HUMANOIDS RUN WORLD'S FIRST ROBOT MARATHON RACE

Robovie-pc, a toy sized himanoid, won the world's first full length marathon for two legged robot, beating it's closest rival by a single second after more than two days of racing.

Five bipedal machines began nonstop 42.2kilometer race on a 100metre indoor track in western japanese city of Osaka on Thursday morning. One of the competors retired after completing only first lap, but others continued running day and night getting up by themselves every time they fell on the floor or into collision with rivals.

Robovie-pc 40cm tall and weighing 2.4kilograms stormed into first lap with only few laps to go after Robovie-pc lite which have established a comfortable lead and appeared to achieve easy victory, suddenly locked up.

Robovie-pc lite returned to the track and fiercely chased the leaderbut after 422 laps Robovie-pc crossed the finish line in 54 hours, 57minutes, 50seconds organisers said one second ahead of it's rival.

The average speed was 0.77kilometers per hour.

After the dramatic fish the two robots made by vstone co, a robot technology firm based in industrial city which also organised "Robo mara full" race waved their arms and bowed to applause from the crowd.

According to event's rules, competetors were allowed to change batteries and servomotors which regulate the speed and other of robots.

The other two robots still running yet to complete the race by staurday evening.

A COMPUTER THAT FIT INTO YOUR EYE

Developed by a team at the university of michigan, the unnamed tiny device is a pressure monitor that can be implanted into a person's eye to treat gluocoma. It may be just one square millimeter but packs hefty punch, containing a ultra low power microprocessor, pressure sensor and a thin film battery, the Daily mail reported.

It also has a solarcell and a wireless radio with an antenna tha tca transmit data to external reader devices, the researchers said. The device is already being totuted as future of computing industry, although it needs several more years to be commercially available.

It's creators Prof.Dennis Sylvester, David Blaau and David Wentzolff claims that radio of the device needs no tuning to find the right frequency that could link to wireless network of a computer. A network of such units one day track pollution , monitor structural integrity, perform surveillance or make any object virtually smart and trackable, tha scientists said.

Prof Sylvester said : "When you get smaller than hand-held devices yuo yhen turn onto these devices. The next big challenge is to achive millimeter device which have host of new application to monitor our bodies, oue environment and our buildings. Because they are so small you could manufacture hundreds and thousands on one wefer. There could be tens to hundreds of them per person and it's this percapita increases that fuels the semiconductor industry growth. Currently the system is pressure that is designed to be implanted in the eye to continuosly track the progress of glaucoma, a potentially binding disease."

The processor in the eye pressure monitor is the third generation of researchers phoenix chip, which uses unique design and ultra sleep mode  to achieve low power consumption. The newest wakes every 15 minutes to take measurement and consume an average of 5.3 nanowatts. To keep thebattery charged it requires exposure of 10 hours indoor light each day or 1.5 hours of sun light.

It can store upto a week's worth of information. While this system is miniscule and complete, it's radio doesn't euip it to talk to other similar devices, which is an important feature for any other systen that is targeted to wireless sensor networks.

CHROME USERS CAN BLOCK UNWANTED WEBSITES

Google on Monday gave users of it's chrome web browsers the ability to block search results from low quality websites know as content farms.

Google's principal engineer Matt Cutts said that chrome users can download and install an extension of chrome that block sites which provide shallow or low quality content from their search results.

"When you block  a site with extension, you won't see result from that domain again in Google search result" Cutts said in a blog post.

"If installed the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as potential ranking signal for our search results".

Cutts said that chrome extension was available in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish in addition to English.

The announcement was Google's latest move against the fight of poor quality search results generated by content farms, which produces hundreds or thousands of poor quality pages a day in a bid to attract traffic to their advertisements.

Last month the company announced their moves to make it harder for spam packed websites to rank high in search results.

Google is the dominant search engine in US, enjoying a 65.6% of online share in the search market at the end of Jan, according to tracking firm comScore.

Comscore said by the end of Jan 16.1% of online searches were done at yahoo websites. Which are powered by bing, While Bing handled 13.1% of online share during the month.

GINGER BREAD + HONEY COMB = ICE CREAM BISCUIT ?

Eric schmidt the ceo/chairman of google addressed the company s keynote at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) at barcelona. Schmidt had few surprises for us in stores.

Schmidt started the keynote by expressing his disappointment about microsoft-nokia deal.

We would love if they chose android. They chose windows. The offer to adopt later is still open. "We certainly tried".

Schmidt also clearly outlined that we didnot facebook as a direct threat but microsoft would be a direct threat with bing improving by leaps and bounds.

He stated that they have scale, brand, and reach to do good things. Facebook today appears to be additive. Facebook users use google more, no evidence Facebook's advertising is hurting google in any way. Right now Facebook is zero to net postive and microsoft is core competetor and will likely remain so for long time.

Schmidt took some time to clear all the confusion realted to android version. And also stated the upcoming version of android have the combine features of both honeycomb and gingerbread.

Schmidt said, "today i'll use the commonly used names, we have OS for phones called gingerbread and we have been improving OS for tablets called Honeycomb. The two of them ...you can imagine the follow up will start with an I, be named with a dessert and will combine this two."

