Generation Next Gadgets

SatNav Technologies has launched a mascot for a range of products and services based on GPS technology. The idea behind the “SatGuide” mascot was to create an image for SatNav Technologies and its many GPS based products and services.
“India has a potential to become the leading destination for multinational GPS companies in Asia, but there is clearly a lack of awareness about the technology and this is proving to be a deterrent. We believe that the “SatGuide” mascot is an initiative that will provide a greater connect with our consumers with better awareness about GPS technology and its applications,” said Amit Prasad, Founder and CEO, SatNav Technologies.
SatNav Technologies is a pioneer in GPS technology in India and offers a wide range of products and services. Over the years, SatGuide (www.satguide.in) has introduced various navigation products like PND, PDA, mobile software and laptop/desktop software, SatTracx Locator services and loggers under the brand name SatGuide.
Major cities are constantly updated by survey and customer feedback, and an additional 200 cities have been added since the previous version of maps. The points of interest are arranged in 42 different categories like airlines, airports, ATMs, among others, for the convenience of the user.

Top phone makers Nokia and Apple will seek a U.S. court hearing in a key patent battle in mid-2012, a court filing showed, raising the spectre of a prolonged legal struggle.
Handset leader Nokia sued iPhone maker Apple last October, accusing the U.S. firm of using its patented technologies without paying for them. Nokia is seeking payment of up to 1 billion euros ($1.36 billion), analysts say. Apple filed a countersuit in Delaware on Dec. 11 accusing Nokia of infringing 13 Apple patents. It later removed four patents from the list. Legal battles are increasingly common in the mobile industry as players vie for a piece of the fast-growing smartphone market. Last week Apple sued Taiwan’s HTC Corp, which makes touchscreen smartphones using Google software, accusing it of infringing 20 hardware and software patents related to the iPhone. The U.S. International Trade Commission has agreed to investigate both companies based on each other’s complaints.

China warned Google, the world’s largest search engine, against flouting the country’s laws on Friday, as expectations grow for a resolution to a public battle over censorship and cyber-security.
The chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, said this week he hoped to announce soon a result to talks with Chinese authorities on offering an uncensored search engine in China. “Google has made its case, both publicly and privately,” China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, said, but did not confirm directly that his ministry was in talks with Google. Google in January threatened to pull out of China if it could not offer an unfiltered Chinese search engine, after cyber attacks originating from China on it and about 30 other firms. “If you don’t respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and the consequences will be on you,” Li told reporters, in answer to a question on what China would do if Google.cn simply stopped filtering search results.
Li complimented Google on having reached about 30 percent market share in the Chinese market since it launched google.cn about three years ago, and said it was welcome to expand market share further if it abided by Chinese law. It was up to Google whether to stay in China’s market or not, he added. Ministry officials have wavered between confirming and denying that talks are happening at all, in response to repeated media questions during China’s annual legislative session. “This is really a hot topic, it’s easy and yet not easy to respond. A lot of these matters don’t fall under my ministry, ” Li said. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shares oversight of the Chinese Internet with a number of other bodies, while still more bureaucracies are involved in matters of foreign investment, complicating the Chinese government’s response to Google’s challenge.

Kaspersky Labs has warned of a surge in Koobface, the highly prolific worm infesting social networking sites.
The malicious program targets sites such as Facebook and MySpace and uses compromised legitimate websites as proxies for its main command and control server.
During the past 2 weeks, the Kaspersky Lab research team has observed the Koobface live C&C servers shut down or cleaned, on average, three times per day. The number dropped steadily from 107 on 25 February, to as low as 71 on 08 March. Then, in just 48 hours, the number grew from 71 to 142, precisely doubling its total number, which all Koobface-infected computers use to get remote commands and updates.
The Koobface command and control infrastructure can be observed when looking at the evolution of the geographical location of IP addresses used to communicate with the infected computers. The usage of C&C servers is increasing mostly in the United Stated, growing from 48 percent to 52 percent. Currently, more than half of the Koobface C&C servers are hosted in the United States, far exceeding any other country.
“These latest happenings give us some indications of how the Koobface gang takes care of its infrastructure, says Stefan Tanase, Senior Regional Researcher, Kaspersky Lab EEMEA. Based on this, we can conclude that the cybercriminals are constantly monitoring their infrastructure status. They don’t want the number of C&C servers to drop too much, as that would mean losing their control over the botnet. When the number of active C&C servers drops to a critical level, they seem to be ready to implement dozens of new ones. The total number of Koobface C&C servers is constantly fluctuating, going from over a hundred to under a hundred and back again in a matter of weeks. It seems that when 100 C&C servers are online, the Koobface gang is relaxed. They also prefer to have their C&C servers distributed across the globe and with different ISPs, in order to make the take-down process harder. However, most of the Koobface C&C servers remain in the United States.”
Kaspersky Lab maintains that its users running any of the Company’s current anti-malware products are fully protected from all known variants of Koobface.

