During the 2nd India England

V V S Lax man. Vaughan. Vase line. During the 2^nd India England cricket Test last August, former England skipper Michael Vaughan stirred up a hornet's nest, when he accused Indian star batsman Laxman of applying vaseline on the edges of his bat to avoid being caught nicking the ball on Hot Spot india. A heated debate ensued Only as expected, also with the Indian cricket administration being never in favors of the Umpire Decision Review System. "It's ridiculous. Why would V V S Laxman use it?" asked Mr.ChinmayaJoshi, a junior undergraduate student, who is involved in a Umpire Decision Review System -related project by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. He was speaking at EmTech India 2012 on the future of imaging in cricket, based on his team's research findings, here on Wednesday. The impact of the ball on the bat, he reasoned, would be even more pronounced, if vase line or petroleum jelly were to be applied on the bat. "In fact, it would be more and of better resolution than in just air," said Mr.ChinmayaJoshi. A team member of him, MR.SiddharthKhular said that it was proven by BBG Sports, the Australian company that pioneered the snickometer system in cricket, that vase line could not hide the hot spot. Mr.ChinmayaJoshi, however, added that application of silicon spray under laboratory conditions did hide it. "When we tested it, no heat signature was seen on the bat," he attested.

After which, they have evolved a fool-proof new fine technology with Femto Photography – "It looks around corners with a trillion frames-per-second camera (cricket)" – and the Netra (Near-Eye Tool for Refraction  Assessment). Said Mr.ChinmayaJoshi, "In Netra, you hold up to the eye, align patterns and send the signals to a computer or a mobile. We have a dynamic range sensor that will detect the impact precisely by locking in a specific frequency." Femto Photography camera is so accurate that even the light waves slow down while viewing intricate motions. It could be used for Hawk-Eye trackings, said Mr.ChinmayaJoshi. By the way, the Hot Spot technology uses Infra Red wave-based imaging system to detect impacts. The MIT team put into use a $30,000 robotic arm, which is normally employed for other scientific research purposes, for this study. They have also discussed in detail with some international umpires about what kind of issues they had to deal with in such scenarios. "Soon, on-field umpires can carry an Apple iPhone or any such device or crowd-source data to statistically identify how a batsman middle or edged the ball during an innings. You can view more about the project at cameraculture.info or eyenetra.com. Here's wishing this brings to an end all controversial decisions surrounding the Hawk-Eye, Snickometer and Hot Spot technologies.

Source: CIOL Bureau

Android handsets and Apple Inc's iPhone in China

Nokia vs Android : Mr.Adam Guli a 35 year old social media entrepreneur who commutes across Beijing  (China) on a scooter Vespa, is giving Nokia Oyj a ride in its race against Android handsets and Apple Inc's iPhone in China. With a directory of a million restaurants, clubs and other consumer businesses in the country, Mr.Adam Guli Let's Powwow is among content providers Nokia is counting on to attract users in the world's biggest wireless market. Espoo, Finland-based Nokia is paying the two-year-old start-up to create a Windows Phone application that Mr.Adam Guli says is on a recommended software list as Nokia's Lumia 800 handset made its debut in China. "We have, I'm quite sure, the largest force of people who work with developers here in China over any of the other ecosystems," Nokia company Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop said yesterday in Beijing (China), where he unveiled versions of nokia Lumia 800 based on Microsoft Corp’s software. "We have been focused on making sure the locally relevant applications get a lot of attention." As many as 140 million smart mobile phones will be sold in China this year, an increase of more than 80 per cent, pushing the country past the US as the world's largest market for the devices, according to researcher Gartner Inc. Local directory services integrated with maps are among applications that may give Lumia 800 phones an edge and justify a higher price, particularly in sprawling cities such as Beijing. Nokia declined 0.6 per cent to 4.11 euros as of 10.14 am in Helsinki, paring the gain this year to nine per cent (China).

