FIFA is Sorry. Will consider Goal Line technology.

Everybody may already know what I am talking about here. Yes, the England - Germany match held on Sunday.


All the spectators, and those watching at home, clearly saw that Frank Lampard's kick was a goal. Everyone except the person who is supposed to see it, the referee. England was denied a crucial goal, which might have turned things around for England.
 



The same day another bad call was made, when the ref missed an offside, which went on to be a goal for Argentina.

All this couldnt go unnoticed. This resulted in a heated debate on whether to use video technology to aid referees to take decisions.

 Now the FIFA doesnt really like introducing technology into the field. They like to keep it real. But taking recent events into consideration, they too agree that "something has to be changed". Those were the words of FIFA president while saying that they will reconsider the option of introducing video technology into future FIFA games.

Anyway dont hope for anything in this championship. Lets see if they take a proper decision fot the next FIFA atleast.

Lung on a Microchip

Yes you read it right.

The scientists at Harvard Univeristy has succeeded in manufacturing an artificial human lung on a microchip.
This lung is made with the help of actual human and blood vessel cells, and a micochip. This working, respirating lung is much simpler than the actual human lung, and the package is small having the size of an eraser.

Researchers say that they are working to build different organs and assemble to from the complete organ systems.
The aim of such developments is to use them for testing of medicines, rather than using animals as test subjects. (Somewhere those rats must be having a party.)

An explanation by Don Ingber, Director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Google Street View : Totally Cool

A few days back, me and a friend of mine were just wasting time on the internet. Somehow we tripped on to Google Maps. Suddenly he thought he would check out the location at which his father, who is abroad, stays.
So, we typed in the address and lo!, there we are right in front of the house, looking at the door.

The beauty of the Google Street View kind of surprised us, I have to say. After walking through the street for a while, we stopped. From then, I needed to do a post on this Street View.

Street View was a feature introduced by Google in May 2007, to allow people to explore places through images. It gives us a felling as hough we are actually standing on the spot. You can look around, up and down and literally walk along the street. It provides you with 360 degree horizontal and 290 degree vertical panoramic views.

How is this done? They simply drive aroung town, in a van or car, with a big camera set on top. These cameras capture the images of the streets and later back at the lab, after a lot of processing, these images are 'sewn' together to form one huge panoramic view.

How do you see this? Go to Google Maps, zoom in to a street where this facility is available. It automatically takes you street view. And how do you know that street view is available? On top of the zoom buttons, you see a peg, in the shape of a man. If he is bright yellow, you are lucky. Instead of zooming in, you can also take the man from top of the zoom button and place him on a street to go to street view there.

Disneyland Paris had recenlty requested the Google team to a Street View sweep of the Disneyland, Paris for attracting people. If you want to check out the place in Street view, click here . Just zoom in and have fun. Get to know the place and decide if you have to go.

Its football fever all over the world. Google knows it as well. Considering the FIFA Championship going on in South Africa, Google has also made a Street View Gallery of all the stadiums in which the matches are held. Now you too can stand in the fields where your favorite stars played.
Check it out here .

Windows 7 hits 150 million licenses

The people at Microsoft should be really happy. They are enjoying one of their biggest success ever.

And this time success came from its new Operating system, Windows 7. Windows 7, is Microsoft's most latest and most advanced Operating System. And it would be safe to say, it is the best one around.

Microsoft has currently sold their 150 Millionth copy of Windows 7. And it was only 2 months back that it crossed the 100 million mark.

According to statistics, this number of sales would amount to selling about 7 copies a second. Pretty huge. eh?

This huge success is due to the huge failure of the previous Operating System, Windows Vista, most probably Microsoft's biggest failure ever. Most organizations had hesitated to change to a new operating system, when Vista was launched. At that time, changing to Vista meant changing the hardware.

But with Windows 7, you get to use your existing hardware. With about the same performance as the older Windows XP, and better graphics and features than Vista, & was the choice of many organisations.

Congratulations Microsoft. Hoping to see more better products from you.

Facebook founder may face death penalty

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in trouble again. Currently he is being investigated against blasphemy case which if convicted may lead to a death penalty.

