Apple Brings New Mac Pro to India

Apple has introduced new updated Mac Pro machine in India along with its revised desktop Mac line up. The new Mac Pro comes equipped with a quad-core Intel Nehalem chip along with an updated system architecture and graphics. Apple offers the new Mac Pro in two variants: quad-core Intel Xeon version and two quad-core Intel Xeon version.

The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac one ever with Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture-based quad-core 64-bit Xeon processor with 8MB shared L3 cache. Now one can add up to 32GB DDR3 memory modules for wider memory bandwidth.

Intel's Xeon chips pack in an integrated memory controller which allows using DDR3 memory. The basic Mac Pro version comes equipped with Quad-Core 2.66GHz Intel Xeon processor and 3GB DDR3 1066GHz RAM. While the other version comes with two Quad-Core 2.26GHz Intel Xeon processors with 8MB shared L3 Cache per processor and 6GB DDR3 1066GHz RAM.

Apple allows adding up to four Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics card with GDDR3 video memory and offers an option of ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card with 512MB GDDR5 video memory. Also, Mac Pros can now support up to eight 30-inch displays with four Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics cards.

Mac Pro come with a 640GB SATA HDD 7200RPM storage capacity that can be updated to 1TB SATA 7200RPM HDD. The Mac Pro also features 18x SuperDrive with double layer support and three PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots for 16-lane cards.

The price of quad core Mac Pro starts from Rs. 1,42,700 while the 8-core Mac Pro version starts from Rs. 1,88,900. Apple said the new Mac Pro models will be available within six weeks from today through its authorised resellers.

RCom Launches 'Fastest' Broadband Service

With downlink speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps and uplink speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps, Reliance Communications' Netconnect Broadband Plus is said to be India's fastest wireless internet service.

Netconnect Broadband Plus service will be available in 35 cities with seamless handover to high speed 1x service covering 20,000 towns and 4.5 lakh villages.

The service, which has been launched in two Plug and Play USB device variants, will be available in retail outlets from March 17 onwards.

The company will offer the service, starting at a monthly subscription charge of Rs. 299, offering complete freedom to pay on use basis. The company will also offer an Unlimited Night plan at Rs. 499 per month.

Reliance Communications says it is targeting a potential 15 million users (includes six million laptop users, 1 million 1X CDMA Datacard users and eight million home PC users) across India for its wireless broadband service.

Now, robots that monitor autistic kids' emotional state

Robot playmates may soon be able to help autistic kids learn the social skills that they naturally lack, courtesy the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child's emotional state.

"There is a lot of research going on around the world today trying to use robots to treat children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has shown that the children are attracted to robots, raising the promise that appropriately designed robots could play an important role in their treatment," says Nilanjan Sarkar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University.

"However, the efforts so far have been quite limited because they haven't had a way to monitor the emotional state of the children, which would allow the robot to respond automatically to their reactions," Sarkar added.

Over the last five years, Sarkar has developed a method that uses physiological measurements, including heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature and muscle response, to monitor the emotional state of individuals.

His original motivation was to improve human-robot interactions. However, when his nephew was diagnosed with autism, Sarkar got the idea of applying the technique to aid children with ASD.

Sarkar teamed-up with Wendy Stone, professor of paediatrics and investigator at Vanderbilt's Kennedy Center, to develop this new approach.

In a study of six teenagers with ASD, Sarkar attached a battery of physiological sensors to the participants and let play Pong or Nerf basketball with his robot.

He found the physiological data gathered could be used to develop an affective model for each individual that was able to predict emotional states of liking, anxiety and engagement with an accuracy of better than 80 per cent.

Furthermore, he found that this information can be used in real time to alter the game configuration in ways that significantly increase the children's degree of engagement.

"Children with autism are not necessarily giving the kind of emotional cues that we know how to read. They are not necessarily good reporters of their inner feelings. If we know that the child is becoming upset or anxious, then we can help the child identify his or her own emotional state and implement strategies for monitoring and control. It is a concrete way to help them identify their own feelings," Stone said.

Sarkar and Stone published two papers - one in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and one in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. (ANI)

software that allows laptops to shout for help when stolen!

Scientists have developed a computer program that allows laptops to shout for help if they have been stolen.

The program, called Retriever, has been developed by a software company called Front Door Software Corporation, reports the Telegraph.

Retriever enables users to display alerts on the missing computer's screen and even to set a spoken message such as a shout or a warning.

Tracking software for stolen laptops has been on the market for some time, but this is understood to be the first that allows owners to activate recorded messages, according to The Times.

Owners must report their laptop missing by logging on to a website, which sends a message to the computer, triggering on-screen messages of warning to the thief and voice alerts.

The 21-pound software, designed by the Colorado-based firm, also collects information if the stolen laptop is being used to access the Internet so that the police can be alerted to its location. (ANI)

LG's Weapon: Netbooks

Korea--In the U.S., consumer electronics maker LG Electronics is best known for its cellphones and flat-screen TVs. By this summer, the company hopes to make a name for itself in PCs too.

LG's weapon of choice is a netbook or compact, low-cost notebook computer. The company currently offers two 10-inch models, the X110 and X120. The X110 debuted last fall and is available in most major markets around the world, except the U.S. The X120, which was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona in February, is scheduled to go on sale in Europe later this month.

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LG hasn't publicly announced U.S. release dates for either netbook. But Skott Ahn, the president and chief executive of LG's mobile communications unit, recently told Forbes that the X110 will be available in the U.S. before July. The device's unsubsidized price will be around $400.

