Oracle sues Google over Java usage in Android

 Oracle has filed a lawsuit against Google, charging that its Android phone software infringes Oracle patents and copyrights related to Java, Oracle said Thursday.

"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman said in a statement.

The suit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco and seeks a jury trial.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.

Panic button app in facebook reported for its behaviour

More than 200 UK Facebook users have reported suspicious behaviour following the launch of a "panic button" application last month, figures show.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which created the app, say the figures represent a seven fold increase in reports.

The application was launched after months of negotiations between Ceop and Facebook, which had resisted the idea.

Facebook welcomed the figures but said there was not one answer to net safety.

BENQ launches portable projector GP1 in India

Benq's GP1 projector

BenQ has pronounced the latest version of its PC-less, lamp-free GP1 Mini Projector in Indian markets. The projector, runs on 3LED technology, has USB video reader and weighs just 640 grams, making it the ultra-light device to be carried along.

The GP1 Mini supports 120% NTSC, 100 ANSI lumens that are backed by digital LED lighting, Wall Color Correction and comes with a default 2W speaker. Considered to be a many at once solutions provider, it comes in handy as a portable home projector easy to be carried around.

It is known to offer a back-up of over 20,000+ hours of light life and comes with an iPod/iPhone dock or via a USB drive.

BenQ states it to be a superior offering than an average 55%-80% NTSC of most projectors. It works wonders especially for photographers, interior designers, realtors, and all those who seek for color precision and brilliance.

The device is priced at Rs. 36,600 (MOP) and is available across all stores.

Google's StreetView monitored by German Govt

The German government said on Wednesday it will scrutinize Google's promise to respect privacy requests by letting people opt out of its "Street View" mapping system and that it would be ready to intervene if necessary.

In a country wary of surveillance due to the Nazis' Gestapo and East Germany's Stasi secret police, the response to Street View has been overwhelmingly negative even though Germans got assurances they can have images of their homes kept out.

Google's announcement on Tuesday that it would allow Germans to stay out of Street View failed to allay fears that privacy would be compromised by the navigation system.

Gmail revamped

Search giant Google has revamped its email service Gmail. The company has overhauled the contact management tool found inside Gmail.

In a blog post Benjamin Grol, Gmail product manager said "An improved Contacts interface has been the number one requested feature from user feedback."
While the core Gmail experience has been changed significantly since its 2004 launch, the Contacts interface has not seen too many changes. The new version of Gmail's contact manager, which Google says is already in the process of going out to users, brings with it a number of changes and addons.

* Mail, Contacts, and Tasks links have moved to the top left of Gmail.

* Compose mail is now a button rather than a link.

Indonesia blocks 4,000 porn sites

The Indonesian government on Wednesday announced that it is blocking access to four million pornography sites on the Internet following continuing calls from the public to protect the nation's youth from the dangers of smut.

The censoring is across the board and encompasses any material deemed pornographic, including nudity, explicit sex whether heterosexual or not, sex organs and pornographic symbols.

Indonesia's Communications and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said the step taken in conjunction with the holy month of Ramadan, was in line with the country's anti-pornographic laws that were passed on October 30, 2008.

"Right this moment, around 90 per cent of such sites are being blocked, we will carry out the blocking exercise in stages until all are blocked," he told a press conference in Jakarta on Tuesday.

These sites have been blamed by the Indonesian public as the cause of the moral decay currently taking place among young Indonesians.

Tifatul added that the move would be retained even after Ramadan and as long as the anti-pornography laws are in force.

Google china's license renewed

China has renewed Google's licence to operate in the country, the search giant announced today.

Writing on the company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said: "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China."

Google – which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic – recently began directing Google.cn visitors to its uncensored Hong Kong site, saying the new approach ensured it stayed true to a commitment not to censor searches from internet users in China.

Solar Plane can fly non stop round the earth

When the Solar Impulse airplane took off on its pioneering round-the-clock flight on Wednesday, the solar panels spread over a wing similar in size to that of an Airbus generated a tiny fraction of an airliner's power.

Each of the prototype's four solar-powered electric propellor motors produces barely more thrust than the flimsy petrol engine that helped the Wright Brothers make history with the world's first powered flight in 1903.

“We're rather far from commercial aviation,” acknowledged Pascal Vuilliomenet of the Swiss federal institute of technology in Lausanne (EPFL), a technical university that is heavily involved in the solar-powered aircraft.

Google drops certain features from chat App in Gmail

Google had rolled out a spruced up Gmail chat interface that brought along Video Chat, Voice Chat and Group Chat shortcuts in Instant Message window. Later, Google discovered issues with new chat design that impacted small number of Google Apps users and hence pulled back the new chat interface. The video, voice and group chat settings already existed but in the menu at the bottom of each chat window.

On the official Gmail Blog, Josh Teague, User Experience Designer at Google, noted that new chat design in Gmail had caused issues with Google Apps users. Hence the chat design update has been pulled back from Gmail and would be rolled out again next week or so after fixing it.

Just ensure that you've downloaded and installed the Voice and Video chat plugin from Google. Stay tuned to your Gmail Inboxes as the new chat design can drop in any time.

Sony J series Laptops with Touchscreen

Song Vaio J Series PC enabled with touchscreen technology launched with advance PC technology and elegant design. Everything on Sony Vaio J Series PC seems to be designed sensibly to give spacious desktop experience and at the same time gives you best 2.6 GHz high speed and unmatched powerful technology combined with new i series Intel processor.

