INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT

Administrative processes are repetitively required to be regularly reviewed and upgraded. A good administrative manager can add value to the company by challenging the efficiency and reliability of procedures that have been running for a period of time whilst striving to look for continuing improvements and identifying and cutting out any outdate practices. With the speed of change in business today the manager has to value the people who are expected to operate often complex systems.

Whilst ever improving software aids all aspects of administration, it has to be remembered it is just a tool for collection and dissemination of data. The information produced needs to be clear and concise to be of value to a manager. Many quality controls have been put in place by companies over recent years and should not just be viewed as just another paper pushing exercise”. If controls are not working then it is up to the company to review why the procedure was implemented in the first place. In the drive for efficiency if the implementation of a new procedure prevents the staff member from actually getting on with the job, impedes production or hampers service output, then obviously rethinking the whole strategy is part of the administrative process.

Recent controversial thinking in some quarters suggests that highly trained freelancers and software may replace administrative managers within organizations. With the increasing use of tele-workers and outsourcing by companies the role of the administrative manager becomes even more necessary than ever before. We therefore have to ensure that all administrative managers are given the essential training required to be able to make the best use of their own technical skills and those of their staff to full potential.

The 1990’s saw most office functions being revolutionized by the improvements in information technology. To keep pace with business changes each individual needs to keep their management skills up to date to ensure their continued employability. Without any doubt, computers have increased efficiency by simplifying operations and further in 21st century we have seen a dramatically increase in web based operation which give the ability for employees to work from remote locations with complete monitoring. Most companies are shifting on web based centralize system which only require few good systems, thus saving much of the cost but placing a much more proficient system. The more committed and happy the staff, the more productive the company.

All companies and organizations are only as good as the people they employ. If an organization has to run “lean and mean” then the selection and recruitment of the right administrative manager, who can make the best use of the tools at his or her disposal, is truly a valuable asset. There will always be a necessity for good administration in any organization; the American government is run by “The Administration”. In the UK there is not a great deal of importance placed on the use of the word “administration”, but which company can be successful without its existence?

New iPhone

The new iPhone went on sale in the US Friday morning, greeted by much smaller lines and less hoopla than previous models.

A few hundred people were in line just before the seven AM (1100 GMT) opening of Apple Inc.'s flagship store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, a fraction of the people who lined up around the block for last year's launch.

That launch turned into a debacle, as Apple's servers failed to cope with the load of new customers trying to activate their phones. People who already had iPhones were trying to install a software update on the same day, adding to the pressure.

This year, Apple and AT&T Inc., the phone's US carrier, defused the drama by taking pre-orders for the new phone online. That means fewer prospective buyers had a reason to stand in line, and it sped up the activation process.

Apple also released its software update for previous customers two days early. There were only scattered reports of problems with that upgrade.

For new customers signing a two-year contract with AT&T, the 3G S model that went on sale Friday costs $199 or $299 depending on the memory capacity. Compared to the 3G, it has a faster processor and an upgraded camera. AT&T said it had taken pre-orders for ‘hundreds of thousands’ of 3G S phones.

Owners of the previous model, the iPhone 3G, will have to pay more than that. Most of them are not eligible for the new-customer pricing because the AT&T subsidizes the cost of the phone and requires customers to ‘pay off’ the subsidy through their monthly service fees before it will subsidize a new phone.

In line at the Fifth Avenue store, Brandon Dennie, 27, was not put off by the prospect of having to pay the unsubsidized price of $599 for the new phone. He's had a 3G for only six months, so he didn't qualify for the lowest price. He's creating his own subsidy by selling his old phone for $200 to a colleague, and he has an Apple gift card. ‘I want the video option and the speed,’ Dennie said.

In its two-year life, the iPhone range has revolutionized phone design and given AT&T a leg up on its rivals in recruiting customers willing to pay high monthly fees.

At an AT&T store in the New York borough of Queens, there were three people in line at 5:45 AM (0945 GMT). Sarah Gates and Ed Phyfe, the couple who were first in line, didn't know about the pre-order option until it was too late, and wanted to be sure to get phones from the small stock set aside for walk-ins.

‘We got Sprint smart phones since just before the first iPhone came out, and we immediately regretted it,’ said Gates, 33. She has nothing against Sprint Nextel Corp., but felt that their Motorola Q phones were awful.

‘I feel kind of bad to leave Sprint ... but I don't like any of the phones they have half as much the iPhone,’ she added.

Scource: dawn.com

Sales and Profit Decline at Adobe

The software maker Adobe Systems said Tuesday that its second-quarter profit and sales declined on weaker demand.

The company’s revenue in the quarter surpassed Wall Street’s expectations, however, and adjusted earnings met those estimates.

For the three months ended May 29, Adobe Systems said Tuesday that it earned $126.1 million, or 24 cents a share. That is down 41 percent from $214.9 million, or 40 cents a share, in the period a year ago.

Excluding special items, the company, based in San Jose, Calif., said it earned 35 cents a share, matching analysts’ forecasts.

Revenue fell 21 percent, to $704.7 million. That is slightly above the $694.8 million that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted.


Source: www.nytimes.com

WiMax launch in Atlanta is biggest city so far in Clearwire roadmap

Clearwire Corp. officially celebrates the launch of its WiMax service in Atlanta on Tuesday, but the formal launch in its largest city so far still has experts wondering how the fast wireless Internet service will catch on around the nation.

