The Japanese have developed a mobile phone that can be used as a kind of tracking device for employees.

The BBC reports to the technology comes from the phone company KDDI Corp, who have developed a way to track employee activities using accelerometers and analysis software, and then send the info straight back to the boss.

Employers using the phones to secret agent on their employees would be able to tell if any of them were slacking or doing anything else for that matter even though that’s not quite the way the phone is being marketed.

“Technically, I believe this is an extremely important innovation,” says Philip Sugai, director of the mobile consumer lab at the International University of Japan.

“For example, when practical to the issue of telemedicine, or other situations in which remotely monitoring or accessing an individual’s personal activities is vital to that service.

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At the moment, enthusiastic gamers have to pay out a small fortune for a gaming console such as an Xbox or PlayStation and then purchase the required software to play the games.

OnLive does away with the need for a comfort as the games are held in the cloud so to talk and are streamed directly to a user’s computer or other device.

“OnLive breaks the console cycle. We don’t require new hardware devices,” said Onlive’s founder Steve Perlman.

Got to confess that’s a big plus. On the whole by doing away with the need for hardware that needs to be upgraded every few years, more people will be able to afford to play for a found.

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Charlie Kindel who is a member of Microsoft’s Windows 7 development team says it is in order to permit the new operating system, which is due out afterward this year, to be as user friendly as possible.
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“Intended for us, the cost of going from good to huge is a clean break from the past” said Kindel.

“It’s dissimilar from what we’ve done in the phone space before and it’s different from other phones” he says.

It’s an determined but risky move on Microsoft’s part but then again I suppose if they want to stand out from the throng and compete on a serious level in the increasingly popular SmartPhone world they have to do something diverse, which they have, they started from scratch.

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Most of the respondents who had Internet access supposed that the Internet has had a positive impact on their lives with four out of five saying it had brought them greater freedom. On the other hand what about those who haven’t got access?

“The right to exchange a few words cannot be ignored” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News. “We have enter the knowledge society and everyone must have right to use to participate”.

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You can send and receive small payments by means of a Facebook application called Buxter and the company behind Buxter that will process the transactions is online payments company ClickandBuy.

Setting it up is effortless. If you already have a ClickandBuy account, and millions of people crossways the globe do, then all you have to do to take advantage of the service is set up your Buxter account on Facebook.

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If you haven’t, Rickrolling is a famous Internet prank that originated back in 2007 on the 4chan forum and by 2008 had turn out to be a global phenomenon.

The joke concerned tricking someone into clicking on a link that appeared to be incredible else but which took the spectator to a page where instead of what the viewer was expecting, they were obtainable with a YouTube video of 80’s song ‘Never Gonna Give you Up’ which thrust unsuspecting 80’s singer Rick Astley back into the attention.

Well now the days of Rickrolling are all but over as YouTube has detached the original Rickrolling video due to “terms of use violation”. The video by the way had amassed tens of millions of hits in its time.

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International security organizations contain updated and rationalized a list of 25 common programming errors that cause security vulnerabilities and depiction software users to cyber attack.

The US-funded association project, which is managed by the Mitre and Sans Institute and brings mutually security experts from more than 30 global organizations, first compiled its list of 25 risky coding practices in January 2009.

The arrangement of the list has been customized to make it easier to use by distinguishing mitigations and general secure programming principles from more concrete weaknesses, the organizations said.

This year’s top 25 entries are priorities using inputs from more than 20 organizations, which evaluated each weakness based on prevalence and meaning.

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Mobile phone traffic will rise by a factor of 50 as the mobile phone industry attracts three billion new mobile broadband subscribers and delivers billions of new content-rich applications, says Hans Vestberg CEO of mobile phone maker Ericsson.

Vestberg told delegates at the Mobile World Congress that the industry’s future success depended on applications and sorting out problems, somewhat than technology.

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By Charles Babcock
InformationWeek

Open source code firm WSO2 has launched WSO2 Business Activity Monitor to give visibility into services oriented architecture-based services, transactions, and workflows.

WSO2, which translates roughly as oxygen for Web services, is bent on building out a portfolio of lightweight, Web services-based middleware which companies can use to build integrated services architectures. It is OSGi framework based software that follows a set of standards that make it easier for remote software objects to work together.

The Business Activity Monitor produces event-based metrics, such as server response times and data polled by a periodic query to a running system. The information about an enterprise service or system, such as an enterprise service bus, is gathered and collated for presentation to a system administrator.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2, said in the announcement that services were proliferating in enterprises, including those that integrate with legacy systems. But “business insight into these workflows is often limited,” as software events move across new services and legacy systems. The WSO2 Business Activity Monitor offers information on those integrated services so that “IT and business users have up-to-the-moment views across their entire infrastructure,” he said.

The monitor can produce alerts when a deviation from a key performance indicator occurs. The monitor will work with Microsoft SQL Server, the open source MySQL system owned by Sun Microsystems, and open source H2, or Hypersonic 2, by Thomas Mueller.

The information gathered by the monitor is presented through an enterprise portal server, WSO2 Gadget Server, which displays customizable dashboards to end users. Gadgets in the dashboards can analyze and display the information in standard or user-customized ways.

The Gadget Server is based on the Apache Software Foundation’s Shindig project, the reference implementation for Google Gadgets and OpenSocial specifications. Google Gadgets are simple JavaScript and HTML applications that can be embedded in Web pages to produce spreadsheet functions, a calendar, or a clock. OpenSocial is a Google API using JavaScript and HTML that lets developers build social networking functions that work across multiple Web sites.

WSO2 is trying to include ease-of-use features in its Gadget Server portal, making it possible for freely available display devices, such as colored heat indicators, charts, and counters, to be built into Gadget Server and used to display business process information. “Giving business a dashboard into the core enterprise systems is one of the most effective uses of a well-designed SOA,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, in the announcement. “Gadget Server is defining the next generation of portals,” he claimed.

Both products are available immediately as free downloads from the WSO2 Web site under the Apache open source license or as an Amazon Machine Image virtual machine running in the Elastic Compute Cloud. They also run under VMware’s ESX Server hypervisor.

WSO2’s revenue flows from technical support for its product line along with consulting services on product training and implementation.

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