New York, May 16: Internet search engine giant Google said it will not sell its Nexus One smartphone through its web store and would rather rely on retail outlets. In a post on Google’s official blog, the company said the web store, which opened in January, had not matched expectations.
“While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not,” Google Vice-President Engineering Andy Rubin said in the post.
Toronto, May 15: With Apple’s iPad selling more than a million devices within days of launch in the US and its iPhone set to overtake BlackBerry globally, Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, is reportedly launching its own tablet later this year.
The Canadian company, based at Waterloo near Toronto, has not confirmed the reports, but bloggers say the tablet would be 8.9 inches and likely launched in December.
Guwahati, May 13: Conservationists have welcomed the recent finding that the Kaziranga National Park in Assam has the highest tiger density in the world, but warned that it could be an indicator of destruction of habitats in the vicinity and suggested framing of a tiger habitat management policy.
‘Aaranyak’, an environment watchdog, in collaboration with the Assam Forest Department in a recent survey using the ’camera-trap’ method has found that the forest, famous for housing the one-horned rhinos, has a recorded density of 38 tigers in an area of 100 square kilometres.
San Francisco, May 13: Software giant Microsoft Corp. has rolled out its latest version of application software, Office 2010, for customers across the world.
The company also announced Wednesday the release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, a web-based collaboration software, as well as the new version of diagramming programme and project management software, Xinhua reported.
“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 define the future of productivity,” Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, said.
Washington, May 12: A flyover of Belize’s thick jungles, employing NASA technology, has revolutionised archaeology by detecting ancient Mayan ruins through impenetrable jungles.
University of Central Florida (UCF) researchers led a NASA-funded research project in April 2009 that collected the equivalent of 25 years worth of data in four days.
New Delhi, May 11: The MCD is all set to start sealing action against unauthorised cell towers in areas under its jurisdiction in a couple of days, after a deadline for operators to apply for regularisation expired last week.
The civic agency is planning to first target those towers whose owners have not at all applied for regularisation.
Sydney, May 11: Climate change could make much of the world too hot for human habitation within just three centuries, research released Tuesday showed.
Scientists from Australia’s University of New South Wales and Purdue University in the United States found that rising temperatures in some places could mean humans would be unable to adapt or survive.
“It would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about seven degrees Celsius (13 Fahrenheit), calling the habitability of some regions into question,” the researchers said in a paper.
Washington: Twitter was bitten by a bug that caused users of the fast-growing micro-blogging service to temporarily lose the list of followers of their accounts.
“We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to ‘force’ other users to follow them,” Twitter said.
“We’re now working to roll back all abuse of the bug that took place,” the San Francisco-based start-up said in a blog post.
Earlier yesterday, popular technology blog Gizmodo published details about the bug explaining to Twitter users how they could force any other user to follow their account.
Cape Canaveral, May 11: Sir Isaac Newton’s famous apple tree is about to leave gravity behind.
Flying aboard space shuttle Atlantis next week will be a 4-inch sliver of the tree from which an apple fell nearly 350 years ago and inspired Newton to discover the law of gravity. British-born astronaut Piers Sellers is flying the piece of wood for The Royal Society of London.
“I’ll take it up into orbit and let it float around a bit, which will confuse Isaac,” Sellers said in an interview earlier this week.
Hamburg, May 09: No-one wants to wait forever for a computer to boot up. Yet that’s exactly what many Windows users have to suffer each day. But slow-booting computers don’t have to be the rule. There are actually operating systems out there that boot up in no time flat.
Christian Loebering from Germany’s PC-Welt magazine names two good reasons for using a quick starting operating system. “For one,” he says, no doubt echoing the sentiments of many, “I don’t want to wait around forever for the computer to boot up just to download a couple of email messages.”
San Francisco, May 07: Internet addresses written in Arabic are making history as the first online domains in non-Latin characters, with Chinese and Thai expected to follow close behind.
“For the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters are being used for top-level domains,” the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said in an online message.
“Arabic has now become the first non-Latin script to be used as an Internet domain name.”
San Francisco, May 07: Google on Thursday released free software that lets smartphones based on its Android operating systems be used as language translation tools.
Google enhanced its Goggles application to read and translate English, French, Italian, German, or Spanish after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones such as the Internet giant’s Nexus One.
San Francisco. May 07: Internet addresses written in Arabic are making history as the first online domains in non-Latin characters, with Chinese and Thai expected to follow close behind.
“For the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters are being used for top-level domains,” the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said in an online message.
“Arabic has now become the first non-Latin script to be used as an Internet domain name.”
