iPhone passes first test,experts give thumbs-up

Apple’s iPhone is a “beautiful and breakthrough” mobile device that lives up to the hype. That’s the word from reviewers for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today, who praised the software and design of Apple’s melded mobile phone and iPod media player.

The iPhone’s strengths outweigh its spotty network service and price of as much as $600, they said. “Despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer,” Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, said in a review on Tuesday. “Its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.”

The accolades will help chief executive officer Steve Jobs meet his goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008, giving the company 1% of the mobile-phone market. He expects the iPhone to become Apple’s third major business, along with the Macintosh computer and iPod, whose combined sales more than tripled in five years to almost $20 billion in 2006. “If the device lives up to the hype, then that will be a pretty big positive, because the hype has been quite large,” said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. Apple may sell as many as 200,000 iPhones in the first two days after its release on June 29, he said.
Mossberg, USA Today’s Edward Baig and David Pogue, a columnist for the New York Times, all said one of the iPhone’s main drawbacks is its exclusive tie to AT&T, which delivers inconsistent coverage. AT&T’s network ranked either last or second-to-last in 19 out of 20 major cities in providing a signal, Pogue said, citing a Consumer Reports survey. The iPhone relies on AT&T’s Edge service, which lags behind AT&T’s fastest so-called third-generation, or 3G, data networks. While the Edge network failed to match the broadband data speeds home users may be accustomed to, Baig said the iPhone is still a “glitzy wunderkind worth lusting for.”

“Apple has delivered a prodigy — a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset,” Baig wrote on Tuesday. Pogue concurred, though he took Apple to task for failing to include chat software. He also said many users would prefer tapping out messages on Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, rather than on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard. “Even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years,” Pogue wrote. “It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.”

Meanwhile, Vodafone is in talks with Apple to launch iPhone in Europe, and talks partly hinge on volume guarantees and subsidies, a Dutch magazine reported. Apple demanded a guaranteed sales volume for the iPhone, which the British mobile operator did not want to give, Dutch magazine Bright said on its website late on Tuesday. The magazine said Vodafone was pushing for more scope to subsidise the phone and did not want Apple to have control of the sale price.

Digg on iPhone

Nicely done IPHONE interface in javascript.. displays digg.com on it. What are the other applications we can test out with this interface ??

Comment below

BitTorrent - Peer to Peer file sharing system? How about the Peer to Peer Video sharing network?

To start with what is Bittorrent ?

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, recipients each supply data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence upon the original distributor.
Bittorents are faster to download , recipient can receive scrambled chunk of data from multiple hosts at the same time, also improving the speed of download. Unlike Napster, Copyright enforcement of Bittorents is a little tricky.

BitTorrent trackers have been subjected to raids and shutdowns due to claims of copyright infringement. BitTorrent metafiles do not store copyrighted data, so it is claimed[10] that BitTorrent trackers, which only store and track the metafiles and usually do not share any potentially copyrighted data, must therefore be legal. Despite this claim, there has been tremendous legal pressure, usually on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA, to shut down numerous BitTorrent trackers.

So how about Bittorent for videos ? For now we can download various video files using a bittorrent client, which essentially is a file download. There are websites trying to host video's like youtube difference being they dont have to spend 1 million dollar on bandwidth per month(Youtube does). Idea is simple, these sites would try to broadcast videos based on P2P. So when you are watching the video, player would assemble video content from different sources using P2P. Would this affect your video quality ? actually not, its as good or better than serving content out of one box. What this would buy you as video seeker ? More variety of content! cause now you are not restricted to viewing video's hosted by a site, instead you can watch any video which you and me can share out of our file system without the pain of uploading.

There are already few players in this field, one of these being Slapvid

Slapvid runs as a Java applet coupled with a Flash video player. Unfortunately this means users have to authorize the 300Kb applet to run the first time, but that still requires less initiative on the users behalf than a full blown browser plugin. The applet runs in the background, managing the delivery of video chunks to be displayed in the player.

When you first start a video, the player connects directly to their central video server to download enough of the beginning of the video as a buffer while the peer to peer kicks in. During this request, their server also sends you back a list of 3 to 5 peers playing the same video. The applet then seeks out peers further along in the video, getting sent bits of the video in 64KB chunks. If you don’t hear back from the peers, the video just streams from the central server.