Clearwire, based in Kirkland, Wash., has an ambitious plan to roll out WiMax service nationwide under the Clear brand over several years, with backing from major players such as Intel Corp., Google Inc., Sprint Nextel Inc. and cable providers such as Time Warner Cable.

The cities of Portland, Ore., and Baltimore have held official WiMax launches, but other cities such as Chicago have been provisioning the technology for more than a year without a formal launch party. Still, Clearwire in March said it plans to have WiMax rolled out in eight cities, including Atlanta, this year, and four more in 2010.

The Atlanta launch was described in a full-page advertisement in today's Atlanta Journal and Constitution, although there is no separate mention on the Clearwire Web site. A public celebration at the city's Atlantic Station is planned.

A Clearwire official couldn't be reached for comment, although the company said in May there would be an Atlanta launch sometime this month. In fact, Clearwire has been signing up customers in advance of a formal launch, based on various reports.

Clear services were also quietly launched in Las Vegas, with an official launch planned for this summer, according to the FierceBroadbandWireless site.

Jeffrey Kagan, an independent analyst based in Atlanta, has been a trial customer of Clear for two weeks, and remarked in an e-mail, "so far this technology works great." He reported getting fast speeds of 5Mbit/sec. to 9Mbit/sec. from a WiMax card inserted into his laptop.

He also noted that when he leaves Atlanta, he loses the signal. In the future, Kagan said he hopes to use a laptop card that will automatically move from a Sprint 3G wireless signal to WiMax and back again, when needed.

"WiMax is similar to Wi-Fi, but the coverage is an entire city compared to just a store," Kagan noted.

Whether those WiMax-capable cities remain islands unto themselves is the big question facing Clearwire. "Success for Clearwire depends on how they advertise and market and how the competition responds," Kagan said. "I don't think the competitors will react at this point unless and until Clearwire starts winning business from them."

Clearwire holds its annual stockholder meeting Wednesday, but analysts don't expect much more information on the timetable for Clear city rollouts.

One WiMax competitor, AT&T Inc., is planning to offer LTE (Long Term Evolution) as its next-generation wireless service. An AT&T spokesman based in Atlanta said the big question facing wireless customers will be how widespread WiMax service will be. "LTE will be everywhere," he said.

Generally, LTE is not expected to be broadly available until after 2012, and WiMax-backers see WiMax as widely available as much as a year to two years earlier.


Source: http://www.computerworld.com/

Microsoft giving away free any-virut

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Microsoft is poised to start giving away security software.

The company is reportedly trialling free anti-virus software internally and said the beta version would be released "soon".

Called Morro, the software will tackle viruses but lack the broader range of utilities, such as parental locks, found in paid-for security suites.

Morro will be Microsoft's second venture in the highly competitive security market.

Microsoft's first attempt revolved around the Windows Live OneCare service that did not succeed in turning many customers away from rivals such as Symantec and McAfee.

Microsoft plans to discontinue Live OneCare once the Morro software is ready.

No specific date has been given for when Morro will be released, but in the past Microsoft has said it would be out by the end of 2009 at the latest.

Microsoft said Morro would tackle viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

Janice Chaffin, Symantec's president of consumer products, said customers wanted more than just basic protection.

"A full internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected," she said.

Security software for home PCs typically cost around £30-40 and often allow users to install protections on more than one computer.

Other companies, such as AVG and Alwil already produce and distribute free anti-virus products.

Fake help

In its latest update, Microsoft added code that detects and deletes the widespread Internet Antivirus Pro family of fake security software programs.

Such programs, also known as scareware, have been proving more popular with hi-tech criminals in recent months.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group estimated that there were 9,287 bogus anti-malware program in circulation in December 2008 - a rise of 225% since January 2008.

The US government has moved to shut down some companies peddling the programs that falsely claim to find malicious software on PCs and then charge for the non-existent threats to be removed.

In addition, the Internet Antivirus Pro software displays fake Windows security messages to try and trick people into thinking the product is legitimate. The software also contains a password stealer that watches where people go online and grabs login data.

Source: bbc.com

No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe

Microsoft said it would be easy to install its browser European buyers of Windows 7 will have to download and install a web browser for themselves. Bowing to European competition rules, Microsoft Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer. The company said it would make it easy for PC makers and users to get at and install the web browsing program. In response the European Commission expressed scepticism over the move and whether it would allay accusations of Microsoft abusing its market position. Abusive behaviour "We're committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world," Dave Heiner, Microsoft deputy general counsel, said in a statement, "but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product. "We believe that this new approach, while not our first choice, is the best path forward given the ongoing legal case in Europe." In response the European Commission said "it would also have to consider whether this initial step of technical separation of IE from Windows could be negated by other actions by Microsoft". In early 2008, Microsoft was fined 899m euros (£765m) by the European Commission for anti-competitive behaviour over bundling in the media player and browser into Windows. In January 2009, Brussels reached a "preliminary view" that Microsoft was denting the chance for true competition by bundling its browser software in with its operating system. Microsoft is due to defend itself against the charges in a hearing. If Microsoft fails to convince the Commission that it is not harming competition could mean more fines and enforced changes to the way it does business. "We're committed to launching Windows 7 on time in Europe, so we need to address the legal realities in Europe, including the risk of large fines," said Mr Heiner. Windows 7 is due to be released worldwide on 22 October. "In terms of potential remedies, if the Commission were to find that Microsoft had committed an abuse, the Commission has suggested that consumers should be offered a choice of browser not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all," said the Commission in a statement responding to Microsoft's announcement. It said Microsoft's approach of offering the program to computer manufacturers "may potentially be more positive" in terms of remedying its alleged abusive behaviour. It added that if Microsoft were found to be abusing its position, the commission would have to work out if the uncoupling of IE offset that behavior.

