Google Pays Tribute To 'Miriam Makeba' With Doodle

• Miriam Makeba, the South African chanteuse renowned for her collaborations with Calypso king Harry Belafonte and folk legend Paul Simon on his the tours of seminal world music album Graceland in 1987, received tribute from Google in the form of a doodle on her 81st birthday.

Watch Today's Google Doodle

A newly discovered asteroid about half the size of a football field will pass nearer to Earth than any other known object of its size on Friday, giving scientists a rare opportunity for close-up observations without launching a probe.

New Morzilla Firefox With Windows-8 Style

Mozilla originally showed off its Metro style Firefox browser for Windows 8 back in October, but the company has started to distribute it in the latest nightly builds this week. Like Chrome, with Firefox for Windows 8 you'll need to set the browser as the default one to access the "Metro style" version. This allows Firefox to run in Microsoft's new Windows 8 environment.

Yahoo Dispatching It's Chat Room Services On December 14Th

Yahoo announced that it is cutting down on some of the Yahoo Messenger features such as public chat rooms, Windows Live Messenger support, Pingbox on december 14 and will not be offering Yahoo! Voice Phone In and Phone Out services by January 30th, 2013.

How Google's Spanner Database Runs With Atomic Clocks And GPS

Google's Spanner database is designed to operate seamlessly between data centers around the world, keeping data synchronized across time and distance. To manage the global database and keep it running smoothly, the company had to invent its own reliable way of keeping time consistent between its servers. To accomplish this task, Google created the TrueTime API, a system that uses atomic clocks and GPS receivers in each Spanner data center to keep time consistent between its servers. Head over to Wired for the full story on Spanner from Google's engineers.

Google's Indoor Maps Now Available On Desktop And iOs

Google Maps has featured internal floor plans of malls, airports, and other popular hot spots for some time now, but only on the Android mobile app. Now, the company is rolling out the same functionality on desktops, just in time for Black Friday shoppers to plan their trip to the mall before leaving home.

Internet Explorer 10 Preview Finally Available For Windows 7

Aside from Microsoft's unilateral decision to enable Do-Not-Track by default, the most controversial thing about Internet Explorer 10 may have been its limited platform support. Except for its first couple of previews, the browser has remained compatible only for flavors of Windows 8. Today though, Microsoft has released their first Windows 7 compatible preview of IE10.

When IE10's first preview was birthed in April, its release notes indicated it would only be compatible with Windows 7 and up -- Vista and XP users be damned. Microsoft seems to have a habit of doing this kind of thing, but -- oh well -- that's just the way it is.

After IE10's June developer preview arrived, Microsoft seemingly abandoned Windows 7 users, supporting only Windows 8 from then on. Fast forward to recent times and IE10 is bundled with Windows 8, but Windows 7 users have remained in the lurch. Sure, we've known since April that IE10 would be available for Windows 7 but of course the problem was no one really knew when. We learned in October that Microsoft was getting very close to releasing its Windows 7 version in "mid November" and it appears that rumor spot on.

Microsoft has been mum in regards to when Windows 7 users can expect the finalized version of IE10. However, if the lag time between past IE previews and final releases serve as an indicator, we can probably expect the final version to hit Windows 7 in spring 2013.

Doodle 4 Google

Search engine Google today displayed "A Prism of Multiplicity", an award winning doodle designed by Chandigarh teenager Arun Kumar Yadav.

More than 100 million people across India will take a dekko at an Indian emblem, a winning Google doodle, on the search engine's homepage on


Children's Day November 14, the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister.
The doodle, "A Prism of Multiplicity" showing a soccer player, a kathakali dancer, gold jewellery, a peacock, a farmer and flowers, was designed by Arun Kumar Yadav, a teenager and a student from Chandigarh.

Yadav was declared winner of the Doodle4Google contest, which received 200,000 submissions from 60 Indian cities.

The competition was judged by a two-member jury comprising cartoonist  Ajit Ninan and actor Boman Irani.

"The theme for this year's competition was 'Unity in Diversity'.


The Doodle4 Google competition was instituted four years ago to encourage children to take up creative work, Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director, Google India, said.

"We are also promoting art awareness through Google. The search engine has tied up with 41 countries under the Google Art Project to bring the best world art to more than two billion Internet users. Art is the least accessible of all other genres," Anandan said.

Google Engineer Designs Air Suction Scanner

For the past eight years, Google has been working on digitizing the world’s 130 million or so unique books. While the pace of new additions to the Google Books initiative has been slowing down, members of the team have come up with a new automated scanner design that could both make the project much more cost efficient and give everyone with $1,500 and a little know-how access to a page-turning scanner of their very own. In the video below, Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh presents the prototype design that he and other teammates created during the "20 percent time" that Google (and now Apple, among others) allocates for personal projects, showing the design challenges he overcame along the way.

