Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan), is a Multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a table, topped with a 30-inch reflective surface in a clear acrylic frame. A projector underneath the surface projects an image onto its underside, while five cameras in the machine's housing record reflections of infrared light from human fingertips. The camera can also recognize objects placed on the surface if those objects have specially-designed "tags" applied to them. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving tagged objects. Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
In addition to recognizing finger movements, Microsoft Surface can also identify physical objects. Microsoft says that when a diner sets down a wine glass, for example, the table can automatically offer additional wine choices tailored to the dinner being eaten.
Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit.[3] However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 2010.[4]
Partner companies plan to use the Surface in their hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. The Surface is to be used to choose meals at restaurants, plan vacations and spots to visit from the hotel room. Starwood Hotels plan to allow users to drop a credit card on the table to pay for music, books, and other amenities offered at the resort. In AT&T stores use of the Surface include interactive presentations of plans, coverage, and phone features, in addition to dropping two different phones on the table and having the customer be able to view and compare prices, features, and plans

Times Group buys UK's Virgin Radio

After the mega buyouts by Indian corporates in industries like tea, steel and automobiles, the global expansion of India Inc has now spread to the media business. Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd, the country’s largest media group and the holding company of the Times of India group, on Saturday bought Virgin Radio in the UK in a £53.2 million (Rs 445cr approx) deal with SMG Plc. ( Watch )
While the financial size of the deal is not in the same league as the Corus acquisition, its significance lies in the fact that it is the first major global takeover by any Indian media group. Virgin Radio is one of UK’s biggest broadcasters with an estimated 2.7m regular listeners. It has an FM licence for London as well as a national AM licence.
The deal will give BCCL’s wholly owned subsidiary, TIML Golden Square Ltd, control over Virgin Radio’s assets in the UK — valued at £68.5 million gross (Rs 570cr) and £63 million net (Rs 525cr) as of December 31, 2007. Its gross revenues in 2007 were £24m (Rs 200cr) and its profit before tax £4.3m (Rs 36cr). Under the deal, TIML can use the Virgin Radio brand name for 90 days after the sale is completed, but will then rebrand the radio network.

SMS is dying...Enter MIM ( Mobile Instant Messaging)

Who wants to just text someone and hope they check their phone when you could instead see if your “buddy” is online, contact him directly if he is or see his away message is he isn’t, and then communicate via IM instead of SMS, which hypothetically means you are communicating over your data connection rather than paying per message with the SMS model.
But the switch is not that seamless.It has got some hurdles too...
Problem 1: Not everyone can get an IM on their phone, and not everyone uses the same service!
Problem 2: Using IM isn’t necessarily cheaper than SMS You’d love to think that delivering an IM from your phone would stream over your data connection and not use your limited SMS cache. But if you are a user in the states, you would be wrong! Both T-Mobile and AT&T deliver your IMs by basically texting. Each IM counts as a message, both outgoing and incoming, so that chat you just had with your friend for 15 minutes about Miley Cyrus just cost you 30 text messages.
Problem 3: IM is not any easier to use than SMS

HSDPA

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Mbit/s. Further speed increases are available with HSPA+, which provides speeds of up to 42 Mbit/s downlink.[1]

Lithium-ion battery

Lithium-ion batteries (sometimes abbreviated Li-ion batteries) are a type of rechargeable battery in which a lithium ion moves between the anode and cathode. The lithium ion moves from the anode to the cathode during discharge and from the cathode to the anode when charging.Lithium ion batteries are commonly used in consumer electronics. They are currently one of the most popular types of battery for portable electronics, with one of the best energy-to-weight ratios, no memory effect, and a slow loss of charge when not in use. Certain kinds of mistreatment may cause Li-ion batteries to explode. In addition to uses for consumer electronics, lithium-ion batteries are growing in popularity for defense, automotive, and aerospace applications due to their high energy density.

Difference between VGA and Mega Pixel camera

VGA differs from a mega pixel by picture size. as we all know by now, VGA stands for a picture that's sized at 640x480 pixels. multiply those two, and you get 307,200 pixels (or 0.3 mega pixels). mega stands for million so a mega pixel means a million pixels. for example, a camera that can generate a picture size of 1280x960 without the use of interpolation can generate 1,228,800 pixels, or 1.2 megapixels; they just round it off to make it 1.3 mega pixels. some phones like that are the S700i, W550i, and the K600. camera phones like the K750i, W800i, and the W900i can generate pictures with a size of 1632x1224 (again without interpolation), hence producing 1,997,568 pixels, or 1.9 megapixels. again, they just round it off to make it 2.0 mega pixels...