Source: bbc.com

Facebook use grows by 700%; maintains top social networking spot

Though still well behind Facebook, Twitter gains steam with usage up by nearly 4,000%

In April, Facebook users spent 13.9 billion minutes on the site, a dramatic hike from the year-earlier total of 1.7 billion minutes, according to a report from The Nielsen Co. The 700% increase let Facebook easily maintain its place atop the social networking business.

MySpace, according to Nielsen, came in a distant second place as users spent nearly 5 billion minutes on the site during April. The company fell far behind Facebook as its usage fell by 31% from April 2008, according to the Nielsen report.

Facebook cannot rest on its laurels as another hot social network, Twitter, grew even faster this year.

Though its only the fifth most popular social networking site, use of Twitter increased by 3,712% to nearly 300 million minutes.

"We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace," said Jon Gibs, vice president of Nielsen's online media and agency insights. "Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing or how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers. Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune."

But while Twitter users are spending an increasing amount of time on the site, another Nielsen study out at the end of April showed that the microblogging site lacks loyalty among its base. That report concluded that some 60% of people using Twitter during one month, don't return to the site in subsequent months.

"Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure," wrote David Martin, vice president of Primary Research at Nielsen Online, in a blog post. "People are signing up in droves, and Twitter's unique audience is up over 100% in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest."

Microsoft unveils new Xbox technology, enlists Facebook

LOS ANGELES: Microsoft Corp on Monday offered a glimpse into a future where the Xbox 360 console is the centerpiece of any living room, and games, social interaction and communications are controlled with the wave of a hand.


At a star-studded event at the annual E3 video game conference that drew appearances by Paul McCartney and Steven Spielberg, the company unveiled ‘Project Natal,’ which uses a camera to track a user’s movements via full skeletal mapping. It also recognizes voices and vocal commands.


The technology obviates the need for a controller or remote device to enable a player for instance to drive a car in a game, interact with a character on screen or show pictures and information to other Xbox 360 users over the Internet.


‘You are the controller,’ Shane Kim, Microsoft’s vice president of strategy and business development for videogames, said in an interview in Los Angeles.


‘That’s a very powerful piece of technology — full body gesture tracking, not just two hands.’


On Monday, Microsoft also said it planned to boost its Xbox 360 gaming console by integrating music-streaming service last.fm, Web social network Facebook and microblogging site Twitter into its Xbox Live online community.


The announcements underscore how the interactive gaming industry, a growing business with estimated annual sales of about $50 billion despite the economic downturn, is looking into ways to attract new gamers while retaining their core audience.


Perhaps with an eye on the economy, Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, said the ‘Natal’ technology can refresh the gaming experience without making consumers buy a new device, which typically costs $250 to $500. Microsoft would also avoid hefty manufacturing and marketing costs.


‘We can leap into a new era of interactive entertainment without launching a new console,’ Mattrick told reporters.
Kim declined to detail when ‘Project Natal’ games and service will be available, saying only that ‘it’s not a 2009 thing.’


IN LIVING COLOR


Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Game Studios, said the technology has been well received by software developers.


‘It’s pretty obvious that the controller is not going away, but the ability to augment the gaming experience that people are used to is one of the paths that people will take,’ he said.


For now, Microsoft is focusing on beefing up its fledgling Xbox Live service.


Users of Xbox Live will be able to keep tabs on and communicate with friends using popular Internet services such as Facebook and Twitter, without needing to use a computer.


The move broadens Microsoft’s goal of transforming the console system -- a distant No. 2 to Nintendo Inc’s Wii machine -- into the center of the living room and more than just a game-playing box. That goal is echoed by Sony Corp, whose PlayStation 3 console also hosts community and entertainment features as well as game playing.


‘This expands the reach of Xbox live,’ Kim said. ‘We have had an effort of making Xbox live a next-generation social and entertainment network.


The event was kicked off by a demonstration of the upcoming version of Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks’ Rock Band franchise featuring songs by The Beatles. Taking the stage briefly were surviving Band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively.


Source: dawn.com

Samsung Announces 12-Megapixel Camera Phone

The Pixon12 will will feature a high-resolution camera, as well as the ability to quickly upload pictures to online photo-sharing sites.

(click image for larger view)

Samsung Pixon12 camera phone

Samsung announced a new phone Monday that could make shutterbugs ditch their digital cameras.

The Pixon12 is a touch-screen phone that packs a 12-megapixel camera, which is the highest-resolution camera currently on a phone. The phone comes packed with software to help users take better shots, as the autofocus software will automatically adjust the camera's mode depending on the object, background, and lighting.

Users can organize and manage these photos through various categories, and pictures can be uploaded to sites like Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and Picasa with a few clicks. The Pixon12 also has a Xenon flash, face-detecting software, and the ability to geotag photos using the integrated GPS chip.

"The Pixon12 is testament to how Samsung's ongoing consumer research enables us to develop ground-breaking products that do not just meet but surpass our customers' expectations," executive VP J.K. Shin said in a statement. "Speedy access to the camera mode, fast shutter speed, and quick browsing are some of the key factors consumers are looking for in their mobile phone cameras."

