Technology

Samsung, which has left no stone unturned in hyping up its CES product lineup this year, has reportedly claimed that it has made the “most seductive TV of all time.”

Samsung’s marketing strategy is focused at highlighting the sex factor of the giant, curved 4K TV, reported The Verge.

The tech giant has already revealed that all of its smart TVs going forward are going to run on its Tizen operating system. However, little is known about the product’s features and specifications.

The official start of CES is just one day away. (ANI)

Tech giant Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com and other sites, including live.com, suffered a brief disconnection of about 20 minutes on Friday, as per reports revealed on Twitter and other website-monitoring services.

While Bing.com and others have since returned from the outage, Yahoo’s search service, which is powered by Bing, at search.yahoo.com is reportedly down, as well. No explanation has been provided for the outages yet.

Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore has said that the software giant’s Office team has not forgotten the Windows Phone.

According to The Verge, Belfiore took to his Weibo account this week to explain the silence on Windows Phone, saying that a bundle of announcements were to be made on a single event prior to Chinese New Year, which falls on February 19th.

The announcements are expected to come at Microsoft’s Windows 10 event, which is set to take place on January 21st.

The country’s first inter-planetary mission MOM or Mangalyaan launched on November 5, 2013 on board ISRO”s PSLV C25 from Sriharikota has completed 100 days around Mars. India”s maiden Mars Mission successfully reached the red planet on September 24, elevating the country to a position that was at par with other elite nations in the global space race. India joined the United States, Russia and Europe in successfully sending probes to orbit or land on Mars. ISRO”s low-cost mission crowned India as the first country to execute such a project in its first attempt.

ANI

The Gujarat State Science Fair organised by Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training (GCERT) attracted many students to the various high technology exhibits on display. Various schools from all over Gujarat participated in the fair, managed by the Municipal School Board, and students demonstrated various models and projects. A spy robot made by 17-year-old student Mihir Pujara displayed at the fair pulled many to the exhibit.

If you have sent some inappropriate text messages to your friend and want to delete it from his/her device permanently, a new app called Strings could help you do so.

The app has been developed by Be Labs, a Seattle-based tech firm. It gives users complete control over their personal conversations.

The app allows you to take back your messages by controlling the feature “if and when content is deleted, immediately and permanently”, CNBC reported.

The recipients must also have the app installed on their phones for it to be effective.

E-commerce company Snapdeal today said 2014 had been a “phenomenal” year for the homegrown online marketplace and more than 65 per cent of orders placed came through mobile devices.

Growing at over 600 per cent, the city-based eCommerce firm said it was also one of the top five-most searched sites on the Internet in the country last year.

“Snapdeal grew over 600 per cent this year (2014) becoming the fastest growing eCommerce company in India and a leader in mCommerce with over 65 per cent of the orders coming from mobile devices,” Snapdeal co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl said.

Talent Reunion, a lifestyle-networking platform, organized the session under the theme “Smart Shopping Innovation” at a local restaurant in Jeddah recently.
A local company recently held a workshop to help shoppers perform transactions safely on the Internet.
Several professionals, experts and young people who attended the session shared their online shopping experiences. They said that the slow start to online shopping in Saudi Arabia could be changed with proper awareness on security.

The group of hackers that breached Sony Pictures Entertainment has threatened to attack a US news organisation.

New York Post reports Guardians of Peace, the cyber-terrorists behind the Sony Pictures Entertainment intrusion, has warned that their wake of destruction “may extend to other such organizations in the near future,” according to an FBI and Department of Homeland Security Joint Intelligence Bulletin that was obtained by The Intercept.

It is reported that the media organisation that the group has threatened to attack is CNN.

South Korean tech titan Samsung has edged past arch rival Apple in the American Customer Satisfaction Index despite receiving a lukewarm response to its flagship Galaxy S5 handset.

Samsung, who came under increasing pressure in the wake of declining profits, received a satisfaction rating of 81 points out of a possible 100, two points ahead of arch-rival Apple, Fox News reported.

South Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics today said it will release smart televisions equipped with its new platform built around the Tizen operating system this year, as it seeks to lower its reliance on Google.

Samsung said all of its new web-connected TV sets would be run by Tizen, and added that it would unveil its first-ever Tizen smart TVs at a consumer electronics fair in Las Vegas next week.

Researchers are working on an automatic car charging system that would slithers from the wall on its own and connect to a Model S like ‘solid metal snake.’

Elon Musk said that Tesla has been working on the project that would work with all existing Model S vehicles on the road; however, it’s not clear whether such a system would be designed for Supercharging stations, home use, or both, the Verge reported.

According to new reports, Sony employees had to resort to older technologies like the Blackberry to keep the work going and used a phone tree to relay messages when the cyberattack on Sony Pictures was launched.

The employees relayed details about the hack from one person to another via phones and had to use ancient technology to issue physical checks since they couldn’t transfer salaries through bank deposit.

Sony CEO Michael Lynton said that it took him more than 24 hours to realize the severity of the attack, reported CNN.

Tech giant Apple has been granted a patent for a stylus design of a smart pen capable of detecting hand movements that enables translation into digital line drawings and text, adding into the list of their new innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has patented Apple’s communicating stylus that employs accelerometers, wireless communication hardware and onboard storage to transfer hand-written notes and drawings on to the display of a digital device, the AppleInsider reported.

IIT Director R Shevgaonkar, whose resignation last week had triggered a controversy, on Wednesday attributed his decision to quit to some “unforeseen situations”.

“Towards the end of the year, however, some unforeseen situations developed and I had to decide to step down from my position. Nevertheless, this is a small transient in the long illustrious history of IIT Delhi.

“IIT Delhi is on constant rising path and I am sure the New Year will bring many unprecedented achievements to the institute,” Shevgaonkar said in his farewell mail sent to the faculty, staff and students.

While 2014 saw some marvellous discoveries like 3D-printed body parts and scientific breakthroughs like comet landing, 2015 too holds a great future for science, reports the prestigious journal Nature.

The first big news is expected to come with the reboot of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in March after a two-year shutdown.

The machine at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will restart with collisions at 13 trillion electronvolts – almost double the current record.