Obama's call to his countrymen against outsourcing

Presenting a new economic blueprint with a purpose to take away US from outsourcing, debt and bogus profits. Obama reminded of the economic weakened because of outsourcing earlier and gives a clear sign of taking away the country from outsourcing, emphasizing on an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values. 

Elaborating his stand, he stated, "No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by." Given the two choice, the president prefer to choose the later one where every American gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. 

Opposing the convention of outsourcing, Obama said to his countrymen that without outsourcing America will be a country where we will be in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity will not be so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work will be paid off, and responsibility will be rewarded. Job opportunities will be created for everyone and there will be no more economic crisis.

He also reminded in his speech about why the US is the leader of the world, a country that leads the world in educating its people, a country that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs.

Free calling application, FeePhoo, launched in India

The most popular free mobile phone calling application, FreePhoo has been launched India. Te Sweden based company uses VOIP to make free mobile calls.

The application will enable users to make free calls from their iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android-based phones using the WiFi or 3G network.

As per one of the company co-founder, they are very happy to launch this application in India as it is an important market for them. They expect Indian users to be delighted by their easy-to-use app, its superior sound quality and social features.

On downloading freephoo, consumers can use their mobile number and phonebook to make free calls to other freephoo users. It also allows its user to make calls to people not having freephoo through its premium services with which user can make low priced calls to both fixed and mobile phones.

Currently the application is available for Apple and Android users, but the company is looking forward to expand its services to other mobile phones as well.

Aakash II to hit the market by April 2012

Following the remarkable success of Aakash tablets across the country, government has decided to bring up its successor Aakash-II in april this year. This will be an upgraded version of the previous Aakash tablets with better performance depending upon the user's feedback received.

As per HRD minister Kapil Sibbal, there has been an enormous number of orders for this least cost tablet all over the country and even abroad. Depending upon the feedback received, the government may need to manufacture these tablets in significantly large quantity and for the same cause, HRD minister has asked several other companies to put their effort in manufacturing the same.

We all know that, Sibbal had launched the world's cheapest tablet, Aakash, last year with much fanfare. The device costing USD 35 (about Rs 2,000) was developed as part of the 'The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies (NME-ICT)' of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD).

Quoting the earlier tablet release, government stated a beyond expected market results with about one lakh orders in place.

IBM into development of a 12-atom storage device

Researchers at IBM have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms compared to the present's best one million atoms to store 1s and 0s, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The new achievement is the product of a heated international race between two elite physics laboratories to explore the properties of magnetic materials at a far smaller scale. This could help lead to a new class of nano-materials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will also consume significantly less power and it may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.

As part of its demonstration of the anti-ferromagnetic storage effect, the researchers created a computer byte, or character, out of an individually placed array of 96 atoms. They then used the array to encode the IBM motto "Think" by repeatedly programming the memory block to store representations of its five letters.

The only limitation so far being the fact that research took place at temperatures near absolute zero, but the scientists wrote that the same experiment could be done at room temperature with as few as 150 atoms.

Voice and motion controlled television to enter the market

Ever imagined how remote controlled TV revolutionary reduced the effort needed while operating your home theater. Changing channels, switching from TV to browsing or to games could have been very tough without an infra-red remote. Taking the ease of use to another level, the most discussed electronics gadget giant, Samsung, unveiled a new array of smart TV at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which will be operated by voice, facial recognition and motion gestures. So now you can see and do what you want with your TV without even reaching your TV remote.

This ES8000 TV is powered with a dual core processor to make sure that all the applications your regular TV, a Web browser and apps like Netflix run simultaneously on your TV and you can switch between them without even closing an application. But the coolest part will of course be the control mechanism. Imagine yourself controlling your TV by saying 'Channel 25' or 'Guide'. You can also use gesture controls to control system volume, browsing and switch between one application to other. Giving all this a thought, it will be more like what we see in a sci-fi Hollywood movie.

TV content is accessed through the Smart TV menu which includes other features like "Family Story"(can upload photos and videos from a mobile device to the TV) and special hubs for fitness content and for kids.

Sad part is that, the ES8000, along with most of the other devices Samsung announced Monday, didn't get an exact release date except for "sometime this year."

The story behind birth of top IT brand names

There are a number of IT brand names who have changed the way we live, we work and we communicate. Some were named accidental (followed by some incidents or a part of some fun) and some were intentional (well planned in advance).