The handset has a 3.1-inch AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) touch screen that should provide vibrant colors and a crisp contrast ratio. The Pixon12 has EDGE, 3G, and integrated Wi-Fi for users to surf the Web and share photos. Samsung's camera phone will also be a strong multimedia player, has Bluetooth, and the memory can be expanded up to 16 GB via the MicroSD slot.

Cell phone manufacturers are increasingly upping the ante with a mobile phone's camera, and Samsung will be beating the completion to the market when it releases the Pixon12 at the end of June.Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson also has a phone with a 12-megapixel camera, but the Satio won't be released until the fourth quarter.

Srouce: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/smartphones/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217701117&cid=tab_art_pertech

Apple Releases iTunes 8.2 With iPhone 3.0 Support

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Apple is expected to release iPhone 3.0 out of beta at its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
June 1, 2009 06:45 PM

Apple on Monday released iTunes 8.2 with support for iPhone 3.0, an indication that the latest smartphone operating system will be generally available soon.

While Apple has not made any official announcements, there's been lots of speculation on the Web that Apple could release iPhone 3.0 out of beta at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next week. The iTunes support makes that scenario more likely.

pple has been gradually preparing the industry for iPhone 3.0. Last month, the company told developers it would only accept for the App Store programs that are compatible with the upcoming OS.

Apple introduced iPhone 3.0 in March. Currently in beta, the software introduces a number of consumer-oriented features, including cut and paste, multimedia text capabilities, and a universal search function. In addition, it opens the door for more innovative and lucrative apps by enabling in-app purchasing, peer-to-peer multiplayer capabilities, and apps with third-party hardware.

Along with the iPhone 3.0 support, iTunes 8.2 also includes bug fixes and better security. The latter involves improved bounds checking to prevent a stack buffer overflow that could result in application termination or arbitrary code execution, Apple said.

Along with iPhone 3.0, Apple is also expected to use the WWDC to focus on the new version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is not expected to participate in the opening keynote. Kicking off the San Francisco event will be a team of execs led by Philip Schiller, Apple's senior VP of worldwide product marketing.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/iphone/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=21770113

Physicists claim breakthrough in ultra-fast data access

French physicists said they have used ultra-fast lasers that can accelerate storage and retrieval of data on hard discs by up to 100,000 times.—File

PARIS: French physicists said on Sunday they had used ultra-fast lasers that could accelerate storage and retrieval of data on hard discs by up to 100,000 times, pointing the way to a new generation of IT wizardry.

The research builds on achievements that earned the 2007 Nobel physics prize for Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany, who ushered in a revolution in miniaturised storage in the 1990s.

Fert and Gruenberg discovered that tiny changes in magnetic fields can yield a large electric output. These differences in turn cause changes in the current in the readout head that scans a hard disk to spot the ones and zeroes in which data is stored.

That discovery opened the way to ‘spintronics’, a form of electronics that uses not only electrical charge but also the spin of electrons in individual atoms to provide a more compact, denser storage on hard drives.

But reading and writing data through spintronics has been hampered by the relative slowness of magnetic sensors.

In a study published in the specialist journal Nature Physics, a team led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg employed a ‘femtosecond’ laser, using ultra-fast bursts of laser light, to alter electron spin and thus speed up retrieval and storage.

‘Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons' magnetisation’ on the storage surface, Bigot told AFP.

Data is retrieved with a burst that lasts just a millionth of a billionth of a second, said Bigot. Femtosecond lasers currently measure around 30 centimetres (12 inches) by 10 centimetres (four inches) which means they are too big for consumer electronics, he cautioned.

Bigot added, though, that their miniaturisation is likely to be achieved over the next decade. IBM, Hitachi and other corporations are ‘extremely interested’ by the research, Bigot said.

Source: dawn.com

Are computers transforming humanity?

The answer is obvious, the implications profound.

By Mary K. Pratt

Imagine a world where your phone is smart enough to order and pay for your morning coffee. No more giving orders, handing over your payment or waiting in lines. No more face-to-face chit-chat or human interaction.

For many, this might seem like a blessing. Who likes to wait in line? But on a grand scale, might this kind of automated world dramatically change -- perhaps even eliminate -- how we communicate and connect with one another? Could it change something about us as individuals, or as a whole society?

"My short answer is yes. It's absolutely changing society and the way people are," says Melissa Cefkin, an ethnographer at IBM. "But there's nothing new in that. We've always had the introduction of new technologies that transform and move society in new ways. It changes our interactions, our sense of the world and each other."

But if primitive hand tools changed us from gatherers to hunters, and the invention of the printing press propagated literacy while downgrading the importance of the oral tradition, what individual and cultural transformations do new computer technologies portend?

Researchers and technologists alike say they're already seeing technology-wrought changes in how we operate as individuals and as a society. To be clear, they're not finding evidence of evolutionary transformations -- those show up over thousands of years, not merely decades. But there have been shifts in individual and societal capabilities, habits and values. And just how these all will play out remains to be seen.

"We're in a big social experiment. Where it ends up, I don't know," says Dan Siewiorek, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Like other researchers, Siewiorek has identified a number of areas in which individuals and societies have changed in response to technology during the past two decades. One of the most obvious, he says, is the shift in how we view privacy. Having grown up in the McCarthy era, Siewiorek remembers how guarded people were with their phone conversations, fearful that they would be overheard or, worse, recorded.

"Now you can sit in any airport and hear all the grisly details about a divorce or something like that. I don't know if the convenience overrides privacy or people don't care about the other people around them, but certainly what we let hang out there has changed," he says.

