Car providing relaxation to motorist stuck in heavy traffic jams

Engineers have developed an advanced car which they say can drive itself on just the press of a button, providing much-needed relaxation to the motorist stuck in heavy traffic jams though it may sound like a James Bond movie stuff.

When the traffic jam ends and the car reaches 30mph, the auto-pilot -- called "Traffic Jam Assist" -- hands control of the vehicle back to the refreshed driver.

M2M or machine to machine communication taking giant strides

With the mobile phone customer base growing rapidly, it was a matter of time before M2M or machine to machine communication started taking giant strides to become an integral part of the digital world.

M2M, in simple words, means combining technologies that allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of the same ability. M2M depends heavily on cellular technology and Indian companies are primed to cash in on its popularity.It just had to happen.

According to a research report released by Economist Intelligence Unit, about 50 billion devices worldwide would be connected by 2020. M2M is beginning to fulfil its promise, with several successful applications already in the field,” says Jason Sumner, senior editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit and editor of the report. “The next step is to create a platform for innovation by standardising technologies, forming partnerships within the industry and demonstrating the benefits to consumers.” The report adds that growth and innovation will come from experimentation within individual sectors, but many firms either do not understand M2M technologies or have doubts about their true business benefits. A recent poll of businesses by Gartner, a technology analyst firm, found many with no plans to adopt M2M, largely owing to lingering doubt over its ability to provide measurable business value.

In India, however things are looking better for M2M. Telit Wireless Solutions, a UK-based technology firm is upbeat about the scope of growth in M2M. “People are keen to implement M2M technology into their existing deployments and applications to enhance their performance using wireless technologies as it makes them more viable and efficient,” says Ashish Gulati, country head for Telit’s India operations. The Draft Telecom Policy released by the Ministry of Information and Technology in 2011, too, had stressed on the opportunities that M2M offers.

Reliance Communication was one of the big companies to latch on the M2M. The M2M applications were developed for the rural markets that enable water level monitoring, and data gathering for milk and agri-cooperatives, fisheries, poultry, and soil analysis. In the urban market, thrust is on mobile ticketing, vending machines and buying goods at kiosks. “M2M applications give alternative revenue streams as well as develop strategic partnerships,” says an analyst from Gartner India.

Gulati is of the opinion that M2M solutions can be effectively used in areas like healthcare, security, tracking, emergency telephone systems, information displays and others. Telit, which acquired Motorola’s M2M division last year, is now looking to get M2M into micro finance as well. “We are already into AMR (automated meter reading) applications for power utilities in India, which enable utilities to monitor how much power is consumed by industrial consumers and how much is billed back, and whether there was any theft on the way between on transformer and the other,” says Gulati.

According to research firm 6Wresearch, Indian M2M modules market is expected to generate $98.38 million by 2016, with an estimated compound annual growth rate of 33.81 per cent from 2011 to 2016. Cellular M2M modules generated $9.15 million in 2011 and are expected to reach $41.54 million by 2016. Figures like these are encouraging players like Gulati and Bangalore-based Avians Innovations. According to a company spokesperson, the market is still at a nascent stage but they are expecting it to grow faster than expected. The emergence of 3G in India has also been a driving factor in the growth of M2M communications. Projects like UID-Aadhaar too will fuel the growth, feel experts.

Automotive, healthcare, surveillance and equipment monitoring are four verticals where experts see a lot of growth potential for M2M. Security and surveillance is an area which is growing rapidly in the country – both commercially and residentially. While telecom service providers like Reliance and Airtel have been working on their M2M applications primarily for the rural markets, the urban market has a lot of potential. “More and more people are indulging in e-commerce and m-commerce and that is a great indicator that they will embrace M2M communications as well,” concludes Gulati.

Google, Web search giant, reimagin itself as a hardware maker

Google unveiled a new 7-inch tablet computer, called Nexus 7, and a sphere-shaped device for streaming music and video that it is calling Nexus Q, on Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual conference for developers.

It was an event that included sky divers, stunt bikers and people rappelling down the side of a building. Then came another spectacle: watching Google, the Web search giant, reimagine itself as a hardware maker.

