on prices in what has been one of the wireless industry's most lucrative product categories in years.

Chief Executive Philipp Humm said in an interview that many of his smartphones will eventually be made up of Google-powered phones costing less than $100, half as much as the smartphones typically available at U.S. carriers. In October, to lower the cost of monthly bills, Mr. Humm introduced a limited data plan that costs $10.

The move acknowledges the reality of the market, where larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. dominate the high end with devices like Droids and the iPhone. Mr. Humm is targeting lower-end contract and prepaid customers. But it is also the latest sign that carriers have to bring down prices to expand smartphone use.

"We are working with our vendors on this one to drive the price of smartphones down," Mr. Humm said. Not every customer is going to want or need the premier high-end handset, he added.

Smartphones turned mobile phones into minicomputers with better software, bigger screens and greater processing power. High-end devices like the iPhone contain just under $200 worth of parts, according to tear-downs by iSuppi Corp.

Their retail prices started dropping almost immediately after they were introduced. Apple Inc. cut the price of its top iPhone by $200, to $399, about two months after its June 2007 launch. Carriers have continued to cut the price of devices and service plans in an effort to expand their appeal.

Earlier this week, Sprint Nextel Corp. rolled out a new phone for its fast, next-generation wireless network and priced it at $149, $50 lower than the price of a similar 4G phone. "We just felt that it made sense and we need to break past that $200 barrier for 4G devices," said David Owens, Sprint's vice president of consumer acquisition. "It is an incredibly aggressive price point."

During the holidays, Verizon Wireless offered a cheaper smartphone data plan — $15 for 150 megabits a month—to lure in new users. The offering followed AT&T's move to tiered pricing over the summer, when it rolled out a plan charging $15 a month for 200 megabits. T-Mobile's plan is even cheaper — $10 for 200 megabits.

Google Inc. has made it easier to produce competitively priced smartphones by giving away its Android operating system. Cheaper smartphones may have slower processors or less advanced screens and cameras, but a lot of the basic functions are similar to those on top phones.

Getting manufacturers to bring down the price is important if carriers are to cut the retail price because they subsidize smartphones heavily. Apple's most expensive iPhone retails for $299 in the U.S., but Apple said in October it collected an average of about $610 a phone in the third quarter. Carriers make up much of the difference.

T-Mobile, the fourth-largest U.S. carrier behind Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, says it won't gear its lineup exclusively to the low end, but it will offer a range of smartphones, including high-end devices.

T-Mobile USA's third-quarter results showed improving performance, but a bulk of the growth came from less profitable prepaid customers. In November, the company said it was having trouble holding on to its most valuable customers, in part because it doesn't offer the iPhone. Mr. Humm, in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, acknowledged that the likelihood Verizon Wireless getting the iPhone as well could affect his subscriber numbers.

Mr. Humm, who introduced the iPhone to T-Mobile in Germany, declined to comment on whether T-Mobile USA would get the device. T-Mobile is a unit of Deutsche Telekom.

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Twitter set record as Japan rang in New Year

A flood of Japanese Tweets sent as the New Year arrived in Tokyo boosted global traffic within the network to a record 6,939 tweets per second (TPS), the microblogging site has reported.

The figure more than doubles the previous record of 3,283 TPS, set during Japan’s surprise victory over Denmark in last summer’s World Cup in South Africa, it said.

"Just four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1st, Twitterers set an all-time record in the number of Tweets sent per second," Twitter said in a blog posted Thursday.

"At that moment, the world sent a staggering 6,939 TPS wishing friends and followers a fond 'Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu' ('Happy New Year!')."

Twitter said that in Japan, with a population of over 127 million, "mobile networks have been known to crash under the strain of this collective cheer. This year, on New Year’s Eve, many people turned to Twitter to celebrate."

Twitter said that on New Year’s Eve, "we saw epic Tweet activity around the world as people in each time zone inaugurated 2011".

In the United States, "the East coast time zone alone almost amassed the same amount of Tweets at its peak of 3,000 TPS as the entire world did during the peak moment of the World Cup."

Created in 2006 to exchange messages of no more than 140 characters, Twitter had 175 million registered users as of November 1 and transmitted 25 billion "Tweets" last year. About 95 million messages a day are sent over the site.

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Tablets crowd gadget show, chasing iPad's tail

Big tablets and small tablets, white ones and black ones. Cheap ones and expensive ones. Brand names famous and obscure at the starting line of a race where the iPad is already a speeding dot near the horizon.