If you ever get a chance to name your site or name your organization or for a few of you to start and name your company. I bet you would have surely got a pain in your head finding out the exact name for your organization eliminating other options popping up in your head with equal intensity. Ever worried, how these top IT companies finalized and are so popular with their present names?

Here, we give a brief story behind the birth of some of the most popular tech brand :

APPLE

Very few of you will be knowing the company was named Apple because it was the favorite fruit of its founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock that evening.

CISCO

Most of us believe that it is some abbreviation but its not an acronym. It is short for San Francisco.

ADOBE

This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

COMPAQ

This name was formed by combining the two terms COM, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

COREL

The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

GOOGLE

I am sure, most of you will already be knowing the fact behind this name. For others, the name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google' ...thus the name.

HOTMAIL

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

HEWLETT PACKARD
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

INTEL 
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ' Moore Noyce' but unfortunately that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. 

MICROSOFT

Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on. 

MOTOROLA

Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called  Victrola.

ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company. 

SONY 
It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster. 

SUN
Founded by four  Stanford  University buddies, SUN is the acronym for  Stanford  University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer. 

YAHOO! 
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

Facebook Hacker Cup 2 invites all top coders

If you think your coding skills are world class, then here is an excellent stage to prove the same as a global footprint. Facebook invites you to prove the same the its second annual hacker cup competition.

Facebook thinks in line with the thought that hacking requires the best out of one's coding skills and even the company said at its blog - "Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook." They believe that hacking is the best way to solve problems while achieving major milestones like Facebook Timeline or a smarter search algorithm.

This code war is open to coders anywhere in the world to find out the best coder. The competetion will have five round of programming challenge with the first round kicking off January 20th as a 72 hours qualification round. Before the final round there will be three more online round to limit the finalists count to 25. These finalists will be called upon at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters for a final competition in March. 

The winner here will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Last year, nearly 12,000 programmers participated in the Hacker's Cup and Petr Mitrichev, a Google employee(who ironically was wearing his Google employee badge during the competition.) from Russia, took home the top prize.

Taking it to business prospective, tech companies have an ulterior motive for running hacking contest as it is a great way to find skilled programmers, one of the industry's scarcest resources. Google runs an annual Code Jam contest for the same and our Facebook Hacker cup winner Mitrichev have won this contest as well in 2006.

BioPixel : An innovative display powered by bacteria

Genetically engineered fluorescent bacteria(E. Coli) has been implemented and tested successfully last month as a potential display unit where each pixel(called as bio-pixel), is made up of a colony of bacterias which contains 500 to 1000 such bacterias acting as a light source on a screen.

Bringing it in line with real time display screens, these biopixels are further engineered to form large circuits and even larger components with display powered with as many as 13000 biopixels. As tested, these biopixels were able to detect arsenic by blinking off and on and as a result turning off and on the screen. Though, there is still a big challenge to co-ordinate blinking among these outnumbered glowing bacterias.

Talking positively about the research, Jeff Hasty, a professor at UC San Diego's Division of Biological Sciences and BioCircuits Institute who headed the research, and his team hope that these biological circuits can be used as sensors for pollutants or other hazardous materials. They expect this technology to be used for a long-lasting and cheap environmental sensor with passing time.

No doubt, the project is of high potential and research value. If everything goes as planned, we are likely to witness devices using 100% biological display made up of bacterias in next five years.

A remarkable cut off in android tablet prices

Its not the first when non-Apple tablets are slashing down their rates in the market.RIM is probably the most recent extreme example of tablet price deflation as it cut down its rate by 300$.

But now the second most popular Android tablets are experiencing price cuts right after SONY, wield off its ax on the tablets price reducing the end user cost by 100$. The 16GB Tablet S is now $400, reduced from $500, while the 32GB model got cut to $500 from $600. If you are interested in buying out the same then here you can have the brief specifications of Sony tablets : 

• 9.4-inch 1280x800 display
• Front and rear cameras
• Android Honeycomb
• 1GB system memory
• Eight hours of rated battery life. 

Good news is Sony is not the only one cutting down the android tablets price in recent history. Other popular companies including Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba and Asus have already reduced their popular android tablet prices significantly soon after their release.

There is no doubt the motive behind these price cutting is to boost up their sales and this is probably the reason why it has become a trend among popular tablet manufacturers. Now the most important question is, are these slash-downs good enough to trigger significant consumer demand for these tablets? I guess tablet manufacturers could answer this better.