Both debuts paled in comparison to the company's ramped-up demonstration of Project Glass, a device that puts a camera and a tiny video screen into a kind of eyeglass frame. This involved Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, jumping on stage wearing the device and engaging in a live video chat on Google's social network with a couple of wing-suited sky divers as they jumped out of a plane. They were followed by stunt bikers and rappellers who dropped down the face of the Moscone West convention center, all the while sharing what they were seeing through experimental versions of the glasses.

Brin said Google would make a $1,500 prototype of the glasses - which it calls the Google Glass Explorer Edition - available to developers from the United States who attended the conference. He said the glasses were slated to ship early next year.

Google's focus on hardware is a strategic shift for the company, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Google is likely to sell the Nexus 7 and Nexus Q at cost, or even at a loss, but hopes to make up for those losses - and then some - with additional revenue from purchases made on Google Play, its app and content store; additional traffic to its YouTube video site; and the advertising it reaps from all of its Internet products.

By selling Google-branded devices, the company also aims to protect its core search business as competitors hover. Facebook is deepening its partnership with Microsoft's Bing search engine and Microsoft just announced plans for its own branded tablet. Apple is moving to cut Google out of its mobile and desktop operating systems with its own cloud, search and mapping services.

"Google is a hardware company now," said Colin Gillis, an Internet analyst with BGC Partners. "Hardware is becoming the doorway to products and services. If you're going to use the Internet, you are going to have to use a device. Whoever makes that device controls what services and products are offered to you, and those nickels and dimes add up over time."

Google's Nexus 7 tablet, which will be manufactured by Asus, the Taiwanese hardware maker, features a lightweight design, 7-inch screen and high-definition display. Google priced its tablet at $199, which puts it in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle Fire. The cheapest version of Apple's latest iPad sells for $500.

The Nexus 7 will feature Google's new version of its Android mobile operating system, called Jelly Bean, which was made available to developers Wednesday and will come to some Android devices next month.

Joe Britt, an engineering director at Google, said the Android updates include a simpler and more accurate on-screen keyboard and a smarter auto-correct feature. The new software will also transcribe speech even when the device is not online.

Google showed off a new voice search feature too, aimed at competing with Apple's Siri virtual assistant. In a demonstration, a Google employee asked an Android phone to "show me pictures of pygmy marmosets," which returned images of the very peculiar dwarf monkey.

Google said it now activates 1 million Android devices each day, or 12 devices every second.

The company's Nexus Q streaming music and video device will sell for $299. Google is betting that it can differentiate the Q from competitive products, like the Apple TV, by making it more social. The Q allows any user with an Android phone or tablet - not just the owner - to wirelessly send content to speakers or a television, all over the air.

Ultimately, Google plans to make the Q a portal that will link to other internet-connected devices in the home, such as smart refrigerators, picture frames and light bulbs.

But Google Glass seemed to garner the most excitement from developers at the event. When Brin said Google would begin taking orders for the devices, he drew loud cheers.

Isabelle Olsson, who is leading the design effort for Google Glass, said the idea behind the project was to try and get "technology to get out of the way." She added: "We created Glass so you can interact with the virtual world without obstructing the real world."

Google seems to be realizing that it needs real-world products to connect with its many virtual-world services.

Apple Inc. and book publishers face trial next year in US

The US joined 15 states and Puerto Rico in claiming Apple, CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA's Hachette Book Group, News Corp.'s HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin colluded to fix prices of e-books. US District Judge Denise Cote, who is presiding over the consolidated lawsuits in federal court in Manhattan, set the trial for June 3, 2013.

Apple Inc. and book publishers that haven't settled e-book price-fixing claims will face trial next year in a case filed by the US Justice Department, a federal judge in New York decided.

"Several parties, Apple and DOJ are pushing for a fast trial as fast as can be accomplished that is consistent with justice," Cote said yesterday as she set the nonjury trial with Apple and other defendants that haven't settled.