Any doubts? Just look at the deeply personal details that people post on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.

Click to continue

Microsoft promises 'search 2.0'

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Microsoft Live Search is changing

Microsoft is re-launching its search engine, promising to make search simpler, and aiming to overhaul Yahoo.

Re-named and re-branded Bing.com, the search engine will go live first in the US and launch in beta elsewhere.

Google has more than 64% of the search market in the US, followed by Yahoo at 20% and Microsoft at 8.2%.

Bing offers to make search more relevant by understanding the intention of searches, and grouping more related information to the original query.

For example, searches for a product will also bring links to reviews, accessories, and online shops, as well as information about the item.

Searches for flight information will pull schedules and times from websites, as well as linking to hotels and weather.

Microsoft wants to reduce the amount of clicking a user has to do to find specific and related information.

Paul Stoddart, Microsoft UK search lead, "Forty percent of search queries go unanswered. There is something missing here and a big consumer need."

He added: "We can see it in the logs [of searches]. When searching using existing search engines I have to keep re-querying things - adding more words, clicking on a site, going back because it is not the right site, and ultimately abandoning their queries."

He added: "We are pulling information that we know people use every day."

He said Microsoft was hoping to build an "emotional connection" between users and its search engines, as well as brand loyalty.

Bing has a much softer, less clinical feel than previous Microsoft search engines and rivals, with a daily changing backdrop image.

"Google haven't been able to innovate a lot of the UI (user interface) because they have to display their ads as that's how they make their revenue. We can try things a bit differently," said Mr Stoddart.

Users are also able to save their searches to avoid having to remember on which site they found a particular piece of information.

Microsoft is forming partnership with a host of different online services which Bing can then trawl to aggregate specific information around searches - such as flight deals, reviews and holidays.

Mr Stoddart said the UK version of Bing was launching later than the US because Microsoft was busy finding the "best of breed" in web services specific to the UK that it could add into search engine results.

"People keep building global search engines but doing something for the UK is important," he said.

He denied that Microsoft's goal of overtaking Yahoo lacked ambition.

"Second place would be a great place. And once we're in second place we will go for first place.

"Microsoft has a great tradition of coming from behind."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8070790.stm

How to simplify your tech life

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23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more

By Adam Pash

PC World - Technology was supposed to make our lives easier -- so why does it seem to do the opposite? If living in a perpetual state of tech overload has you frazzled, here are some solutions for you.

The enlightening tips in this story will show you how to conserve time and effort, eliminate headaches, clean up your workspace, secure your PC and your data, and manage your media. The path to the ultimate state of 21st-century Zen starts right here, right now.

Get organized

If your daily life is hectic, start calming it down by organizing your workspace. Whether you need to neaten up your PC desktop or the actual top of your desk, here are some simple things you can do to make things tidy, searchable, and in sync.

Manage multiple e-mail accounts in the Gmail interface

Effort: Minimal
Cost: Free

Most folks have accumulated a handful of e-mail addresses that they are not prepared to stop checking altogether. If you're a Gmail user, Google's e-mail app is particularly adept at consolidating several e-mail addresses so that you don't have to log in to five different accounts every day.

You can either set up your other accounts to forward all incoming mail to your Gmail account or use Gmail's "Get mail from other accounts" feature to automatically import every message you receive to your centralized inbox. Gmail even permits you to use it to send e-mail on behalf of your other, non-Gmail addresses.

If you prefer to do things the Microsoft way, Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail offers much of the same functionality as Gmail, but in an interface that's the spitting image of Outlook.

Use Google sync tools to manage PCs and phones

Effort: Moderate
Cost: Free

If you have a smartphone, a desktop PC, and a laptop or netbook, that amounts to at least three different places where you might want to add an appointment to your calendar, edit your contacts, or access an important file without worrying about keeping all your data in sync.

Google to the rescue again: If you're managing your days in Google Calendar and keeping track of your contacts in Google's Contacts application, Google Mobile Sync provides two-way, wireless synchronization of your calendar and contacts.

Microsoft Outlook users should check out Google Calendar Sync for the same two-way calendar sync.

Finally, if syncing up a folder's worth of files is important to you, look at Dropbox, a free service that syncs up to 2GB of data between any number of computers, the Internet, and even your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Find any file on your PC with desktop search

Effort: Moderate
Cost: Free

Even if you have organized every last file on your PC, you're still bound to lose something in the digital haystack every now and again. You could go the obvious desktop-search route with Google Desktop, or if you're running Vista you can just use the built-in Instant Search functionality.

But I'm going to stray from the beaten path a little and suggest Everything, a free, no-nonsense desktop search app that finds files on your desktop as you type, with lightning speed.

Scan paper and unclutter your home office

Effort: Initially high, minimal over time
Cost: $350 (at press time)

Your home office is a haven for all your pet projects and personal finances, but it's useless if you can't find anything under a giant stack of papers. To remedy that, take a two-step approach: Toss out all the junk, and then scan and file or shred the rest.

An intelligent sheet-fed scanner such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 can handle large stacks of paper in a range of sizes and turn any text on a page into a searchable PDF file on your PC. Just gather up all the papers that are multiplying on your desk, toss them into the scanner, and press the scan button.

The next time you need to find a particular receipt or invoice, for instance, simply search your computer (see previous tip). You get the surface of your desk back, and you may never have to rummage through a creaky file cabinet again.