The scanner uses air suction from an ordinary vacuum cleaner to isolate individual pages, scanning the front and back in one pass along the device's prism-shaped body. After a quick 40-second setup, it can digitize a 1000-page book in a little over 90 minutes (although that could be easily improved with a faster motor), and unlike many popular scanners on the market it doesn’t require anyone to operate it once it’s been set in motion. But what makes the project really intriguing is that all of the plans have been open sourced with open patents, meaning you’re free to experiment, build on Qumsiyeh’s design, and even sell derivative scanners without worrying about Google’s army of lawyers swooping down on you. And with half of Qumsiyeh's $1,500 price tag being eaten up by the scanner he tore apart for parts, we'd say there's still a lot of room for optimization.

Google Moves Forward In Designing Its Search Engine

Google has unveiled a new design for its search results page that gives more real estate to its Knowledge Graph results and makes the look and feel on desktop computers consistent with those on smartphones and tablets. In a nutshell, the new layout shifts the advanced search options from the left sidebar to the horizontal bar above results where options to search verticals like Images, News and Maps are located.

The advanced search tools themselves aren’t changing. Clicking on the “Search tools” link brings up virtually the same options as before, allowing you to filter results by date ranges and a handful of other criteria (sites with images, related searches, nearby, translated foreign pages, etc.).
Google says the new search results page will be available only to users in the US initially, with a gradual roll out to other languages and regions coming as soon as possible. A quick browse to Google.com shows the new design is live even for users outside the US, however.

Here's the full announcement:

"You’ll notice a new simpler, cleaner design on the search results page — we’ve been working on ways to create a consistent search experience across the wide variety of devices and screen sizes people use today. We started with tablets last year, got it to mobile phones a few weeks ago, and are now rolling out to the desktop.

With the new design, there’s a bit more breathing room, and more focus on the answers you’re looking for, whether from web results or from a feature like the Knowledge Graph:
t’s going out to Google.com users in the U.S. to start, and we want to get it to users in other languages and regions as soon as we can. We hope you enjoy this design refresh — let us know what you think on our Google+ page."

Windows 8 Beats Android

Data from Internet traffic analytical firm StatCounter reveals that Windows 8 has overtaken Android with regards to web traffic. It’s an impressive feat given the fact that Microsoft’s new operating system has only officially been available for less than two weeks.

Judging by the traffic analysis chart above, we can also see what Windows 8 tallied a decent amount of web traffic even before the October 26 launch date. This of course is due to a few different reasons. It’s likely that some users are still running the Release Preview of Microsoft’s operating system that was first made available for download on May 31.

Even more likely, however, is the fact that the final RTM build of Windows 8 was made available for download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers in mid August. There’s no doubt that a number of enthusiasts picked up a copy of the new OS at that time.

Today's Google Doodle Niels Bhor 127Th Birthday

A million active users isn’t cool. You knOw October 07, 2012 Google created a google doodle to celebrate Danish physicist Niels Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) 127th birthday who received Nobel Prize for his contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics in 1922. to connect the rest of the world too."

Books Of NIELS BHOR

The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr - Collected Works (2008, thirteen volumes)

Facebook Reaches One Billion users

 A billion active users… and Facebook has just crossed that milestone as revealed in a short post by the company’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. To put that into perspective, the world’s population is thought to be over seven billion as of 2012, which means roughly 14 percent of all humans are accessing the social network each month.

Along with the announcement, Facebook also released a fact sheet with some interesting metrics for the occasion. All in all they’ve seen over 1.13 trillion likes since launching in 2009, 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photo uploads, 17 billion location tagged posts, and 62.6 million songs played 22 billion times. The median new user age is "about 22," down from 23 two years ago, and 600 million users are accessing Facebook via mobile.

Despite its monumental growth Facebook has had its share of troubles too, from a handful of lawsuits settled out of court to the never-ending concerns over user privacy. Most recently, the company has dealt with the negative press of its lackluster initial public offering and the rapid share price decline that came as a result.

Monetization and mobile are still somewhat of a question mark for Facebook’s future, but with one billion active users and still growing the company is certainly in a privileged position and that’s not likely to change soon.

Here’s the announcement posted by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg:

"This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. If you're reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. 

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too."

Facebook,Youtube Banned In Kashmir

The Internet-service providers have blocked social networking websites such as YouTube and Facebook in Kashmir. The companies have reportedly blocked GPRS facilities on the mobile phones as well. According to reports, the government had imposed a ban last week in a bid to prevent any untoward incident during the possible protests in the state against the recent anti-Islam video on YouTube.

According to an IBN Live report, the Jammu & Kashmir had ordered the service providers to make sure that the controversial hate video on YouTube was not accessible from the state. The order was released by the state Home Department, invoking the powers conferred under section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act 1885.