Best thing about Sony Vaio J Series PC is touchscreen monitor and rest everything else we can assemble in our computer personally. Sony Vaio J Series PC touchscreen is measured at 21.5 inches and integrated with high definition LED technology.

Yahoo! to link Facebook updates to its Users

People can now link their Yahoo! and Facebook accounts to view and share updates, a move that will enable the search engine to reach out to a wide audience in the social networking space with its sites and services.

The partnership between the two online majors, announced in December last year, will help Yahoo! add networking features like status update and news feed from Facebook on its services like mail, messenger, Pulse, News, Sports and Finance services.

Samsung Galaxy Tab details leaked

After Apple released the iPad, there has been a flurry of activity in the tablets market with many devices like LG'S UX 10, Asus' EeePad  and MSI's Windpad.

Looks like Samsung Electronics too is inching towards making a tablet of its own and images of the same have already been leaked across the Interweb. We are talking about the Galaxy Tab tablet that Samsung tweeted about from its official South African Twitter account.

Apple - world's Biggest tech company

The computer giants Microsoft and Apple have been arch rivals for years. But now Apple has finally streaked past its competitor to claim the crown as the world's biggest technology company.

It's a massive coup for the firm. The huge success of their iPods, iPhones and now their iPads means Apple's now worth one hundred and fifty two billion pounds, around two billion more than its rival.

Facebook's New & simple Privacy settings

After facing criticism for introducing the 'Instant Personalization' feature that altered Facebook users' privacy settings, Facebook started tightening up the security on its site and has announced new, simpler Privacy Setting features.  Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in a blog post on the official Facebook blog, noted that the new changes will make privacy controls a lot simpler. These changes would be introduced in the coming weeks.

Facebook had tightened security after facing heat from users and critiques. Zuckerberg, in the blog post, states that the new privacy settings focus on three things: single control for user's content, more powerful control of user's basic information and easy control for turning off applications. Firstly, users would get a simpler control pane wherein they'd be able to choose who can view the content posted.

Atlantis last flight successful

 The space shuttle Atlantis touched down Wednesday at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, bringing an end to its last scheduled mission.

The landing marks the likely end of Atlantis’ 25 years of space flight as NASA retires the ageing space shuttle fleet.

Only two further missions, by the Endeavour and Discovery shuttles, are planned by the US space agency NASA before those vessels are also taken out of service. The last shuttle flight is set for November.

Samsung to Launch first smartphone running on its properiatory OS

Samsung Electronics plans to launch the first smartphone based on its own operating system in coming weeks, as it seeks to catch up with bigger rivals in the booming high-end market, an executive said.

"You need a proprietary system to drive growth in the smartphone market and bada will do the job, as it is designed to support all segments from low to high end," Lee Ho-soo, head of Samsung's smartphone operating system, said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Bada, which means ocean in Korean, is at the heart of Samsung's drive to emulate success by the likes of Apple and RIM in the fast-growing smartphone market, develop new revenue sources from its own Samsung App store, and create synergies with other businesses such as its TV business, which is the world's biggest.

LiMo expects new Models based on its mobile platform

Wireless Linux group LiMo expects three major operators to offer handsets using its platform this year, to compete with news rivals Google and Apple, its executive director said. So far only Vodafone has launched a model in Europe, using its Linux-based operating system, while 60 handsets were launched using the platform, mostly in Japan and South-Korea.

"The first one was Vodafone and three other carriers will follow this year," Morgan Gillis, Executive Director at LiMo foundation, said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

He said three companies from the group of France Telecom, Telefonica, Verizon or SK Telecom would introduce new models using the alternative operating system by the end of this year.

Hotmail Revamped

Is your email inbox a virtual mall — a one-stop shop for all your web needs and operations? Going by the latest upgrades rolled out by Microsoft for its free email client Hotmail, and Google's attempts to steal its thunder by providing API that allows third-party applications to integrate with Gmail, the focus has shifted from storage and in-built messengers to making your inbox the centre of your web universe.

So earlier this week, Hotmail — that old email client that introduced many of us to the world of instant communication — got a makeover. Years after the email client with a proud Indian connection (courtesy, founder Sabeer Bhatia) gave way to younger, roomier and feature-rich email client Gmail, Microsoft appears to have pulled out of its hat an upgrade that is in keeping with the times.

Flash 10.1 for Android to be released soon

Google used the announcement of the availability of Flash Player 10.1 for Android 2.2 to get in plenty of side swipes at Apple, but it didn't go into any detail about what you get in Flash 10.1 – or how you get it.

What Google showed at Google IO was a "pre-beta build, not the final product release," Adobe director of technology strategy for partner development Anup Muraka . "However it's a really solid technology base and it's going to play a lot of content."

"The goal for this release is that most existing Flash content should just work," says Muraka. "We acknowledge that not all content is going to behave the same; some content will work better than others. You can't expect high bit-rate HD video to work perfectly on a small screen smartphone over a 3Gnetwork- but we're still seeing good performance for video playback."

Cattle manure to power Datacenters soon

Hey diddle diddle. Guess what the cow has done this time? America's dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft.

While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centers in more rural locales, and dairy farmers' efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel. With the right skills, a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years, Hewlett-Packard engineers say in a new research paper.