Apparently, someone in Facebook against the Holy Prophet Mohammad, which was much to the dislike of the Pakistani authorities.

26 year old Facebook CEO Matk Zuckerberg, is currently being tried by the Pakistani court under the Pakistani penal code Section 295-C, which goes on to say: "Use of derogatory remark etc, in respect of the Holy Prophet, whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable for fine."

Along with, Pakistan has also banned major websites like Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Google, Amazon and Bing. You take away all these, you better take away access to the internet as such. Wouldn't make much of a difference.

I don't really understand the logic behind such a decision. Banning major sites or trying the founder of a website on court, just because some members of their site violated their rules, just doesnt seem right.

Instead of doing this, they could have simple asked the Facebook guys to ban the user from their site.

Well, every country has their own policy. I just hope it doesn't happen here.

What do you guys think about this?

By the way, the above poster is of the movie 'The Social Network', which is to be released this year, in which Facebook is playing a very big role. In fact the movie is about the founders of Facebook itself.

Nokia N8 is the last Symbian N-Series phone

Surprising to most Nokia lovers, they have recently said that they are going to stop using the Symbian OS on their future phones in the smartphone category (ie., the N-Series).

And thus the Nokia N8 becomes the last and the most advanced Symbian handset by Nokia.

From now on MeeGo will overtake Symbian in the N-Series devices. MeeGo is a Linux (Fedora) based Operating System, which is being developed by the combined efforts of Intel, Nokia and the Linux community.

But this doesnt mean that Nokia is going to leave the Symbian platform altogether. They will still be using Symbian in their mid-range handsets, which happens to have the largest market appeal. Since the Symbian^4 is also under development, we hope to see some pretty phones soon.

Alienware M series : The most powerful laptops in the Universe

The name 'Alienware', wouldnt be alien to most of the gamers and computer fanatics. They have benn rolling out one monster after another, in their series of high end gaming computers. And when we say high end, it literally means the highest end. The is no going higher than that.

Alienware's range of laptops, the M series, consits of 3 monster laptops - M11X, M15X, M17X.
Where 11, 15 and 17 correspond to their screen sizes.

All the 3 come with almost the same configurations, with the choice of certain 'upgrades!' from the standard configuration.

This being a laptop, does not take on the problem of portability as other laptop manufacturers, unless you are comfortable carrying around a 5 kg laptop. The M15X is a bit more lighter though.

Here we will consider here the new M15X laptop.

Looking at the bundle, its pretty attractive with cool Alienware accessories. The contents of the package are:

• 
  Charger 
• DisplayPort to HDMI cable 
• Instruction manual 
• Alienware cap 
• Alienware mouse pad 
• Utilities disk 
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Pretty cool, isn't it? Wait till you see the specifications.

The desing is great. It has a matte paint finish, and ofcourse has the Alien head on it.

On the right, we have the slot loading BluRay drive, Express card slot, two headphone jacks, microphone jack, ESATA cum USB port and a single USB 2.0 port.

Coming to the left, we have the memory card reader, 1394 (FireWire) port, one more USB port, DisplayPort, LAN jack, VGA port, power cord and the Kensington lock.

The aggressive front view. with customisable lighting affects is what sets this monster apart from others, except maybe the high end configuration.

The scrren is a full HD screen with very good colour reproduction. Everything looks sharp and clear.
The keyboard is simply astounding, with equal lighting for all keys. You even get to choose the lighting colours through the AlienFX software. There is even a ring of light around the trackpad.

The internals of the M15X goes like this. It is run by a Core i7 920XM processor(4 cores, 8 threads) which is Intel's Extreme Edition for the mobile platform, a 15.6-inch screen that sports a 1920x1080 resolution using WLED backlight and Dell's TrueLife technology, 6GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, slot loading BluRay drives and 1GB of Nvidia's GTX260M graphics card. It is powered by a 9-cell battery.

You get all this for a mere Rs 2 lakh.

Astonished? You shouldnt be, considering the configuration you get.

If I had the money, I would buy one for sure. And I do hope to get one someday.

Smile for your IceCream : Augmented Reality IceCream machine

IceCream makers Unilever (better known as Kwality Walls in India) and customer experience company SapientNitro are going to make us all smile. They are launching the worlds first smile activated vending machine.