Silicon Valley, may 07: Google is set to launch its own online e-book store in 2010.
Google Editions books will not be tied to a specific device, unlike rival e-book company Amazon.
The Amazon Kindle is linked to books from the company’s own store and similarly with Apple’s iBookstore.
“It is a different approach to what most readers today have and the vision is to be able to access books in a device agnostic way,” said Google .
Washington, May 07: US space agency NASA has successfully tested an emergency abort system for the space shuttle’s successor, Orion, at a remote test site in the New Mexico desert.
The emergency system used powerful rocket motors to blast the crew module off the launch site yesterday, shooting it 1.9 kilometres into the air in six seconds at high rates of speed, then wafting it back to Earth on a parachute.
Beijing, May 07: As the reports say, the iPhones sold in China till date came without a WLAN chip. Adhering to the needs for 3G platform the Chinese iPhones shall soon have the Wi-Fi ability.
Considered to be the most Internet friendly phone minus the option for 3G connectivity is soon set to change.
The WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) security protocol followed by the Chinese failed to comply with the standards and thus, Apple had to withdraw its WLAN feature from iPhone.
Washington, May 07: Microsoft in accordance with the partnership announcement with Nokia dating back to last year would soon be releasing the Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia.
It was earlier thought to be an alliance that will have Microsoft port its Office Suite, the mobile version of it, to Nokia’s Symbian smartphones but, the latest news confirms that it will be having the new version aka the Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia.
New Delhi, May 06: In a virtual showdown in their ongoing turf war with statutory power regulator DERC, private discoms today accused the authority of taking a “myopic approach” towards their demand for a tariff hike and said the rigid attitude may lead to a “serious situation”.
All the three discoms, bolstered by government’s sympathetic approach towards their demand, held a joint press conference defying DERC gag order not to speak to media, where they forcefully justified their demand for a tariff hike.
San Francisco, May 06: Facebook on Wednesday temporarily shut down its online chat feature after a software glitch let people’s friends in the online community see each others’ private chat messages.
For a “limited period of time” chat messages and pending friend requests could be made visible to friends, according to Facebook.
For peeks at the usually walled-off information Facebook users had to manipulate a “preview my profile” feature in a particular way, according to Facebook.
Washington, May 06: The five official nuclear powers said on Wednesday they will continue to refrain from conducting any atomic tests and called for all nations to ratify a treaty banning all nuclear explosions.
The United States, Russia, China, Britain and France issued their statement at a month-long meeting of the 189 signatories of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is taking stock of the landmark arms control pact.
Mumbai, May 05: D-Link, a provider of networking solutions, today launched a new switch series that it claims conserves power without affecting network performance.
The green managed switch, DGS-3200-24, offers advanced security features and is capable of operating in temperatures up to 50 degree centigrade, the company said.
D-Link green technology automatically detects device link status and reduces the power usage of ports that are not linked. When detecting a link down, the DGS-3200-24 switch conserves power usage without sacrificing network performance.
Washington, May 05: Astronauts may now be able to satisfy their sweet tooth as researchers have found a strawberry that can grow in space with little maintenance and energy.
Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture, and Gioia Massa, a horticulture research scientist at Purdue University in the US, tested several cultivars of strawberries and found one variety named Seascape, which seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop.
London, May 05: Modern gadgets such as Blackberrys and iPhones are ruining women’s sex lives because their husbands are too distracted in the bedroom, says a latest study.
More than a quarter of women (28 percent) claim that email and internet are disrupting their love lives, with hand-held devices particularly to blame. Other factors which prevent couples enjoying intimacy include long working hours (cited by 55 percent of women), tiredness (83 percent) and being too busy (74 percent), reports telegraph.co.uk.
Melbourne, May 05: Traffic snarls in cities need not cause much worry as a new car with an inbuilt electric scooter that flips and folds into the boot will allow commuters to zip through the congested streets.
Carmaker Volkswagen is working on a bike that neatly compacts into the boot of a car and can be recharged on the move, The Age reported.
The “Bik.e” may look like a traditional push bike, but there are no pedals – thus it’s actually more like a folding electric scooter.
Mumbai, May 04: The ambitious Monorail project which aims at easing Mumbai’s traffic, would provide pollution-free travel, MMRDA officials said today.
According to Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) officials, the Monorail will not only save commuting time of Mumbaikars but also fuel.
“Since the Monorail does not require any fossil fuel for its operation it remains free of air pollution, and as it runs on a narrow 0.8-meter beam with the help of rubber tyres it makes very little noise,” MMRDA Commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad said in a statement.