Microsoft launching Windows10

Windows 10 starts to deliver on our vision of more personal computing, defined by trust in how we protect and respect your personal information, mobility of the experience across your devices and natural interactions with your Windows devices.

Step by step instructions to Repair A Water Damaged Mobile Phone

Figure out how to spare bunches of your cellular telephone once it gets water-logged. following time once your get your cell telephone absorbed water, tea or low, basically remember and take after these direct and straightforward consideration measures.

BlackBerry - Introduces Mobile Advertising Platform

RIM has unveiled the brand new BlackBerry Advertising Service, which will supposedly help developers integrate advertising in their BlackBerry smartphone applications quickly and easily.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Friends or Acquaintances? Ask Your Cell Phone

Your telephone may know more about your private life than you do, according to a new study of mobile phone calls. The insight opens the door to mining massive data sets from mobile phone call logs, which should allow researchers to test theories for how relationship networks make or break businesses, shape the flow of information, and even affect the course of epidemics.



A nagging problem for social scientists is the limitation of self-reported survey data. Not only are people expensive to poll, but they are also notoriously error-prone when they try to recall their own behaviors. What researchers would prefer is a record of people’s behaviors that is cheap and accurate. Mobile phone call logs can certainly provide enormous amounts of cheap data. Researchers have used such data to map out people’s social networks, utilizing the duration and frequency of calls between pairs of people as a measure of the intimacy of their relationships. Doing so has revealed patterns of people’s contact with each other both in time and space, which is crucial for modeling everything from gossip to how flu viruses spread across populations.


But how accurately do call patterns reflect the intimacy of relationships? After all, sometimes the closest of friends rarely call each other, while some motor mouths call just about everyone.


To put telephone data to the test, a team led by Nathan Eagle, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, gave mobile phones to 94 MIT students and faculty members. For 9 months, software on the phones kept track of the volunteers’ location and logged all calls made between these phones. Over the same period, the researchers also gathered social data from the subjects in the traditional way, asking them whether the other subjects were friends, acquaintances, or strangers. Finally, the subjects rated their job satisfaction, which has been shown to strongly correlate with the number of workplace friendships.


Just by analyzing the calling patterns, the researchers could accurately label two people as friends or nonfriends more than 95% of the time. But the results, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mobile phone data were better at predicting friendship than the subjects themselves. Thirty-two pairs of subjects switched from calling each other acquaintances to friends in the traditionally gathered survey data. These are most likely new relationships that formed during the course of the study, say the researchers, and they left a clear signal in the mobile phone data. Friends call each other far more often than acquaintances do when they are off-campus and during weekends. The pattern is so distinct that the researchers spotted budding friendships in the phone data months before the people themselves called themselves friends.


Finally, the team compared people’s self-reported job satisfaction with their networks of friendship at their workplaces. Because the mobile phones kept track of people’s proximity to each other, the researchers had a clear measure of people’s daily contact with friends at work, not only through calls but through physical proximity. As predicted, the more contact people had with friends at their workplace, the more highly they rated their job satisfaction. And conversely, the less face-to-face contact people had with friends at work, the less they said they enjoyed it.


The finding that you don’t have to ask people about their relationships–that just looking at the pattern of their phone calls is sufficient–”is very new,” says Brian Uzzi, a social-network scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The next question is whether the new methods for maintaining contact with friends–such as e-mail and social Web sites–are weakening the need for physical proximity to friends. “It’s a face-off between Facebook and face-to-face contact,” he says, and “it looks like face-to-face contact still matters a lot.”

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

FORUM NOKIA – USID Design Challenge2009

FORUM NOKIA – USID Design Challenge2009



Enrich the lives of the differently-abled,


Get rich!


Do you think you can create a difference to the world with your ideas? Then how about enabling 650 million disabled people?*


Forum Nokia USID Design Challenge 2009 gives you an opportunity to design an aid or a support system using the information and communication technologies (e.g. Mobile Applications, Devices, Services etc.) for the people with disabilities. Empower and Make life easier for the 10% of the world’s population – with a solution/ application that empower mobile devices and runs on finger tips. One that tips the odds in their favor by creating technologies that empower, enable and bring them equal with the rest of the world.


PRIZES


Prizes as per the following will be awarded to the best three entries:


1st Prize: Rs. 50,000/-*


2nd Prize: Rs. 30,000/-*


3rd Prize: Rs. 20,000/-*


*Tax will be deducted as per the Income Tax regulations of Govt. of India.


The prizes will be awarded during the closing event of the USID 2009 which is being planned in September 2008.


The details and schedule for the closing event will be notified to all the winning teams through email/post. The Individual team can decide to collect the prizes themselves by attending the closing event of USID 2009 on their own expenses or can inform USID Foundation about their incapability to attend the closing event. In this case, USID Foundation will make some alternative arrangement of forwarding the prizes to the winning teams. By participating in the design challenge, you agree to be bound by the Official Rules, and the decisions of USID Foundation, which shall be final in all respects. All the entries shall receive participation certificates from the USID Foundation.


IMPORTANT DATES


Registration: August 10th, 2009


Submission: August 30th, 2009


For registration send email to usid_designchallenge@usidfoundation.org with your name and institution/organization.


ENTRIES SUBMISSION PROVISIONS


The teams must submit their deliverables as mentioned below. Incomplete entries will not be taken into consideration.


DELIVERABLES


1. Design Concept Poster ( PDF A3 ), including the following


* Theme Title, Teams details, Institution / organization details


* The problem statement you have taken


* A concise description of the proposed solution


* Clear illustrations of key aspects of your proposed solution


* Compelling, effective visual design


* Prototype


* Acknowledgement of any assistance drawn from outside the student team (advisors, faculty, domain experts, existing solutions, users, etc.)


2. Design Solution Storyboard (PDF, PPS) (if require to explain the concept)


3. Interactive Prototype showing the concept (Optional)


HOW TO SUBMIT ONLINE


The deliverables should be submitted as a single Zip file by 30th August, (6:00 PM GMT) to email ID: usid_designchallenge@usidfoundation.org .The file must be not larger than 10 Mb in size.


TEAM SIZE


Individual or maximum 4 members


JURY AND SELECTION CRITERIA


The entries will be judged by a jury composed of members from (eminent design, technology and User Experience and accessibility professionals) from industry & academia. The Jury will choose three winners who will be awarded 1st, 2nd and 3rd ranks. Each entry will be judged based on the Creativity, Ingenuity, Innovation, Feasibility, Impact & User Experience and Feasibility of implementation.


Disclaimer: This competition shall not constitute a commitment or create a joint venture, partnership, agency or other media or business relationship between the participants and the organizers or judging companies of this competition. This competition shall not either be understood to grant to any participant whether expressly or by implication any ownership, rights or license to any intellectual property rights of any of the organizers, judging companies and vice versa. None of the Information which may be disclosed or exchanged by the parties shall constitute any representation, warranty, assurance, guarantee or other inducement by any party to any other of any kind, and, in particular, with respect to the infringement of any trademarks, patents, copyrights or any other intellectual property rights, or other rights of either party.

Monday, August 3, 2009

India’s GSM subscriber base reaches 315.7 million in June

As per data released by Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI), India’s GSM subscriber increased to 315.7 million in June end. The GSM based operators added about 9 million users in June, up from 8.3 million in May. However, this data does not include user figures for Reliance Telecom.



Bharti Airtel became the first operator to cross the 100-million subscriber mark, ending the month with 102.3 million users. They acquired 2.8 million subscriber base in June.


Source: COAI

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