Debates and discussions on the historic women’s reservation bill is buzzing the virtual world too.
Manisha Ahlawat, who created a group “Reality Bites? Would the Women’s Reservation Bill be implemented unbiased?” on popular social networking site Facebook, says: “Seeing more women in the position of power will definitely make more people respect women.
“In rural India where a politician is seen with much respect, imagine when they start seeing women in such powerful positions. It will change the whole outlook towards women. It is all a matter of getting used to women out of homes and kitchens and as decision makers, not mere followers,” she opined.
The women’s bill, which seeks to reserve 33 percent of all legislative seats for women, was passed in the Rajya Sabha Tuesday after two days of unruly scenes. It is expected to be introduced in the Lok Sabha soon.
On social networking platform Orkut, Srishant Sahu, an IT professional, asked: “Do we really need a women’s reservation bill?”
To this Ashima Jain, a student, replied: “I think we are really done with what the political parties can do and should do. If they really had the intent, we should have been able to see the results. Let’s face it, Indian political parties really need this whip (the bill).”
Some slammed the Yadav trio - Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav, Janata Dal-United’s Sharad Yadav and Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Lalu Prasad - for their opposition to the bill in its present form and their demand for a ‘quota within quota’ for Dalits, minorities and backward classes.
“Will it benefit the upper caste women and will it be against minorities? All castes have women, don’t they? When these Yadav chiefs were shouting hoarse against the bill, nobody asked them where are their women? Why have you not fielded female candidates voluntarily and outside your families?” asked Shalu Dev on the discussion board of the group “I support the Women’s Reservation Bill”.
“Maybe we would not have needed this bill in the first place had all the opposing political parties been more sensitive towards the issue in the first place,” added Rakhi.

OnLive is set to launch its “cloud-based” video game service in June, as the closely watched start-up looks to challenge home console heavyweights with the promise of on-demand gaming.
OnLive will roll out to PC and Mac users in the United States on June 17, charging customers $14.95 a month for instant access to games from publishers including Electronic Arts Inc, Ubisoft Entertainment SA and THQ Inc. Users will pay to rent or buy titles through OnLive, but game prices were not announced. A packaged new release generally costs around $60. OnLive Chief Executive Steve Perlman said the service was going to be “disruptive” to the game industry in general and to home console makers Nintendo Co Ltd, Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp in particular. He said OnLive will help publishers by combating software piracy, reducing sales of used titles and improving margins, which are lower on packaged software than they are for titles distributed digitally. “You’re able to deliver games directly from the publisher now to the consumer,” Perlman said at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday. “People have no patience; they want something now.” “OnLive will deliver games run from the so-called “cloud,” meaning they are stored remotely on servers, rather than locally on a PC or a console. It promises lag-free access to games that can be played on nearly any personal computer or television.
OnLive was under stealth development for seven years, and was formally introduced a year ago to much fanfare. Although some question whether the technology will work as promised, if it does, analysts said the service could indeed pose a challenge to console makers. OnLive has data centres around the U.S. filled with servers to handle user demand. Perlman declined to say when the service might roll out to other markets such as Europe. Perlman is well-known in Silicon Valley. He helped launch WebTV, which Microsoft bought in 1997. OnLive’s financial backers include AT&T Inc Media Holdings Inc, Lauder Partners, Time Warner Inc unit Warner Bros, Autodesk Inc and Maverick Capital.

Those below 18 years of age will not be able to purchase cellphone cards under the new rules being enforced by the Bangladesh government.
“Over 200,000 mobile phone connections have so far been cancelled following allegations of various criminal offences, including extortion, issuance of threats, and other forms of harassment,” Home Minister Sahara Khatun told reporters Wednesday.
Over 1.2 million unregistered SIM (subscriber identity module) and RUIM (removable user identity module) cards have so far been blocked.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her nephew and lawmaker Fazle Noor Taposh are among those who recently received threatening SMS messages, The Daily Star reported.
Those who are over 18 must put their national identity numbers on registration forms to become subscribers.
Restrictions were also slapped on getting authority certificates for selling the cards. Applicants for the certificates from service providers must have secondary school certificates and go through police verification.
Bangladesh’s total telephone users stood at around 56 million at the end of January 2010.

Motorola Inc has reached a deal with Microsoft Corp that will put Bing search and mapping services on its phones that use Google’s Android operating system.
Motorola said the partnership with Microsoft means that a Bing bookmark and search widget will be loaded on cell phones, starting in the coming weeks with phones in China. The move follows shortly after Motorola struck a similar deal to let consumers in China use Baidu Inc, among others, as the default Web search instead of Google on Android based phones. The partnerships come against a backdrop of Google’s dispute with China over censorship, which, if it leads to Google withdrawing from the country, could cause big headaches for Motorola. That’s because Motorola is banking on its ties to Google’s Android and its sales in China to help in a big turnaround effort. Having search alternatives on the Android phones should lessen Motorola’s dependence on Google, in China or elsewhere, analysts have said.

With shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups, News Corp’s MySpace, the one-time leader in Internet social networking, has had a rocky year.
Mike Jones, who took over as co-president last month with Jason Hirschhorn, said that even within MySpace some employees have lost the will to keep fighting. “We are at the point now where we need believers,” said Jones, noting that the company has encouraged various individuals not fully committed to the cause to leave and has hired new talent. The need for faith speaks to the scope of the challenge facing MySpace.
With competition from booming social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and Google Inc jumping into the fray, MySpace hopes to become the first social network to regain its mass appeal. At the company’s Beverly Hills headquarters on Monday, Jones and Hirschhorn outlined their plan for the first time since taking the reins as co-presidents. They pulled the curtain back on a new version of the site that will be rolled out in instalments over coming weeks and months. The new site recasts MySpace more strongly around its music and media content, with features such as the ability to listen to a music playlist based on songs that other MySpace users are sharing in their stream of updates. The goal is to spur growth among new users and to lure back users that have departed, says Hirschhorn. “We do not want to stay at 100 million (users) or 120 million. We want to grow to 200 million or 300 million,” Hirschhorn said, though he declined to give a time frame for achieving those numbers. MySpace had 119.6 million unique visitors worldwide in January 2010, down 7.4 percent year-over-year (though up from its November low of 108.1 million), according to ComScore. While those seem like respectable numbers, Facebook says it now counts 400 million active users.
Hirschhorn, a former executive with Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks, joined MySpace in April 2009 as Chief Product Officer, part of a new management team that brought in Jones as Chief Operating Officer and Owen Van Natta as CEO. Less than 10 months later, Van Natta is gone, due to what a source close to the company said was a personality conflict among the trio. Van Natta couldn’t be reached for comment. The two new co-presidents would not comment on the shake-up, but said the revamp of the site now being introduced is in keeping with the strategy all three executives devised over the past 11 months, including the August 2009 acquisition of Internet music sharing service iLike. Analysts say building on MySpace’s strength in music and entertainment is a sensible strategy, though some wonder whether the company will be able to create a unique offering amid a raft of rivals with similar goals, from Yahoo Inc , and music-service Pandora to Facebook. And they warn comebacks are rare in the Web business. “When you look at the other social networks that have faltered, they end up being a special play for a particular culture,” Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Web consulting firm Altimeter Group said on Monday. He cited Friendster, a social networking pioneer that lost ground to Facebook and MySpace and now caters to users in Southeast Asia.
One of the immediate challenges facing the two new presidents is replacing the three-year, $900 million search advertising deal with Google that expires in August 2010. The drop-off in MySpace traffic already has resulted in the company receiving lower-than-expected payments from Google, and analysts say any new deal will be on far less favorable terms.
Jones, who has led negotiations with Google, would not comment on whether MySpace would need to alter its cost structure if the next search deal yields less revenue. But he was confident MySpace wouldn’t have trouble finding a partner or partners, interested in selling ads to its audience. Some analysts also wonder whether MySpace, which News Corp acquired for $580 million in 2005, might be better off on its own as it vies with companies focused strictly on the Web business, many of which are privately-held and under less pressure from shareholders to deliver quarterly results. “For many Internet companies, the most important thing is to be able to be adapt and be quick to move in a rapidly changing market, and sometimes that could be impeded by being part of a larger company,” Ryan Jacob, of the Jacob Internet Fund said on Tuesday. The Jacob Internet Fund does not own News Corp shares. However, Jacob said that the financial support News Corp provides, and the doors it can open to partnerships, could prove helpful to a company trying to rebuild its business. Hirschhorn said MySpace was under no pressure to meet financial goals at the expense of long term strategy. “We’re a business, this isn’t Unicef. Of course we’re focused on monetization,” said Hirschhorn. News Corp’s priority was improving MySpace and rebuilding its audience. “If we don’t improve this product there’s not going to be anything at the end of the road,” he said.

More than 100 Chinese consumers have filed an official complaint against Hewlett-Packard Co over faulty laptop computers, leaving the door open for a lawsuit against the U.S. technology company, a lawyer for the group said on Wednesday.
Jiang Suhua, a lawyer at Yingke Law Firm in Beijing, told Reuters the complaint centred on video cards which overheated and caused the laptop to malfunction. He said that around 170 Chinese sent the complaint on Friday to the country’s quality control watchdog agency, General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. Jiang said the problems dated back as far as 2007 in some cases. Reuters was not immediately able to contact HP officials in Singapore or the United States. Jiang said the group wanted the government to investigate and order HP to recall all faulty laptops in China. “Yes, we can bring it to court, but right now it has not reached that stage,” he said. HP generates more than three-fifths of its revenue outside its U.S. home base. Last month, it said sales from fast-growing emerging countries Brazil, Russia, India and China leapt 41 percent from a year ago.