US antitrust officials have stepped up enforcement against anticompetitive price-fixing agreements in industries including health care and auto parts. Regulators have also increased scrutiny of Cupertino, California-based Apple's digital publishing, mobile computing and music retail businesses to make sure the iPad maker hasn't thwarted competition on its way to becoming the world's most valuable company. Three e-book publishers named in the US government's antitrust lawsuit, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins, settled their cases after the complaint was filed April 11.

A group of 15 states and Puerto Rico filed a similar lawsuit. Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Gary Becker told Cote on Saturday that a settlement with the three publishers and all 50 states would be agreed to by Aug. 10.

"We are in the process of getting the other states to sign on," Becker said. "I think we're off to a good start. I have no reason to believe they won't sign up."

Shepard Goldfein, a lawyer for Harper Collins, told Cote on Saturday that he was confident the accords with the states would "get done." Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, continue to fight the lawsuit.

Apple's digital book-pricing practice may have cost consumers more than $100 million, Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said at a Washington news conference after that suit was filed.

The case is US v. Apple, 12-cv-02826, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network

A new book by a former senior staff member has claimed Facebook, which is supposed to be one of the most dynamic companies in the world, was deeply sexist and stuck in a 1950s mentality that was a cross between a frat house and Mad Men until recently.

Katherine Losse, who worked for Facebook between 2005 and 2010, claims that female workers at the social network were propositioned for threesomes or given crude insults like ‘I want to put my teeth in your ass’ in The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.

Lower ranking employees, who were invariably female, were treated like “second class help” and banned from a conference unless they worked as coat checkers whilst there.

Meanwhile in between toga parties and late night ‘hackathons’, male engineers raced skateboards around desks as if they were in the X Games.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg has been compared to Napoleon and branded a ‘little emperor’ who created a company where his staff could ‘idol worship’ him.

On his 22nd birthday female workers were even asked to wear a T-shirt with his face on it in his honour.

Losse was employee number 51 and worked her way up from customer relations to a senior marketing role before becoming the speechwriter for Zuckerberg.

At its core, she claims that Facebook is all about creating a ‘popular techno frat that didn’t exist at Stanford or Harvard’ where men can engage in endless competition with each other.

“The older men in the office could be unbridled in their wide ranging desires for sex and attention as the youngest ones,” the Daily mail quoted her as writing.

“One of the few married engineers on the team was known by his female colleagues (after he had made several unwelcome propositions to them) to invite lower ranking women at the company to have threesomes with him...

“...When a female employee reported being told by a male co-worker in the lunch line that her backside looked tasty — “I want to put my teeth in your ass” was what the co-worker said — Mark asked (it was hard to tell whether it was with faux or genuine naiveté): ‘What does that even mean?” she wrote.

During an away trip to Las Vegas a group of Facebook engineers filmed themselves inviting girls up to their table in a club then shouting “Leave, you’re not pretty enough!” when they didn’t like them.

The 2007 ‘F8’ conference in San Francisco was open only technical employees but Facebook relented on everyone else - so long as they carried out coat checking duties whilst there.

This meant lower paid employees who were invariably female were treated like ‘second class help’, Losse writes.

The year before Facebook had offered its staff a $1,000 a month subsidy to live within a mile of the office in the belief that it would make them happier.

But until there was an outcry this was only offered to engineers on 80,000 dollars a year salaries.

Customer service workers, which included the few women who worked for the company, were told they could not have it even though they were on just 30,000 dollars a year.

“The company’s entire human resources architecture was constructed on the reactionary model of an office from the 1950s in which men with so-called masculine qualities (being technical, breaking things, moving fast) was idealised as brilliant and visionary whilst everyone else (particularly the nontechnical employees on the customer support team who were mostly female and sometime, unlike the white and Asian engineering team, black) were assumed to be duller, incapable of quick and intelligent thought. It was like Mad Men but real and happening the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress…,” Losse wrote.

“...Facebook it seemed wanted to have it all: to be the new and scrappy kid on the block and have the feel of an old boys’ club that had been around forever,” she added.

It wasn’t until the arrival of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in 2009 that things actually changed.