The machine uses augmented reality to draw the attention of passers by. When you look into the screen, you see not only you, but with some enhancements like moustaches or some other kind of 'decorative' items.

This machine is being tested at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. All you got to do is stand in front of the machine, and give it your best smile ever. Using face recognition technology, the machine detects the wideness of your smile. It snaps a pic of your 'I want an IceCram' smile , and asks your permission to upload your pic to their facebook page, which can be seen here. Next comes your favorite part, selecting your icecream.
You can select from the wide range of flavours they offer and 'tada' here comes you icecream, making you smile even better.

Of course this icecream is free only at the Cannes Festival. Once the commercial versions are out, you'll have to pay for your own icecream, with a grin on your face.

This machine is expected to be launched in various high traffic locations, like shopping malls, all across the world in the next 18 months.

A video of the smiles.

Lenovo IdeaCentre A300

Lenovo's 'Idea' range of PCs based on the no business consumers, for home use like web browsing, media playback and such.

The IdeaCentre is a range of all-in-one PCs, of which the IdeaCentre A300 is the latest addition.

The specifications of this device are :

• Windows 7 Home Premium 
• 21.5″ inch (1920×1080 pixels) Full HD Display
• Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 Processor (2.2 GHz, 2 MB cache)
• Intel X4500MHD Graphics
• Up to 4GB DDR3 RAM
• Up to 500GB Hard Disk
• Optional External Drive
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• Bluetooth
• Hybrid TV Tuner
• Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse
• 2×2W Stereo Speakers
• 8-in-1 card Reader
• Weight: 9.5 kg

The expected price for this PC is about Rs. 40,000.

Lenovo has also launched a separate Mulitmedia keyboard device, which is actually a combination of a keyboard and mouse.
It has got a full QWERTY keyboard, two buttons, a trackball. and a set of special multimedia keys.

• 
  

HTC EVO 4G : Hard to catch

HTC EVO 4G, the worthy competitor for the iPhone 4G, has been sold out again. It is the second time this phone has been out of stock.

Now, you might have to actually go down to a store and get one, as online purchase is not an option anymore.

Sprint, the mobile service provider who is selling this new phone, says "this device is so hot we can't keep it on our virtual shelves." Well lets hope so.

In the mean time, a rumor is going around that this less stock is due to some factory fixes being applied to correct the screen separation problem.

More details of the phone specifications here .

The New XBOX 360

The new XBOX 360 gaming console is up for sale.

The new 360 is a bit smaller than the Original XBOX 360, comes with 250 GB storage space and is much faster.
It is also less noisier ('whisper quiet' they claim) than the  Original XBOX 360.

A size comaprison of the new XBOX 360 with the Original XBOX 360, Original PS3, PS3 Slim and Nintendo Wii can be seen below.

 New XBOX 360 vs. Original XBOX 360

 New XBOX 360 vs. Original PS3

 New XBOX 360 vs. PS3 Slim

 New XBOX 360 vs. NIntendo Wii

Word is out that Microsoft is going to stop production of the Original XBOX 360.

Personally speaking, I like the looks of the original Xbox 360. But if the performance is better, well who cares about the looks.

More info about the New XBOX 360 here.

Need for Speed : Hot Pursuit

If tuesday was Microsoft's day to shine at the E3 conference, then yesterday was the day for EA (Electronic Arts).

Yesterday they announced what is to be the 14th installment of most probably the worlds most popular racing game. Yes the next Need for speed is here. Titled Hot Pursuit, it is all about exotic cars and hot pursuits(of course!).

The game is developed by Criterion Games, the same people that brought forward the Burnout game. So we expect great graphics in this game.

What they have done is make up for the loss of the Need for Speed feel in the latest game. So they have taken it back a bit to its roots. hey want to get the focus back on the sheer excitement of ripping down the highway at top speed.

In the game, the player gets the choice to play a full career in either cop side or racer side. In cop mode you get to radio in for road-blocks and backup. In racer mode you get to jam the cops radio frequency and many such cool features.

This game is set for release on November 16th this year

Well, I know, who wants to keep reading all this. Lets get right into action.

