Latest News

Developers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University are working together to create an armband -- named Skinput -- that projects an interface directly on your skin.

They have combined a mini projector, which creates a changing display, with a sophisticated sensor that can tell which part of your arm is being tapped.

The researchers showed Skinput could be used to control audio devices, play simple games such as Tetris, make phone calls and navigate simple browsing systems.

The gadget effectively turns your arm into a touchscreen surface by picking up the various ultra- low sounds produced when you tap different areas.

Different skin locations are acoustically distinct because of bone density and the filtering effect from soft tissues and joints.

Source: Mail Today New gadget turns your hand into a touchscreen

Fancy a bite to eat? Tea for the kids? All you need to do is press your hand down on the softened surface to create a hole and in go the ingredients.<center></center>

Setting the temperature and time is then another simple flick of a finger. This is the future according to Electrolux and their new tactile design concept called ‘ Heart of the Home’. The ingredients are placed on the mouldable surface and the same area then heats up and cooks your food. Before it does this, it analyses what has been placed on it and offers you a range of recipe options to choose from.

So, unlike cooking stoves in use at present, the cooker will afford some choices of recipes for the ingredients after putting them in its mouldable surface.

If you need to cook larger amounts and need a wider surface, then you simply press down on a bigger area. And because there are no pots and pans, there won’t be any washing up.

Although the firm’s concept video doesn’t explain how it is cleaned, it presumably takes just a swish of a dishcloth to clear away any remains.

In the video, the user is shown creating a number of pans simply by pressing on the malleable surface. Once a recipe is selected the user is able to move the ‘ hobs’ across the surface.

Source: Mail Today Future cooker does away with utensils

Users will simply have to think of what they want to say and a voice synthesizer will translate the thoughts into speech almost immediately. They have tested the device on a patient who has " locked- in syndrome", after a stroke stopped neural signals travelling from his brain to the rest of his body.

The rare condition means that the person is aware and awake, but cannot move or communicate because of complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes.

The 26- year- old volunteer was asked to think of a series of basic vowel sounds. The researchers were able to translate these and vocalise them in just a fraction of a second using the new system.

His accuracy increased with each practice session from 45 per cent to 89 per cent.

Scientists began the experiment three years ago, when they implanted an electrode in the patient's brain on the boundary of the two regions that govern speech and movement.

Within four months, neurites had grown into the electrode and begun producing neural signals.

Source: Mail Today Implant in brain that could read your mind

So in villages that don't receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular "radio" service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

"I call it the poor man's iTunes," says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India's largest cellular companies. "A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available."<center></center>

The cricket fan without a television or radio can dial up and listen to the latest match live on his phone. Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cell company by subscribers, has a special service that calls hundreds of thousands of farmers every day with recorded messages of weather reports and advice about crops.

Tata Teleservices has a service which lets farmers use their cellphones to control the pumps that water their crops.

Source: Live Mint Cellphone entertainment takes off in rural India

The play's focus is collateral, with the money lender Shylock demanding a particularly onerous form of recompense if his loan wasn't repaid: a pound of flesh. Mr. Geanakoplos, too, finds danger lurking in the assets that back loans. For him, the risk is that investors who can borrow too freely against those assets drive their prices far too high, setting up a bust that reverberates through the economy.

For years, his effort to understand this process didn't draw much interest. Now it does--yet another after-effect of the brutal deflating of the credit bubble. The crisis exposed the inadequacy of economists' traditional tool kit, forcing them to revisit questions many had long thought answered, such as how to tame disruptive boom-and-bust cycles.<center></center>

Mr. Geanakoplos is among a small band of academics offering new thinking about those cycles. A varied group ranging from finance specialists to abstract theorists, they are moving to economic center stage after years on the margins. The goal: Fix the models that encapsulate economists' understanding of the world and serve as policy-making tools at the world's biggest central banks. It is a task that could require a thorough overhaul of the way those models work.

"We could be looking at a paradigm shift," says Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor now at Columbia University.

That shift could change the way central bankers do their job, possibly leading them to wade more deeply into markets. They could, for example, place greater emphasis on the amount of borrowing in the economy, rather than just the interest rates at which borrowing is done. In boom times, that could lead them to restrict how much money various players, ranging from hedge funds to home buyers, can borrow.

Source: Live Mint Crisis compels economists to reach for new paradigm

PRANAV Mistry makes up things as he moves.

And if you were him, this newspaper would be feeding you a live video of Wednesday's top news on a salmon pink backdrop, streamed straight from the studios of ET NOW.

And the smartphone in his pocket would capture live feed from the website and a camera would track his finger using computer-vision techniques while a projector beamed it on to the pink backdrop.

All of it made up by devices costing under $350.

"I now realise that many ideas I came across during my IIT Bombay days are getting done in places like MIT in the US, and everybody is giving a lot of attention," Mistry, who is in Mysore to talk at the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, told ET in an interview.

A PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Media Lab, Mistry, 28, has come a long way from being the president of the Young Scientists Club at hometown, Palanpur, in northern Gujarat. "I come from a middle-class family and have always learnt to work with affordable solutions," he says. Patent application for device filed

Called SixthSense, the prototype is made up of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant-like mobile wearable device while the projector and camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user's pocket via bluetooth. Mistry has filed a patent application for the device.

Source: Economic Times With Easy Tool, Indian Blurs Physical-Digital World Gap

Last Thursday, the management student tweeted, "Trying to decide between a Lenovo or an Acer laptop."

Soon, and much to his surprise, he had a reply from the Chinese computer maker's India arm, Lenovo India Pvt. Ltd. "I only expected some users to respond," he said.

Lenovo got in touch with Kaushik, asked him for his specifications, gave him suggestions on various computer models and a list of authorized dealers from whom he could purchase the laptop. "Lenovo helped with the (purchase) decision," said Kaushik who bought a Lenovo G450 laptop two days after the company reached out to him.
<center></center>
Lenovo India went on social media's newest and least understood avatar, Twitter, in end-July.

Members on the networking site communicate through messages shorter than 140 characters--a concept that has become a rage globally and continues to grow as users find new applications for it.

"Our expectation was only to listen to customers," said K. Ramakrishnan, country manager, marketing, at Lenovo India.

In less than two months, the company has generated enquiries and translated some of them into sales, for both individuals and bulk buyers.

Several Indian companies are advertising and closely tracking themselves on social media on the Internet--all the content generated on a gamut of blogs, online video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites and even on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Few have been effective.

Source: Live Mint Firms logging into networking sites to connect with customers