‘Up for grabs’

"In China, the game is far from over," said Derek Ling, who runs Tianji, China's biggest professional networking site with nine million users. "The Apple iPhone is not nearly as dominant in China as it is in the US." Apple has been "having difficulty negotiating the right terms with the biggest provider in China, which is China Mobile, so everything is up for grabs." Nokia yesterday showed versions of Lumia 800 and Lumia 610 to run on China Telecom Corp's network. It's also working on phones for networks operated by China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. and China Mobile Ltd. Nokia and Microsoft said this week they will offer grants for Windows Phone app start-ups through Finland's Aalto University. "We're doing the same type of thing here in China," Elop said. Under the agreement with Let's Powwow, data about restaurants and clubs will be pushed to Nokia's map database for use in other apps, Mr.Adam Guli said after an evening ride in Beijing, where his company is based. Nokia gained access to geographic databases for China when it acquired mapmaker Navteq in 2008.

Dianping, Jiepang

Location-based apps already in the Windows Phone Marketplace include Dianping, a city directory that has coupons and supports check-ins; and check-in service Jiepang. Jiepang has a new version using Nokia maps that will be exclusive on Lumia 800 phones, said Leo Lee, a spokesman. Android phone maker Samsung Electronics Co, working with the three major carriers in China, was the country's leading smart mobile phones supplier in the fourth quarter with a 24.3 per cent share, according to Gartner. Nokia was second with 19.6 per cent, while Apple had 7.5 per cent. "Nokia faces stiff high-quality competition including local phone makers who offer a mobile experience plugged into all sorts of services," said Benjamin Joffe, who runs strategy consulting firm Plus Eight Star in Beijing. "So it depends how good an integration they can do with services like social networks and e-commerce."

Renren, Sina

China’s biggest social media platforms already support Windows Phone. Renren Inc, a social networking service, is listed on the Windows Phone Marketplace, as is Sina Corp's Sina Weibo, a micro blogging service, and the QQ instant messaging system from Tencent Holdings Ltd. Renren and Sina have worked with phone maker HTC Corp to offer handsets with preloaded apps and in some cases special buttons to access the services, while companies such as Xiaomi Corp, which sells high-end handsets running a customised version of Google Inc’s Android for less than half the price of an Apple iPhone 4S, aim to make money later on software and services. Windows Phone integrates social networking with the user's contact list and photos, providing live updates to the screen. With Face book Inc and Twitter Inc’s websites blocked in China, Nokia will need deeper integration with Chinese social networking applications to make the most of the platform's evolving abilities. Windows Phones from all manufacturers had a 1.9 per cent smart mobile phones market share in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner, compared with more than 50 per cent for Android and nearly a quarter for the Apple iPhone.

‘Last shot’

"Windows Phone is Nokia’s last shot if they want to maintain their smart mobile phones share in China," said C K Lu, a Taipei-based analyst with Gartner. China was still Nokia’s biggest market last year, even as revenue for the greater China region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, fell 18 per cent as users were attracted to cheap Android smart mobile phones competing against mid-priced Nokia devices. Nokia will need smart mobile phones priced as low as $150 to compete, Lu said. The company announced the 189-euro ($252)nokia  Lumia 610 in February and it is Nokia's cheapest Windows Phone. The price for the China version of the 610 hasn't been revealed. "Right now both the Apple iPhone and Android have such great momentum and Windows Phone is really swimming upstream and they have a lot to prove," said Ling, who hasn't yet committed to a Windows Phone app. "Ultimately we follow where the users are."