Screenshots :

Release Trailer :




Gameplay Demo : 

Samsung I8520 : First Android phone with a projector

Yes folks, you read it right. The new Samsung I8520 has an inbuilt projector, so that you can project the images on your phone on a nearby wall. Let it be a presentation, photos captured by the 8 Megapixel camera or captured Hi-Def videos, watching them with your colleagues, friends or family have never been so fun.

Samsung has unveiled its latest Android based handset, the i8520 at the on-going CommunicAsia Expo at Singapore.The i8520 was first revealed at the Mobile World Congress in February 2010. It hogged the headlines back then owing to one unique feature it sported. The phone had a pico projector at the rear that will enable it to project images on to the nearest wall.

The phone is a full ledged smartphone that is set to run Android 2.1. It has a 3.7 inch super AMOLED display and an 8 megapixel camera as well. Like its contemporaries, the phone will also record and playback HD videos. The HD recording is capped at 30fps. It also has a front VGA front camera that would be used for video calling purposes.

The i8520 will support native DivX and Xvid playback support. Connectivity options include Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11b/g/n support for Wi-Fi. It will feature a 3.5-mm headphone jack and with 16GB of internal storage and microSD expansion slot, storage should not be problem. It would be a Quad Band phone with support for GSM/EDGE as well as for tri-band UMTS 900/1900/2100.

This device will pack in all the above mentioned features plus a pico-projector in a slim,14.9 mm body. The phone is slated to go on sale in Singapore soon. Pricing and availability details for other locations are currently unavailable

More technical specifications here.

 

iPhone 4 vs. the Smartphone Gang

As we have seen, the iPhone 4 drastically improves over the previous versions of the iPhone, even the iPhone 3GS. But that wouldn't mean a lot to much of us. But how does it compare with other established smartphone competitiors?

Thats what most of us might be interested in. Well heres a comparison between the iPhone 4 and other smartphones - HTC EVO 4G, Nokia N8, and HTC HD2.

iPhone 4

HTC EVO 4G

Nokia N8

HTC HD2

 

Platform	iOS 4	Android 2.1 with Sense	Symbian^3	Windows Mobile 6.5
Processor	Apple A4	1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon	680MHz ARM11-based	1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon
Storage	16GB / 32GB internal	440MB internal, microSDHC expansion	16GB internal, microSDHC expansion	Approx. 200MB internal, microSDHC expansion
Cellular	Quadband GSM, pentaband HSPA	CDMA, EV-DO Rev. A, WiMAX	Quadband GSM, pentaband HSPA	Quadband GSM, dualband HSPA
WiFi	802.11b/g/n	802.11b/g	802.11b/g/n	802.11b/g1
Display size	3.5 inches	4.3 inches	3.5 inches	4.3 inches
Display resolution	960 x 640	800 x 480	640 x 360	800 x 480
Display technology	IPS LCD	LCD	AMOLED	LCD
Integrated TV-out	No	HDMI	HDMI	No
Primary camera	5 megapixel AF, LED flash	8 megapixel AF, LED flash	12 megapixel AF, xenon flash	5 megapixel AF, LED flash
Secondary camera	VGA	1.3 megapixel	VGA	None
Video recording	720p at 30fps	720p at 24fps	720p at 25fps	VGA at 30fps
Video calling	Yes (WiFi only)	Yes	Yes	No
Location / orientation sensors	AGPS, compass, accelerometer, gyroscope	AGPS, compass, accelerometer	AGPS, compass, accelerometer	AGPS, compass, accelerometer
SIM standard	Micro SIM	N/A	SIM	SIM
Quoted max talk time	7 hours on 3G, 14 hours on 2G	6 hours	5.83 hours on 3G, 12 hours on 2G	5.33 hours on 3G, 6.33 hours on 2G
Quoted max media playback time	40 hours audio, 10 hours video	None quoted	50 hours audio, 6 hours video	12 hours audio, 8 hours video
Weight	137 grams / 4.8 oz.	170 grams / 6.00 oz.	135 grams / 4.76 oz.	157 grams / 5.54 oz.
Dimensions	115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3mm	122 x 66 x 13mm	113.5 x 59 x 12.9mm	120.5 x 67 x 11mm