Ahn says LG is fascinated by the rapidly evolving netbook market. "A lot of experiments are taking place to come up with something between smart phones and laptops," he notes. "There is a gap, for sure, between the two categories, so we are experimenting to see which products fit our customers' unmet needs."

Among the questions LG is trying to answer: What these exact needs and "pain points" are; which form factors and applications it should adopt in its netbooks; and how to target customers without cannibalizing its cellphone business.

LG plans to increase netbook sales worldwide, according to spokeswoman Judy Pae. "We expect the global market for netbooks will show continuous growth," she adds.

Netbooks aren't the only new gadgets on LG's agenda. The company is also rushing to build smaller mobile Internet devices known as MIDs, or mobile Internet devices. In Barcelona last month, LG announced that it is collaborating on a range of MIDs with chip maker Intel. Those devices are scheduled for 2010.

The new initiatives tap into an ongoing major trend in consumer electronics--convergence between the PC, cellphone and TV. Ahn believes that smart phones, MIDs and netbooks will be the "representative products" for convergence this year.

Will consumers respond? LG will have plenty of competition among leading PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo as well as netbook specialists like Taiwan's AsusTek. Rival Samsung has its own line of well-received netbooks, the NC 10 and NC 20, and has already cracked the U.S. market with retailers like Amazon.com. Nokia's chief executive recently said the company may enter the laptop space too.

LG may look to partnerships to make it stand out. Its X110 and X120 sport typical netbook features, including a compact size (2.6 pounds), 10-inch display Intel Atom chip set and Windows XP Home software. The newer X120 boasts some upgrades, such as twice the storage (160 GB) and "Smart-On" technology that enables users to activate the device and access the Web and other frequently used applications within five seconds.

Ultimately, though, it is the X110 and X120's most cellphone-like feature--built-in 3G connectivity--that set them apart from other netbooks. LG's netbook strategy, Pae says, is to "offer greater value [by providing] easy connectivity for user convenience [and] ... create synergy with its mobile product line."

That is a clue that LG will leverage its wireless industry relationships to launch the devices in the U.S. Pae says the company is in talks with "several distribution channels," including mobile operators. In other words, you may find an LG netbook at your local carrier soon.

Mobile connections surpass 4 bln mark worldwide

The number of connections on mobile phone networks has crossed the 4 billion mark worldwide, industry association GSMA said on Wednesday, forecasting further growth to 6 billion by 2013.

The number of connections does not translate directly into the number of users, however, because in many mature markets, one user may have two mobile phones, or a phone and a mobile data device, which would both count as two connections.

In Western Europe, about a fifth of connections are estimated to be due to one user having more than one device, a figure that probably applies to many developed markets, a GSMA spokesman said.

In developing countries, by contrast, phones are often shared.

In the run-up to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona -- the wireless industry's biggest trade show which starts next Monday -- the GSMA said some 100 million connections were "mobile broadband" connections. This refers to mobile data connections using the high-speed HSPA standard.

The figure reflects the popularity of "dongles" which connect laptops to the Internet via mobile phone networks, as well as phones with high-speed data connections made by Nokia or HTC or the latest version of Apple's iPhone.

Orange seeks to broaden appeal of mobile data

Telecoms operator Orange wants to generate at least a fifth of its mobile sales from data services in the next few years, up from about 6 percent now, and will tempt consumers with offers for particular interest groups.

"We have had good growth of non-voice, non-SMS services, but really on the back of a short tail of customers, said Olaf Swantee, the head of mobile at Orange, which is the main brand of France Telecom.

"A small group of customers pretty much use the entire data of the network --the iPhone users, the Blackberry users, the smartphone users."

In saturated western European markets where nearly every consumer has a cellphone, selling mobile data services is one way operators can still produce top-line growth.

As example of one of the new services Orange will offer, Swantee cited a deal for consumers that use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace a lot.

Orange and LG, the supplier of the phone, developed custom applications that were coupled with a data plan with unlimited access to social networking sites. It substantially boosted usage in that segment, he said.

"Orange today has close to 180 million customers, and 90 percent of those customers are not really using the mobile Internet," Swantee told Reuters ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry's biggest annual gathering.

"With this new approach, we believe we can get non-voice revenue up from 6 percent to over 20 percent of mobile revenue in the next couple of years."

Following the runaway success of Apple's AppStore that lets users buy and install thousands of iPhone programmes at the touch of a button, Orange will launch a similar online store from May across its European markets.

Orange's widgets -- small software programmes -- will give users easy access to online content or services they are interested in, for instance weather reports or news updates, the company said.

It plans to open the platform to third-party developers to give consumers more choice.

Nokia and Microsoft are rumoured to be among those planning to launch similar stores.

Mobiles phones may run future economy

London, January 31 (ANI): While cellphone credit-the transfer credit between phones with a simple text message-has partly replaced cash to in some parts of the African continent, a paper now predicts that more economic functions will soon come to be carried out through mobiles.

The paper has been submitted to a workshop on the future of social networking organised by W3C, the body in charge of global web standards.

It says that the next step is to give cellular phone users the equivalent of social networking websites like Facebook.

Gloria Ruhrmund, a South Africa-based mobile social media consultant, envisages that combining social network-style services with existing mobile credit transfer systems may further take over from traditional banking systems.

According to her, such mobile social networks may provide new routes to pay salaries, provide health advice, mobilise voters, and to connect and educate isolated communities.

Some social mobile tools, such as instant messaging service NokNok, are already established in Africa, reports New Scientist magazine. (ANI)