Schmidt also announced android movie studio which will allow the cration creation of media. This app reminded us of imovie app that apple launched last year. Google faced some embarrassement as they were facing some network issues and they couldnot complete the demo of the app. 

MICROSOFT TO PAY BILLIONS FOR NOKIA DEAL

NOKIA corp. will get billions of money from MICRSOFT corp. to ditch it's current smart phone software in favor of windows 7, nokia CEO stephen elop said sunday, in a defence of the deal.
Nokia the world's largest maker of phones, and microsoft made it's alliance on friday. Both investors and employees reacted with dismay : Nokia stock dived 14 percent and finnish employees used flex time to go home early.

On Sunday ahead of the start of the mobile phone congress cell phone trade shown shown in Barcelona, Elop told press, analysts and industry players that apart from benefits of the alliance that were laid out on friday. Microsoft is paying billions of dollars to nokia to switch to windows 7 phone.
"This is something i don't think was completely explained", Elop said.

Elop a former Microsoft executive, said Finland-based nokia had been courted by google inc.,as well which sought to convince it to use andriod as well for smart phones. Microsoft payments are recognition that nokia had" substantial value to contribute, Elop said.

Nokia's world wide market was just over 30 percent in the last year's fourth quarter, down from 40 percent a year earlier. Those phones Symbian package which wasn't designed to be used with touch screens.

Money and in-kind contribution will flow both the ways in the deal, Elop reiterated. Nokia will be contributing it's OVI facilities and will be playing microsoft royalities for it's software as other manufactures do. It will save money by not continuing development of it's own software. The net benefit is still in billions he said.


ANALYSTS BELIVE THET GOOGLE PAYS MANUFACTURERS TO USE ANDROID ,BUT NO FIGURE HAVE COME TO LIGHT.


Adding nokia's market share to that of existing android phones would have left the world with two real players in phone's software, Elop said. He didn't mentioned iphone, but it's other dominant force in smart phones. A duolopy would have been big ramification for everyone, he said.

Microsoft has made software for smart phones more than a decade. Window 7 is an attempt to make a clean break with the past and create an OS to deal with big iphone-style touch screen.   

GOOGLE GETS YOUR FRIEND'S POSTS IN SEARCH - SOCIAL SEARCH

Google is making web search more easy and social, weaving post from Twitter, blogger, flickr and other accounts of use's friends into search results.

The move is  an expansion of google social search which the "internet giant" introduced in 2009.

Instead of featuring at the bottom of page of search results, relevant posts from social media of accounts of user's friends are integrated into the list of results themselves.

A goolge search for campaign, for example may bring up twitter posts by a friend about hiking trails or a link to campsite pictures uplaoded by a friend to flickr.

Social search will be available for only to whom those who have google account.

Google account holders may also have a option of linking their social media account to their google profiles.

Google said that new social search feature is available in english for the moment.

It will also not display any input from the largest social network of them all --Facebook -- which has previously declined to share data with google.

FIRST FACEBOOK PHONES ANNOUNCED - HTC CHACHA AND HTC SALSA

Rumors of facebook phone have finally come true. Facebook announced two centric android based phones at MWC in Barcelona. The "CHACHA" and "SALSA" be qwerty and touch enabled respectively.They will be powered by android 2.4 gingerbread.

Both phones have cool looking facebook hardware button at the bottom,which lights up every time opportunity to share what you are doing via your device.If you are listening to music,you can simply press the button and phone will automatically identify the song and share it on facebook.

The HTC SALSA is all-touch smart phone with 3.4 inch display boasting of a resolution of 480x320 whereas HTC CHACHA features a full qwerty and 2.6 inch display with a resolution of 480x320. The similar specifications in both the devices are 600MHZ qualcomm MSM7227 processor, 512 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM 5 mega pixel auto focus camera with vga front camera for video chat.

ICC BANS TWITTER DURING MATCHES

The ICC is to impose a blanket ban on all twitter posts by team officials during matches in a bid to be seen to be doing all it can do to crack down corruption.

Long serving Australian manager Steve bernard has been tweeting since last year august.

ICC chiefs insists that they have no issues on what bernard had posted in past.

But, given players are banned from having access to mobile phones during matches they thought it prudent following he spot fixing scandal recently involving pakistan to avoid a situation where team officials left themselves open to corruption claims,however baseless as a result of twitter posts.

"As recent events have shown that ICC have zero-tolerance to corruption and any thing that can negate that possibility is some thing we are definitely interested in" one of spokesman told AFP on tuesday.

"This is just a precaution, we are not overly concerned with it. But we do fell that team manager's phone should be used for operational purpose during matches".

"This applies to all teams and this decision is not taken in response to anything the Australia team manager had previously".

Players and officials are still allowed to post when their sides are not playing

GOOD NEWS FOR ANDROID FANS

Yes, Android fans, there is yet another LG Optimus phone, and this time it's for Virgin Mobile. virgin mobile recently announced via it's facebook page that it'll be releasing the LG Optimus V starting tomorrow.

If the phone seems like deja vu to you, that's because the LG Optimus V is essentially the same as the LG optimus S for Sprint except for the physical button placement. Though we don't know the specs yet, we expect it'll be the same as the other Optimus phones: Android 2.2, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G, and all the usual Android goodness, like Google apps and more. We also expect the pricing to be on the affordable side. Stay tuned tomorrow to find out.