Memory Cards

We are currently enjoying the flash memory era.Flash memory along with ARM processors(embedded processors in general) had brought 'computers' to the hand from desktop. Few of the prominent types of memory cards are detailed below:
1) SD cards
Developed by SD(Secure Digital) Card Association,mainly panasonic,sandisk and toshiba.
(Board members of the association are Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, Hewlett Packard, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Infineon Technologies AG, Kingston Technology Company, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Motorola Inc., NEC Corporation, Nokia Corporation, Power Digital Card Co., Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., SanDisk Corporation, Sharp Corporation, Socket Mobile, Inc. and Toshiba Corporation.)

Types:SD,miniSD,MicroSD,SDHC,miniSDHC,microSDHC.
SD card capacities range from 8 MB to 2 GB and from 4 GB to 32 GB for SDHC cards as of 2008.
2) Memory Stick From Sony/Sandisk
Types:Standard,PRO,DUO,PRO DUO,PRO-HG Duo,Micro(M2)
The original memory stick was available in sizes up to 128 MB, and a sub-version, Memory Stick Select allowed two banks of 128 MB selectable by a slider switch, essentially two cards squeezed into one. An 8 GB card was unveiled at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and according to Sony, the Memory Stick PRO has a maximum potential size of 32 GB.

3) xD ( From Olympus, Fujifilm)
Types:Standard,Type M,Type H
xD cards are used in Olympus and Fujifilm digital cameras and Olympus digital voice recorders; Fujifilm also made an MP3 player (xD-MP3) that used the cards. As of 2006, xD cards are available in capacities of 16 MB (16 MiB), 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB (1 GiB), and 2 GB. xD cards have dimensions of 20 mm × 25 mm × 1.78 mm, and each weighs 2.8 grams.
4) MultiMediaCard from Siemens/Sandisk
Types:MMC,RS-MMC,MMCMobile,MMCPlus,MMCMicro
MMCs are currently available in sizes up to and including 4 GB with 8 GB models announced but not yet available. They are used in almost every context in which memory cards are used, like cellular phones, digital audio players, digital cameras and PDAs. Since the introduction of Secure Digital card and SDIO (Secure Digital Input/Output) slot few companies build MMC slots into their devices (an exception is some mobile devices like the Nokia 9300 communicator, where the smaller size of the MMC is a benefit), but the slightly thinner, pin-compatible MMCs can be used in almost any device that supports SD cards if the software/firmware on the devices support them.
Aside:CompactFlash from SanDisk is still used in Digital SLRs due to its high capacity
Also read :Solid State Drives

BIGFlix

BIGFlix
BIGFlix is an online DVD rental service in India from Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. This is similar to the highly successful US firm Netflix.

How it works
BIGFlix corrently has over 15,000 movie titles that you can choose from.There are Indian and International titles available.Subscription starts from Rs.299 with a refundable deposit of Rs.400.Subscribers can opt 1,2 or 3 discs at a time.There are option for monthly,quarterly,half yearly and annual option available.Refundable deposit also varies accordingly.Subscribers can collect movies from a BIGFlix store or queue them up for free home-delivery from the website(bigflix.com).Subscribers can return the borrowed movie at any nearest BIGFlix store or they can request a pick-up right from their doorstep, at no extra cost. Pick-up requests can be sent via any of three convenient ways:SMS ,from the BIGFlix website or via phone

Well,usually I borrow content from wikipedia.But this time....this time I wrote the content in wikipedia and repeated it here.Well, is n't it growth?

Article on Sachin Tendulkar in CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/talkasia/

File Shredder

With File Shredder you can remove files from your hard drive without fear they could be recovered. There are quite a few software tools today for retrieval of deleted files under Windows OS. Those tools, often referred to as "file recovery" software, are taking advantage of shortcoming of WIndows "delete" command that we all use regularly to delete files. Actually, the "delete" operation in Windows only removes bits of information from files so they appear deleted in OS. It is easy to retrieve those files using aforementioned specialized file recovery software.
In order to remove, or shred files permanently from your system you have to use a program that is capable of rewriting the files with random series of binary data multiple times. This process is often called shredding. That way, the actual content of the file has been overwritten and the possibilities to recover such a shredded file are mostly theoretical.
File Shredder has been developed as fast, safe and reliable tool to shred company files. The author of this program released it free under GNU licence and you are welcome to download File Shredder and use it without any restrictions. File Shredder is simple but powerful program that surpasses manu commercial file shredders out there. The Author believes that such a utility should be available to anyone for free and that permanent and safe removal of confidential documents is a matter of basic right to privacy.