Untangle your cables

Effort: Moderate
Cost: $10

Have you followed the tip above to clear away paper clutter? Great. Your desk would look perfect now if not for the ugly cables running from every gadget you own to its respective power supply. IKEA sells an inexpensive cord basket that's ideal for hiding your cables. Just screw it in, unplug your gear, and put everything back together one cord at a time, tucking each cable into the basket.

Similarly, you can set up a charging station for your cell phone, MP3 player, and other gadgets, either by using your own ingenuity or by purchasing a dedicated product like the Kingston Charging Valet.

Streamline your online experience

If you have more online accounts than you can track, these tools will put you back in control. With the help of these tips for Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, you can keep passwords secure, control your networks from a single interface, get one number for all your phones, and more.

Reduce your online profile to safeguard your privacy

Effort: Moderate
Cost: Free

The Internet is an amazing venue for sharing your life with family and friends, but if you don't pay attention to what you're sharing, it can turn into a privacy nightmare. You can do a lot to protect yourself.

If you're on Facebook, for example, get to know the privacy settings. You can determine what you broadcast to the world, and when used wisely, the settings provide serious control over what details the site exposes. One great option to tweak is the Search setting, which lets you restrict how much information people can see about you before you add them as friends.

If you've tried your hand at a lot of social networks over the years, it's a good idea to go back and delete old, neglected accounts that still show up in your Google results but don't satisfactorily portray the professional demeanor you've worked so hard to cultivate.

Finally, set up a simple nameplate site to take an active role in determining what people see when they dig for dirt on you. One worthy option is a Google Profile, which can give you a leg up in shaping how others perceive you on the Web (though in PC World's tests, it didn't rank as highly in our search results as we had hoped).

Consolidate your online identities with UnHub

Effort: Moderate
Cost: Free

Between your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and -- if you're really popular -- your Wikipedia page, you probably find it tough to give someone a single URL that says "Here's me." The Web site UnHub helps to solve that problem.

The service allows you to create a very simple home page with a persistent profile bar that links to every site that defines you on the Web. No matter which of your pages your buddies visit, yourUnHub profile bar stays on top so that your visitors can easily move on to your next online hangout. Best of all, you don't have to update each of your sites every time you add a new social network to your list.

Update your blog

Effort: Minimal
Cost: Free

It's rare to find a piece of Microsoft software that outperforms the competition where the Internet is involved, but if you love to blog, you can't find a better companion than Windows Live Writer. The handy application plugs into popular blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress, streamlining your writing process with a built-in spelling checker, image editing tools, post previews, and more. It also boasts plug-in support for integrating with your Flickr account, with Twitter, and with the popular social news site Digg.

Manage Twitter more effectively

Effort: Minimal
Cost: Free

Everyone is talking about Twitter these days, but despite the service's insane popularity, its chaotic default Web interface doesn't do much to simplify working with it. If you'd like to manage your Twitter experience better, try the free Twitter client TweetDeck. It displays your friends' tweets, corrals your mentions, tracks searches, and has tools for shortening links, posting pictures, and more.

If you want to keep an eye on what the Twittosphere has to say but you don't want to check it constantly, consider signing up with TweetBeep, a service that sends you a daily di­­gest of Twitter posts matching any number of search criteria you select. It's all the tweets without all the distraction.

Use KeePass to secure your passwords

Effort: Moderate
Cost: Free

If you use a different password for every online account you own (as well you should), your head is probably about to explode. More likely, though, you use the same one or two passwords for all those sites, which is a security horror story waiting to happen. To calm your mind and to maintain security, use a password manager.

KeePass Password Safe is a free, open-source password manager that tracks all your Web site passwords, credit card numbers, ID numbers, software registration codes, and other details. It can autofill your user name and password through your browser whenever you visit a site where you have an account.

Perhaps best of all, the tool can autogenerate highly secure random passwords for new accounts, and then remember them for you. All you need to recall is the one password that unlocks KeePass's power.

Unify your phone numbers through Google Voice

Effort: Minimal
Cost: Free (at press time)

Remember the simple days when landlines reigned supreme, and anyone who wanted to get ahold of you had just one number to dial? Today you likely have a personal cell phone, your work cell, and an additional landline at each location. Suddenly, getting in touch has become much more complicated.

With Google's latest offering, Google Voice, that's about to change. The service eliminates the multiple-phone problem by creating one central number that rings all of your phones -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Google Voice also supports advanced call-routing rules, transcribes your voicemail, and even forwards a copy of it to your e-mail inbox.

I've been using Google Voice for more than a year (since it was known as Grand Central), but it's currently in closed beta. If you don't want to wait for the Google Voice beta to open, you can significantly boost your voicemail prowess in the meantime with YouMail.

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Intel to produce new, more powerful server chip

Intel Corp will start producing a new, more powerful version of its Xeon multiprocessor chip for servers in the second half, a spokesman said. — AP/ File Photo

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp will start producing a new, more powerful version of its Xeon multiprocessor chip for servers in the second half, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

The new chip, code-named Nehalem EX, will go on sale in the first quarter of next year. No prices have been announced for the new chip, which will succeed the Xeon 7400, priced from $1,100 to $2,700.

The Nehalem EX will provide two improvements. First, it will increase the number of cores inside a single chip from six to eight. Second, each core will be able to handle two ‘threads’ of software instead of just one.

Severs will be able to handle up to eight of the sockets for the powerful new chips, and third parties can expand beyond that, according to Intel's Nick Knupffer.

Further technical details are available here .