Source: Business Standard

Research firm Gartner USA said today

The Indian printer copier and multi-functional Device product (MFP) market declined 5.8% to 6.41 lakh units in October-December 2011 as compared to the same quarter last year, research firm Gartner USA said today. A total of 6.81 lakh units were shipped in the same quarter last year. "The fourth quarter of 2011, did not meet expectations when compared to the previous quarter," Gartner Research Analyst Mr.AmritaChoudhury said. HP remained the leader with 53% market share in the fourth quarter of 2011, though it lost share by 2.7 percentage points as compared to the fourth quarter of 2010, Gartner said. Canon followed with 21.8% market share, while Epson and Samsung followed with 9.8% and 7.9% market share, respectively, it added. In the A4 MFP Device space, which includes inkjet Device and page technology, HP maintained its leadership position with 52.2% market share, followed by Canon, Epson and Samsung with 20.6, 10.9 and 8.6% share, respectively. In the A3 flatbed copier MFP Device segment, Canon led the market with 24.7% share, followed by Ricoh, Konica Minolta and Xerox with 19.4%, 15.1% and 11% share respectively, the study said. The inkjet printers market experienced a decline of 24.9% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010, the research said. "The growing proliferation of electronic media, such as smartphones and tablets, as a means of communication also contributed to the dismal outcome," Mr.AmritaChoudhury added.

Source: Business Standard

U.S. state Maryland Department of Corrections

 Password : It is called “shoulder-surfing”, and it is getting increasingly common. Applicants at job interviews are being asked, at some point in the proceedings, to either hand over their passwords to social networking sites like Face book so that the interviewers can have a quick look, or log in there and then so the interview panel can, quite literally, look over their shoulders. It has begun to happen frequently enough that Face book released an advisory last week warning users that handing over their pass words was a breach of the website’s terms of service. Indeed, wrote the organisation’s “chief privacy officer”, Erin Egan, Facebook would sue any organisation that made the demand. The spark was a well-publicised case in which the U.S. state Maryland Department of Corrections, which runs that American state’s jail network, went through the Face book profiles of thousands of job applicants after asking for their passwords, and rejected some of them on the basis of facts gleaned from the exercise.

It is easy to see why employers might be tempted to peer into applicants’ online lives. Worldwide, people’s social lives have moved online to a far greater degree than they have earlier. On Twitter, Face book and Orkut, people make connections and reveal information, official and personal, that many in their employers’ human resources (HR) cell may well think are germane to the hiring process. Are they in the habit of talking about work issues on their social network, for example? Sometimes people think that their Face book page is like an intimate dinner gathering, when it’s actually like standing in a room full of hundreds of acquaintances, shouting into a megaphone. Yet the evolving consensus is unsympathetic to this view, at least in the United States. The Maryland government, stung by its jail department’s actions, has criminalised the act of asking for Face book passwords, and several other jurisdictions have followed suit.

The United States is, however, considerably more privacy-friendly than other countries, especially India. There, even asking about marital status and whether or not the applicant has children is considered intrusive — and, in some cases, a violation of statutory privacy rights, for which interviewers may be sued. In India, rare is the job interview that does not touch at least briefly upon personal affairs. Will India’s jobseekers respond to questions about their Face book life docilely? Will India’s HR departments come to think of this as basic due diligence, such as they are required to do? There are two reasons to suppose that India’s reaction will not be too different from that of the United States. The first is that India’s middle class, as visible in the fracas over the freedom of speech online, has come to think of the internet as an escape valve from the considerably more restrictive offline public sphere. Like the government’s intrusion into online privacy, corporate intrusiveness may meet with a backlash. The second reason is that companies that are more likely to hire tech-savvy employees are also more likely to be closely integrated into the workplace practices of the United States. Both jobseekers and those looking to hire them will follow the spreading debate on shoulder-surfing with considerable interest.

