Robot child gets upgraded
Apr 27 – A robot designed to learn like a child is getting some new legs and smaller hands. The iCub was originally designed to resemble an infant but had hands of an 8-year-old child because of difficulties making them any smaller. Stuart McDill reports. (01:41)
A lot of people use Firefox as their main browser for the internet. Now it is coming to the Android. It is in a pre-alpha version so there will be some bugs, but it will be nice to have it for the Android. I downloaded it and will check it out
It is actually called Fennec
We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.
There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha). But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop. —Vladimir Vukićević
LONDON (Reuters) – Thomson Reuters Corp launched a global, high-speed network on Tuesday for financial firms to access real-time data as well as share information with each other directly.
The company’s new network, called Elektron, includes hosting centers in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Singapore, with more to come in Hong Kong, India and Brazil later in the year, all connected by a fiber optic ring.
The company is operating the system in partnership with data center company Savvis Inc.
(more…)
By Sinead Carew
A man looks at his mobile next to a Cisco banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 17, 2010.REUTERS/Albert Gea
The router, Cisco’s first major upgrade in six years, is aimed at helping operators handle surging Internet use driven by driven by popular smartphones like Apple Inc’s iPhone and Web services like Google Inc’s YouTube.
The company boasted that 72 of the new CRS-3 routers connected together could deliver every movie ever made in four minutes over the Internet, or connect China’s entire population of 1.3 billion by video conference all at once.
(more…)
Looks like the iPad will have some competition for the tablet wars. HP’s Slate will be able to use Adobe Flash and AIR, which the iPad will not. This I think will make it more marketable and a much better choice than an iPad.
Here are some videos from Mashable.
- Image via CrunchBase
By Alexei Oreskovic
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.
The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo.
The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world’s No.1 social networking site.
Earlier this month, Google Inc unveiled a new service dubbed Google Buzz that replicated many of the social networking features that have made services like Twitter and Facebook Internet success stories.
Facebook and Twitter – which said on Monday that users of its service generate more than 50 million Tweets every day – pose an increasing threat to established Internet giants like Yahoo and Google whose businesses depend on selling online ads to large audiences.
In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo said that beginning on Tuesday its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called “real time search” capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.
Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year.
Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example.
“We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique,” Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters in an interview.
Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.
According to some media reports, Microsoft and Google paid a combined $25 million for the right to include Twitter data in their search results.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7dcd87ff-b042-4ea4-b1da-d87acd54c05e)
(Reuters) – U.S. technology giant Intel Corp <INTC.O> is planning to set up a $2 billion fund to invest in U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The chipmaker, which has a unit that invests in many technology companies, is in talks with venture capital firms to seek investment ideas, the daily said.
The investment plan would not require raising additional capital, the business daily said, adding that the response to Intel’s proposal was not immediately known.
Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini is scheduled to give a speech Tuesday at the Brookings Institution, the paper said.
Brookings said in its invitation to the event that Otellin’s speech will focus partly on “the need to create a culture of investment in the United States,” according to the paper.
Intel could not be immediately reached by Reuters for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.
(Reporting by Archana Shankar in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Nesbit)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ae8978b7-27b8-489e-ab64-41fd4d136d41)
By Tarmo Virki, European technology correspondent
HELSINKI (Reuters) – The cellphone market will rebound more strongly strongly than expected this year as improving economies boost spending on new gadgets and handset vendors push cheap smartphones, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.
The market fell 1 percent in 2009, the first decline in eight years as consumers cut spending amid recession.
But Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said she now expects the market to grow 11-13 percent this year, compared with the firm’s December forecast for a 9-percent increase.
“The economy seems to be stabilizing more into a recovery trend than we forecast back in December,” Milanesi said.
“Sales will return to low-double-digit growth, but competition will continue to put a strain on vendors’ margins.”
Gartner is more optimistic than the top cellphone maker Nokia, which has forecast growth around 10 percent, and also slightly ahead of analysts consensus of 11 percent in a Reuters poll this month.
Gartner sees smartphone market volume growing a whopping 46 percent from 172.4 million sold last year, boosted by cheaper models. The most affordable now cost just over $100 excluding operator subsidies.
Gartner said it expects average sale prices in 2010 to fall more slowly than last year — when intense competition hurt pricing in markets such as China and India — helped by an improving economy and consumers upgrading to cheap smartphones.
By Antony Bruno
DENVER (Billboard) – It’s been more than six years since then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates admitted that Apple caught the company “flat-footed” in the digital music market and directed his team to make up for lost ground, according to recently surfaced internal e-mails.
To date, Microsoft’s effort to address the digital music market has largely focused on its Zune player and Zune Pass subscription service, which have won favorable reviews but few customers. But with the recent unveiling of its Windows Phone 7 Series operating system at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft hopes to reboot its struggling digital music strategy.
Even the well-received Zune HD device, introduced last fall, hasn’t been enough to convince music fans to convert to the Zune Pass. The company says it has sold only 3.8 million players since 2006, and NPD Group estimated in November that it has a 2 percent share of the U.S. portable media player market, compared with 70 percent for Apple’s iPod.
By Richard Baum
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don’t want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.
Can I ignore their invite?
“Can I be your friend?” might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it’s not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.
Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor’s power tools.
Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.
Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we’ve become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.