Google rolling out consumer version of its electronic eyewear

Google Inc though it stopped short of putting a price tag on the "smart" glasses, expects to roll out a consumer version of its electronic eyewear that can live-stream images and audio and perform computing tasks in less than two years.

Google Glass, as the technology is known, will be sold to consumers at a price "significantly" lower than the $1,500 that the company is selling it to US-based software developers from early next year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

Brin showed off the glasses at Google's annual developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, providing the most in-depth public look at the futuristic technology since Google first announced the project in April.

Google also unveiled its first tablet which it will start selling from mid-July for $199, hoping to replicate its smartphone success in a hotly contested market now dominated by Amazon.com Inc's Kindle Fire and Apple Inc's iPad.

Google Glass is a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames which can record video, access email and messages, and retrieve information from the Web.

In a high-octane demonstration of the technology, several skydivers wearing the glasses jumped out of an airship and landed on the roof of San Francisco's Moscone Center, sharing a live video of the stunt with the crowd.

Reporters at a briefing after the conference lined up to try on Brin's personal pair of glasses, where they were able to watch a video of fireworks displayed on the small screen. The perspective in the video shifted as wearers moved their heads to look up, down or sideways.

The glasses, which weigh less than some sunglasses, contain a wireless networking chip and essentially all the other technology found inside a typical smartphone - save for a cellular network radio - Google executives said.

The battery is smaller than a smartphone battery, but Google is working on ways to make the battery charge last for a full day.

Brin said he expects the glasses to be available to consumers less than a year after the developer version is available.

Google is still experimenting with various aspects of the glasses, including potentially providing directions on the screen and the ability to have the glasses speak out text messages, Brin said.

He said, in response to a question, that there are no plans to offer any kind of advertising on the device.

Microsoft buying internet startup Yammer for $1.2 billion

Microsoft is buying internet startup Yammer for $1.2 billion in an attempt to bring Facebook-like sharing features to its widely used suite of business software applications.

Yammer specializes in creating private social networks so employees within the same company can keep tabs on what colleagues are working on. That's similar to how Facebook's online social network allows friends and families to track what's happening in each other's personal lives.

The deal, announced Monday, comes nearly two weeks after word of Microsoft's negotiations with Yammer first leaked out in published reports.

The acquisition represents Microsoft's latest attempt to adapt to a major shift in the technology industry, one that is fueling demand for more Internet-connected services and social-networking tools.

The upheaval is threatening to marginalize Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, and ultimately diminish the amount of money coming in from sales of its Windows operating system and a wide range of applications designed primarily for personal computers.

As part of its effort to remain relevant, Microsoft paid $8.5 billion last year for Internet video chat service Skype in the largest acquisition in its history.

In another bold move, Microsoft last week unveiled its own tablet computer, Surface, to compete with Apple's iPad. Microsoft has designed Surface to run on the upcoming Windows 8, the biggest change to the company's operating system in nearly two decades.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is counting on Yammer's sharing tools to ensure that long-established Microsoft applications, including its word processing and spreadsheet programs, remain vital components for getting work done. Google has emerged as a threat with a toolbox of similar programs that run primarily over the Internet rather than on individual machines.

"Think of Yammer as a fundamental part of our Office family," Ballmer said on a Monday conference call.

Microsoft will have much of the same autonomy given to Skype since that deal closed eight months ago. Yammer will continue to be run from its San Francisco headquarters by its co-founder and CEO, David Sacks. It will also continue to provide its services separately from Microsoft's offerings.

Microsoft did not give a time frame for when the deal should close.

Gartner Inc. analyst Larry Cannell said Microsoft's latest acquisition was smart and reflected "a recognition that the social capabilities in Microsoft's products have been deficient."

Investors couldn't muster much enthusiasm for the deal on another somber day for the stock market. Microsoft's stock fell 82 cents, or nearly 3 percent, to close at $29.88.

Although other companies such as Jive Software and Salesforce.com are building social networks for businesses, Yammer shares the most DNA with Facebook Inc.

When it started in 2008, Yammer raised its initial funding from Peter Thiel - Facebook's first major investor. Thiel formerly worked with Sacks while they were both executives at PayPal, an online payment service that eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002.