It's impossible to walk the floor at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show without stumbling across a multitude of keyboard-less touch-screen computers expected to hit the market in the coming months. With Apple estimated to have sold more than 13 million iPads last year alone, the competition is clearly for second place, but even that prize is worth pursuing.

Technology research firm Gartner Inc expects that 55 million tablet computers will be shipped this year, most of them still iPads, but there will be room for rivals to vie for sales of the remaining 10 million to 15 million devices.

A bevy of consumer electronics makers, including major names such as Motorola Mobility Inc, Toshiba Corp and Dell Inc, showed off their tablets in Las Vegas at CES, betting 2011 will be the year the gadgets finally take off.

Companies tried for years to popularize tablets, but the frenzy began only with the release of the iPad in April. Now companies whose names don't include the word "Apple" are doing everything they can to differentiate themselves from the tablet front-runner.

They're adding bells and whistles the iPad doesn't yet have — such as front and back cameras for video chatting and picture taking and the ability to work over next-generation 4G data networks — in hopes of taking on the iPad, or at least carving out a niche.

Motorola's Xoom sports a screen that measures 10.1 inches diagonally — slightly larger than the iPad's — and dual cameras for video chatting and taking high-definition videos.

It will also include the upcoming Honeycomb version of Google Inc's Android software. Honeycomb has been designed for the larger touch screens on tablets; current versions of Android, used in many of the tablets at CES, are meant more for the smaller touch screens on smart phones.

For example, Gmail on a Honeycomb tablet shows a list of e-mails in one column and the body of the one you're reading in a second column. On a current Android phone, you'd only see one column at a time.

Motorola, at least, is confident that its offering is more full-featured than the iPad.

"A lot of people have been waiting for the definitive tablet," said Paul Nicholson, Motorola's marketing director. "This is the definitive tablet."

The tablet, which will start selling in March for an as-yet-unknown price, will also work on Verizon Wireless' existing, 3G network at first and later be upgradeable to work on its faster 4G network.

Tablets that work with a wireless carrier's high-speed data network may be a key to success in the tablet space, said Ross Rubin, an analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm. While a version of the iPad can use AT&T Inc's 3G network, Apple has not yet announced a plan for it to use any of the new 4G networks.

"Today we see a lot of tablet usage in the home. Perhaps tying it to a faster network can ... really expand the on-the-go use case for these products," Rubin said.

No matter how well any of the new contenders are received, though, analysts expect Apple to dominate in the tablet market for at least two years. With Apple's habit of annually refreshing its products, chances are the iPad will gain new features early this year that could launch it even further ahead of the competition.

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Now, you can control computer commands by thought

A new software platform, developed by French scientists , which was demonstrated at a tech fest at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) here allows individuals to control computer commands by just a 'thought'.

Acting as an interface designed to translate what happens in the brain into a computer command, this software --'OpenViBE'-- is the outcome of a project initiated in 2005 and has a multitude of potential applications.

"The OpenViBE software platform facilitates the design, testing and use of 'brain-computer interfaces' - in other words, systems that process the electrical signals linked with brain activity and translate them into a command that can be understood by machines," computer scientists Yann Renard and Laurent Bonnet said while demonstrating the software at the Department of Computer Sciences, IIT , here yesterday.

These allow individuals to communicate with a computer or any automated system without using their hands or other movements to activate a button or remote control, they said.

"OpenViBE provides a tool that is aimed at a varied audience, from researchers and clinicians to video game developers," they said.

To a query on whether writing by thought was now possible, the scientists replied in affirmative.

A person wearing an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap focuses his attention on the letter that he wants to spell out. When this letter flashes, a particular brain wave is generated which is picked up, detected and interpreted by the machine, they said.

Explaining further in technical terms, the scientists said, "OpenViBE is a series of software libraries and modules written in C++ that can be simply and effectively integrated in order to design real-time applications. Programmer users can develop their own code, while non-programmers can use the graphical interface."

The Brain-Computer Interfaces and OpenViBE can also be used to assist those with motor disabilities -- particularly entirely paralysed persons suffering from locked-in syndrome, in multimedia -- video games and virtual reality and in general to facilitate any type of interaction with an automated system like robotics, home automation.

"They also open up possibilities to treat certain neurological problems, attention disorders, motor recovery after a stroke for example, through rehabilitation processes such as neuro feedback," the scientists said.
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