To demonstrate the peering technology, they’ve developed their own flash player that shows the top Youtube videos in 5 minutes. The player mashes together short clips of each video. You can see the whole video by clicking the hand. However, because of bandwidth concerns on their central server, the peering technology is only turned on for a small sample of users. All other users will just see videos streamed from Youtube.

Nintendo Wii is a medical miracle, PS3 XBOX just makes you fat

The Nintendo Wii is in the hands of millions across the globe and is one of the best selling consoles of all time, making it hard to get, even now. The Wii is popular with just about everyone but is cropping up in places you might not have expected, hospitals, rehab centers and retirement homes.

The Wii’s unique controls make it the perfect companion for rehab centers, teaching patients how to regain control of their arms and letting them have fun at the same time. Walter Rowy suffered a stroke and after only a week at the Riley Rehab Center, is mastering Wii sports thanks to the motion controls.

The Meridian Star spoke with Ben Rucks, director of rehab services at Riley, who said that Dr. Janet Coyle was responsible for adding the Wii to the rehab program for stroke patients.

"Dr. Coyle got one (Wii) for Christmas and after playing on it for awhile, she realized that it would be wonderful for our stroke patients," stated Rucks.

He also said, "Unlike other video games — which only use the thumbs — the Wii requires use of the whole body, balance and hand-eye coordination.” “This is especially ideal for stroke patients in their recovery."

So far the Wii has been credited for helping patients lose wait and is being used to treat children who suffer from hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a condition that paralyzes one side of the body.

Stroke support groups are also purchasing Wiis to allow people that can’t acquire or afford the console to continue therapy after leaving the rehab centers.

There is one problem; it seems women aren’t taking to the games as well as men have so additional games are in the pipeline that will hopefully make the Wii (more) enjoyable for all the patients.

In addition to rehab centers and hospitals, retirement communities are also snatching up Wiis where elderly residents use it to play virtual golf and bowl. Another title that should be considered by these centers is Big Brain Academy which will help keeps minds focused and sharp.

While some hospitals do have the Xbox 360 and PS2 on offer for most children’s wards, neither have been shown to offer the medical benefits of the Wii since those don’t require you to get up and move around which is required for most types of therapy involving everything from broken limbs to strokes or more serious conditions.

This gives Nintendo another claim to fame with the Wii, it is doctor approved, Sony can’t claim that and neither can Microsoft.

More on Wii,PS3,XBOX

Smarter search tools

Xerox researchers say they've developed a text-mining tool that's tuned to the way humans think, speak and ask questions.

Type "what Steve Jobs said yesterday" into the FactSpotter tool and the search software will hunt through documents and return a handful of relevant answers, instead of churning out countless articles containing the Apple CEO's name.

But the FactSpotter software, unveiled last week, will not be available to the public over the Internet or otherwise--only to customers of document management company Xerox, which developed the tool.

Jean-René Gain, director and general manager of marketing, strategy and alliances at Xerox, told Silicon.com that Xerox will not sell FactSpotter as a standalone application--only as an embedded application to its customers.

"We are not taking on Google with this," Gain said. "It is an aside option to consider, but we need this technology to differentiate ourselves" from competitors.

Mario Jarmasz, technology showroom engineer at Xerox, said: "This is completely different from searching on Google because we can drill down to certain levels of detail."

Xerox predicts the text-miner software will be useful in other situations where information must be retrieved from a massive database, including corporate and government searches, drug discovery, fraud detection and risk management.

Christopher Dance, laboratory manager at Xerox, told Silicon.com that FactSpotter could also be used to manage the vast number of documents produced during large mergers and acquisitions.

FactSpotter can hunt for relevant documents at a rate of 2,000 documents per second. Dance said the next stage of the development process will be to speed up the software.

The tool uses a linguistic engine that analyzes the meaning of words and the construction of phrases and sentences to work out exactly what a user is hunting for.

FactSpotter also recognizes concepts in a search term. To use the previous example, when a person types in "what Steve Jobs said yesterday," the tool will break down the sentence and recognize "Steve Jobs" as a person and "yesterday" as a time.

Xerox is "trying to make a computer understand text like a human being," said Frédérique Segond, parsing and semantics area manager at the company.

Segond added the FactSpotter tool is the next step for searching documents and uses "Web 3.0" technology that connects data, whereas Web 2.0 applications only collect data.



Artificial Intelligence is the direction many next generation search engines are taking and very rightly so.

While most would agree that Google has set the current standard for Web search, some technologists say even better tools are on the horizon thanks to advances in artificial intelligence.