Intel produces several lines of central processing units. Its multiprocessors are its most expensive, sophisticated line, used for running large servers. It also has smaller, powerful chips to run desktop and laptop machines.

Below that is its popular, inexpensive Atom processor, used in Netbooks.


Source: dawn.com

Hi-tech aims to improve lifestyle

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Facebook, mobile phones, and energy meters are helping to see if people can be nudged into living healthier lives.

The three-year project will see how people react when data is fed back to them about their energy use and activity levels.

While it has been established that such feedback can alter behaviour, the researchers want to unpick the mechanisms of such change.

About 800 people will be recruited to the project which starts in September.

Normal life

The research, called the Charm Project, builds on the work of academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein which implies that the way people are told about poor lifestyle choices influences how they react.

Instead of simply telling people to stop, it has been shown that it is more effective to reveal how one person's behaviour ranks against their peers.

Adopting a less confrontational style can, claim Thaler and Sunstein, "nudge" people towards better choices.

"It's about influencing behaviour by telling people what other people do," said Dr Ruth Rettie, head of the Charm Project and a reader in marketing at Kingston University.

"There's quite a lot of evidence that we can influence, not just by nudging, but by informing them about social norms," said Dr Rettie.

Social norms are the broadly accepted ways that people conduct themselves and encompass such things as manners, cleanliness, and behaviour.

However, said Dr Rettie, norms can differ from person to person and many people follow a set of norms without much thought about why they do so, or whether they are choosing wisely when living by them.

Via three separate investigations, Dr Rettie and her colleagues will gather data about consumption or usage behaviour related to sustainability, feed information about it back to the subjects, and see how that "social proof" changes behaviour.

The project will not dictate norms to people. Instead it will find out what people do and then tell everyone involved about that activity.

Three trials

One investigation revolves around mobile phones that have software installed on them to measure how active their owners are.

200 people will take part in this trial, said Dr Parisa Eslambolchilar, a lecturer in human-computer interaction at the University of Swansea who is developing the phone application.

By monitoring power, people will be nudged toward lower use.

"We're looking at how often people take exercise, or do they prefer to walk to work, or their office, or do they prefer driving?" said Dr Eslambolchilar.

Participants will be given feedback about their activity and whether they are more or less active than the others in the group. Data from accelerometers in smartphones and PDAs will be analysed to work out how far people are walking. GPS will be used for those that cycle, to work out their average speed and distance travelled.

Still to be decided is the way that information about activity will be fed back. One idea is to represent individuals as flowers in a garden with the more active participants growing taller over the course of the investigation.

Household energy use will be monitored as another of the Charm Project investigations. This will see small energy meters placed in the homes of 400 people recruited for the project.

"The monitor clamps around the cable, it does not interfere or use home power," said Dr Matthew Studley, a senior researcher in robotics at the University of the West of England who has developed the device.

Information about energy use will be sent to the researchers, who will then inform participants of how much they used and how that compares to others in the trial.

Feedback

Information might be fed back through text message, a project website, or a letter in the post, said Dr Studley.

"We are not particularly interested in the amount of energy that they are using, it's the change in their behaviour as a result of the feedback," he said.

"We expect that most will reduce their consumption in response to feedback on their own and other people's usage," said Dr Studley. "What we do not want to happen is that people using far less than everybody else increase their usage of energy."

The third investigation will revolve around social networking site Facebook and will investigate how friends influence each other and see what it takes to nudge people towards more "sustainable" ways of life.

Dr Rettie said the Charm Project aimed to get a better understanding of why people make the choices they do and what can influence them.

"There has been a tendency in academic circles to think that choices are made on a rational and conscious basis," she said. "We find out their attitudes, consider their intentions, and that will give you their behaviour."

But, she said, research shows that many of the things people do are not based on rational choice.

Finding out what informs choices and how to influence them was likely to become far more important as the need to live more sustainable lifestyles becomes pressing, she said.

"If we are going to change and make lifestyles more sustainable, then changing this process is very important," she said.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8062327.stm

Ericsson offers phone location service to counter credit card fraud

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_and_wireless&articleId=9133487&taxonomyId=15&intsrc=kc_top

Service seen as aid to business travelers using credit cards overseas

Ericsson is courting major banks with a security service the company thinks could cut down on credit card fraud as well as eliminate an inconvenience for travelers using cards overseas.

Banks are increasingly blocking credit card transactions in certain high-risk countries due to increasing levels of fraud. A business traveler who lives in the U.K. but goes to Russia can likely have a transaction rejected if the person hasn't informed the credit card company of travel plans.

Ericsson's IPX Country Lookup service uses a person's mobile phone to provide a confirmation that a person is in the country where the transaction is carried out, said Peter Garside, U.K. and Ireland regional manager for Ericsson's IPX products.

For the service to work, Ericsson's technology must be installed on a mobile operator's network. Once installed, Ericsson will pay the operator a "small fee" every time a bank wants to verify a certain transaction by one of its customer's mobile phones, Garside said. Ericsson will then put a margin on the lookup fee and charge that to banks, he said. The lookup fee hasn't been set yet.

Garside said Ericsson has figured out how to extract the location information from operators worldwide. The technology only identifies what country a person is in but not the precise location in that country. It only works for GSM networks.

To allay privacy concerns, Ericsson is recommending that banks get consumers' consent before using the transaction verification service. Once a person's approximate location has been passed onto the banks, that data will not be held any longer, Garside said.