Source: Business Standard

Prude University West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA

Researchers at Prude University West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA, have used a thin film of titanium nitride into transporting plasmons. Plasmons are tiny electron excitations coupled to light that can direct and manipulate optical signals on the nanoscale. According to researchers, titanium nitride's addition to the short list of surface-plasmon-supporting materials, formerly comprised only of metals, could pave the way to a new class of optoelectronic devices with unprecedented speed and efficiency. "We have found that titanium nitride is a promising candidate for an entirely new class of technologies based on plasmonics and metamaterials," said Alexandra Boltasseva, researcher, Purdue and an author on a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optical Materials Express. Metals carry electricity with ease, but normally do nothing to transmit light waves. Surface plasmons, unusual light-coupled oscillations that form on the surface of metallic materials, are the exception to that rule. When excited on the surface of metals by light waves of specific frequencies, plasmons are able to retain that same frequency, but with wavelengths that are orders-of-magnitude smaller, cramming visible and near-infrared light into the realm of the nanoscale. Gold and silver are the best candidates for plasmonic materials, but they are not compatible with silicon manufacturing technologies, limiting their use in commercial products. 

 

In an effort to overcome these drawbacks, Boltasseva and her team chose titanium nitride—a ceramic material that is commonly used as a barrier metal in microelectronics and to coat metal surfaces such as medical implants or machine tooling parts. It also could be easily integrated into silicon products, and grown crystal-by-crystal, forming highly uniform, ultrathin films—properties that metals do not share. The researchers deposited a very thin film of titanium nitride on a sapphire surface and observed that the material supported the propagation of surface plasmons almost as efficiently as gold. Currently, the researchers are now looking into a manufacturing method known as molecular beam epitaxy to further improve the performance of titanium nitride. This method would enable them to grow the films and layered structures known as superlattices crystal-by-crystal. The researchers also speculate that titanium nitride may have applications in metamaterials. Recently proposed applications of metamaterials include invisibility cloaks, optical black holes, nanoscale optics, data storage, and quantum information processing. "Plasmonics is an important technology for nanoscale optical circuits, sensing, and data storage because it can focus light down to nanoscale," noted Boltasseva. "Titanium nitride is a promising candidate in the near-infrared and visible wavelength ranges. Unlike gold and silver, titanium nitride is compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing technology and provides many advantages in its nanofabrication and integration."

Source: EE Times

solution for some applications

Presented at Gartner's Mobile Strategy Seminar, held yesterday in Johannesburg, these are the top 10 mobile technologies that will change business (as described by Gartner research VP, Leif-Olof Wallin).

HTML5

By 2015, Gartner predicts HTML 5 will deliver 50% of all applications that would have been native in 2011. Wallin notes, however, that while HTML5 is often presented as the solution to all problems, it will not be the only solution for some applications, since it is not yet fully standardised. Wallin warns developers and business to expect fragmentation and to adapt applications accordingly.

Near-field communication

“This is really great technology that has unfortunately just taken forever to mature,” says Wallin, adding that it will undoubtedly become the leading 'touch to act' tech. According to Gartner, near-field communication (NFC) will enable numerous capabilities such as payments, ticketing, vouchers and coupons, check-in services, access control and information sharing. “There is already support from key platforms and vendors such as Android, Nokia and RIM,” notes Wallin. Wallin, however, warns that m-payment solutions won't happen readily and commercial and technical battles are expected to emerge between banks, network operators and Internet mega-vendors.

Platform independent AD tools

Gartner says no single mobile platform will dominate, and HTML5 alone will not satisfy all cross-platform development needs. As a result, there is opportunity in recognising that operating systems are not the only platforms one should be independent of.

Location and context

By adding location and contextual intelligence to services, there is the opportunity to change consumer or employee behaviour, says Wallin. According to Gartner, applications will become more proactive in their functionality and increasingly hyper-personalised. Wallin warns, however, that the technology is still very immature, and there are privacy concerns to be taken into account. An example of this technology would be an application that can remind the user of someone's birthday, tap into their social profile to suggest an appropriate gift, and use location services to suggest the nearest store.

Bluetooth 4

Gartner says Bluetooth 4 will become the standard way for sensors and peripherals to talk to a wide range of mobile devices. This will enable new business models based on sensing new accessories and new capabilities, such as proximity applications. For example, smart jewellery such as a watch that can communicate with one's mobile phone and display incoming messages or alerts. Wallin, however, cautions that the technology is still immature and market penetration will take another one to three years.