Search is like oxygen for many people now, and considering Google's breakthroughs in Web document analysis, supercomputing and Internet advertising, it can be easy to think this is as good as it gets. But some entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI) say that Google is not the end of history. Rather, its techniques are a baseline of where we're headed next.

Proponents of AI techniques say that one day people will be able to search for the plot of a novel, or list all the politicians who said something negative about the environment in the last five years, or find out where to buy an umbrella just spotted on the street. Techniques in AI such as natural language, object recognition and statistical machine learning will begin to stoke the imagination of Web searchers once again.


"This is the beginning for the Web being at work for you in a smart way, and taking on the tedious tasks for you," said Alain Rappaport, CEO and founder of Medstory, a search engine for medical information that went into public beta in July.

"The Web and the amount of information is growing at such a pace that it's an imperative to build an intelligent system that leverages knowledge and exploits it efficiently for people," he added.

Medstory is not alone. Other young companies such as stealth start-up Powerset and image specialist Riya are also looking to turn arcane computing techniques into business success stories.




Getting machines to think like us

Women taking to cyber crime in large nos

Believe it or not, women appear to be taking more naturally to cyber crime these days, especially, women disgruntled with their jobs and in the mood to take personal revenge. That’s what some crackshot cyber-sleuths have to say. Latest statistics suggest that almost 20% of such cyber crimes in India are committed by women, and the trend is on the rise.

Experts confirm that cyber crime tops the list of white-collar crimes committed by Indian women. “The internet somewhat gives a sense of anonymity to the person. Hence, the tendency is more among women to commit cyber crime. The number is nearly 30% in Kolkata,” says deputy commissioner (detective department) of Kolkata Police Gyanwant Singh.

The non-violent nature of such crimes tend to trigger the ‘criminal’ instinct. “Women feel it is much more sanitised to commit such offences. Competition in workplace, desire to earn fast money and lack of proper parental guidance at an early age are also reasons,” says Jairanjan Ram, consultant psychiatrist at Apollo Gleneagles Hospital, Kolkata.

The crimes, typically, committed by women in the Indian cyberdom include copyright and logo theft, phishing, malicious emails, malicious use of social networking sites and ecommerce . Most accused women are found to be highly educated, financially independent and in their early 20’s and 30’s .

It has also been estimated that 80% of cyber crimes are committed by ‘insiders’ and the balance 20% by hackers. For instance, the Mumbai Police recently unearthed a case where an ex-employee was sending obscene and threatening email to a superior colleague for nearly three months. On interrogation, it was revealed that the crime was committed by a women who was working under the complainant for a year. She posed as a male and had sent the emails to take revenge for alleged ill-treatment doled out to her.

Mumbai Police’s cyber crime cell officer Mukund Pawar said investigations has revealed that most cases lodged against women are mainly related to malicious emails. “Otherwise, the tendency to commit other cyber crimes is much less.”

The police has even registered few cases in Bangalore where IT firms threaten their women employees with charges of cyber crime if they quit their job. Karnataka’s directorgeneral of police Ajai Kumar Singh told ET: “While there have been some instances where women employees are charged with copyright violation, but some IT companies have even resorted to such tactics to retain employee.”

However, the women cyber criminals are yet to become a reality in the semi-urban region. “Women cyber criminals are yet to become a rage in the towns. It is equally alarming that women are the biggest victim of such attack accounting for nearly 40% of cases registered,” says deputy superintendent of police (cyber crime) of Tamil Nadu, S Balu.

Source:economictimes

First IPhone Third Party App

Its a shopping list application , built on an assumption that IPhone would support Javascript

What does this application do ?

You pick from basic categories such as "Fruit," "Veggies," "Meat and Seafood," and "Drinks," which then brings up a list of more specific items. Click an item, and it's added to your shopping list. Not mind-boggling, for sure, but it is extremely useful.
This application is freely available for download here


Will IPhone run javascripts ?

What good is a Web browser that doesn't support Flash and if not Java, at least Javascript? It reminded me of the hobbled browser that shipped with the T-Mobile Sidekick I & II which didn't support Javascript (For the record, the SKIII supports Javascript).

Just about any Web site with a drop-down menu navigation system wouldn't work without Javascript. And without it, you can pretty much forget about doing any kind of ecommerce. A huge percentage of sites these days rely on Flash and Javascript and leaving these off the iPhone could kill the product.

So it is safe to assume we do have our first iphone application developed, which is gonna run on iphone


Download Safari here