The service will work even if someone's phone is off, although the phone must be turned on at least once when in a new country. Mobile phones will register with the local operator when turned on in a different country, so Ericsson will be able to query the last known location.

The service comes out of Ericsson's IPX product line, which enables third parties to bill for ring tones or other content via mobile networks.

Garside said operators won't incur any costs to integrate the service into their networks and can make money from the location information they hold. "The operators are sitting on some valuable assets," Garside said.

Banks will be able to set their own policies around the lookup service. For example, a bank may decide it only wants to pay a lookup fee for card transactions that occur in Romania and a few other countries.

Ericsson's technology could be appealing to banks, which are facing ever-increasing levels of cross-border ATM fraud, said Peter Welch, an independent banking analyst who was briefed by Ericsson.

Close to 40% of the fraudulent transactions performed with U.K. cards in 2007 were done overseas, according to information published by APACS, a U.K. payment card trade association. Total fraud amounted to £535 million (US$845 million).

The U.K. as well as most European countries now use the chip-and-PIN (Personal Identification Number) cards, which contain a microchip. Consumers must enter a four-digit PIN to complete a transaction, which is verified by the chip. But thieves who steal card details can create cloned cards and use them in ATMs in other countries whose cash machines do not verify that a chip is present in the card.

Bank customers would likely agree to opt-in to the service, especially if it reduces the frequency with which overseas card transactions are denied, Welch said.

"I would think there is enormous potential for it," Welch said.

Web Surfing With Eye Gaze instead of Mouse.

Developed by Stanford University doctoral researcher Manu Kumar. EyePoint uses a four-step process that incorporates a user's hands and eyes to increase accuracy and eliminate the false positives that come from using eye movements alone. Plus, the technique brings a more natural way of interaction to a broader band of users.

"Using gaze-based interaction techniques makes the system appear to be more intelligent and intuitive to use," says Kumar. "Several users have reported that it often felt like the system was reading their mind."


Wow Factor
Eye Commander

Makes eye-gaze a viable alternative to the mouse for everyday pointing and selection tasks, like Web surfing.

Here's how it works: While looking at a screen, the user presses a hot key on the keyboard, magnifying the area being viewed. The user then looks at the link within the enlarged area and releases the hot key, thereby activating the link.

Eye tracking, which has been around for decades, typically uses infrared devices embedded into a headset or a monitor frame. The devices track the centers of the user's pupils and then calculate which part of the screen the user is viewing.

This method, however, has been plagued by errors, limiting its use primarily to people with disabilities that prevent using a keyboard and mouse.

Eye trackers are accurate to about 1 degree of visual angle. When looking at a 1,280-by-1,024-pixel, 96-dpi screen at a distance of 20 inches, this equates to a 33-pixel spread in any direction from where the user is looking. That's not accurate enough to pinpoint a link.

"What is really exciting is that the processing power of today's computers is completely changing the kinds of things we can use for computer interfaces," says Ted Selker, associate professor at the MIT Media and Arts Technology Laboratory and director of the Context Aware Computing Lab. "Things like eye tracking are using channels of communication that literally were unavailable to interface designers even five years ago."

"[Kumar's] approach -- using eye movement in a subtle, lightweight way, rather than as a direct mouse substitute -- is exactly the right way to go," says Robert Jacob, a professor of computer science at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Selker says eye tracking might become a standard computer interface within the next five years. For now, the primary obstacle is the high cost of eye-tracking hardware, although mass adoption of the technology would drive those costs down.

Web tool 'as important as Google'

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A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.

Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove 'linguistic fluff'

"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers - it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."

Learning language

The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.

For example, a relatively simple search, such as "who was the president of Brazil in 1923?", will return the answer "Artur da Silva Bernardes".

This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people's questions.

"We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case," he said.

In addition, he said, the system had got "pretty good at removing linguistic fluff", the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.

Searching for 'Blair Bush' could give a different result...

Simple text

However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.

"Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say 'I don't need all those extra words'."

Instead they tended to use "concepts" similar to how most people use search engines today.

But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was "disappointed" by Dr Wolfram's "dismissal of English syntax as 'fluff'''.

For example, he said, suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?"

"Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama," he said.

...than searching for 'Bush Blair'

"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."

Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be "the world's first web-based question answering system". It has been on the web since December 1993.

Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.

Dr Katz said it answers "millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world" on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.

It is also able to compute answers from several sources in a similar way to Alpha.

Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.

For example, Powerset uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.

The company is attempting to build a similar search engine "that reads and understands every sentence on the Web".

In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.

Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.

"In a sense we are at the beginning," he said.

3G License Auction in 1 month: Hafeezur Rehman

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Long awaited 3G license is likely to be auctioned in three to four weeks, reported “The Peninsula” of Qatar, citing an interview with Hafeezur Rehman, Federal Secretary for Information Technology and Telecom.

Paper further quotes that policy for launching 3G services has already been submitted to the federal cabinet, and its matter of just few weeks to auction 3G spectrum.

He said despite the global recession and a worrying security situation the government wants the 3G services to be available for the Pakistani cellular customers.

He said the base price for auction of the spectrum will be decided by the cabinet besides the policy decision whether the existing operators only will be allowed to participate or more international companies will be invited. “The; ministry has also submitted its recommendations op these matters; but the final decision rests with the federal cabinet,” he added.

He said the policy in this regard will not be discriminating for existing companies or new entrants and the base price will also be set keeping in view the international recession and market trends. He said that the 3G services will be provided in a three phase process.