The service providers have confirmed the government ban on the social networking websites. Kashmir Watch in its report cites reply of a customer care executive of Airtel: “You will not be able to access Facebook and YouTube because the sites have been banned in Jammu and Kashmir. The services will be restore only after the ban is lifted, but we cannot be sure when that happens.”

The move to ban social networking is receiving severe crticism as the general public was not made aware about it in advance. Also, people have expressed unhappiness over not being able to access e-mail and BlackBerry services. “Never has it happened in the past. We are facing huge problems in the communication due to the slow functioning of the service. We had also enquired from the officials of the BSNL but they are not taking our word seriously,” says a delegation of businessmen.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GOOGLE

Google celebrates its 14th birth anniversary with an animated doodle on its home page. The doodle features a cake with 14 candles, and below that, portions of a chocolate cake, which together form the word “Google”.

Google, now a dominant Internet company, was started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996. The company filed for Inc. on September 4, 1998 and booked Google.com domain on September 15, 1998. The company later chose to celebrate its birthday on September 27, most probably to avoid being too close to the tragic September 11 event. Google, however, says it's just “whenever they feel like eating cake.”

On its 13th birthday, Google's doodle featured five letters of the company logo donning party hats seated around a cake with balloons and gifts around. Check out Google's 13th birthday doodle here.
Over the years, Google has played a pivotal role in changing the way we use the Internet, making it simple and convenient for us. Its contributions to the web has been invaluable, and the company has continuously updated things around. For more read Google's top seven contributions to the Internet.

Google Play Crosses 25 Billion Downloads

Google officially announced that its online store, Google Play, reached the 25 billion downloads mark. And to celebrate the event, the search giant is offering some great discounts for the next five days.

Special collections such as  25 movies you must own, 25 banned books, 25 albums that changed the world and the 25 top selling magazines in Google Play will be offered at discounted prices, and you will be able to buy a few games for 25 cents each.

In case you are still curious about this type of metrics, Google Play now counts over 675,000 apps and games.

Iran Blocks Google

According to Reuters, Google's search and Gmail services have been blocked from public view in Iran. Tehran officials say these latest additions to Iran's web filter are the result of a much publicized anti-Islamic video called "Innocence of Muslims". The controversial video made its home on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, where it has managed to incite anger, protests and violence across portions of the global Muslim community.

Iran already has one of the largest collections of blocked URLs found in any country, but that's just the start. Earlier this year, Iran announced plans of creating its own domestic "Internet" -- an intranet which would be isolated from the rest of the world. Officials claim the goal is national security, something Iran is rightfully concerned about after government servers were infiltrated by US-Israel sponsored Stuxnet and Flame viruses. Skeptics, however, believe Iran's claim of "national security" is little more than an excuse to keep protesters away from "Western" social media tools and non-sanctioned information.

ComputerWorld says this security researcher has confirmed that Google and Gmail are still accessible via direct IP addresses although their hostnames remained blocked. It also appears some mobile phone operators aren't on the same page yet as the Iranian government, allowing mobile access for some -- for now.

Tehran officials says phase one of Iran's upcoming "domestic Internet" has already passed, isolating government operations on its own national network. Phase two, which is expected to arrive sometime next year, will put the rest of Iran's population on their state-sponsored intranet. After the system is deployed, it remains unknown if there will be gradual transition from the global Internet or if Iran will abruptly cut ties.

Apple Demanding $3 Billion In Damages As Samsung Targets On iPhone5

Multiple legal experts predicted Apple wasn’t prepared to simply walk away from their legal battle with rival Samsung after winning a $1 billion+ judgment last month. It seems those experts were right on the money as The Korea Times is reporting Apple plans to ask US District Judge Lucy Koh for even more money during a hearing tomorrow in San Jose.

Cupertino will allegedly seek to triple the original amount awarded to them by the jury with hopes to collect roughly $3 billion in damages. The basis for Apple’s complaint lies on the fact that Samsung was found guilty of “willful infringement” on five of six patents that were part of the dispute.

As Robert Barr from the Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley pointed out when the first ruling was handed down, $1 billion is an extremely favorable and rare award in a patent case. If Apple were to collect an additional $2 billion, it could likely be one of the biggest patent judgments in history. It’ll be up to the judge to decide if she feels Samsung should pay more in damages.

In related news, Samsung is planning to add the iPhone 5 to a list of devices they believe infringe on their patents. The company noted in a court filing that they plan to amend their infringement complaint once they have had adequate time to analyze the iPhone 5. No word yet on exactly how long that process will take but we suspect Samsung will get busy on their analysis bright and early tomorrow morning.

India Working Hard For The Fastest Computer Title By 2017

It seems like India isn’t happy having its home-grown supercomputer ranked at number 58 (out of 500) globally. To correct that, Sibal has put in motion plans to develop another completely indigenous supercomputer, one that would uproot IBM’s Sequoia as the world’s fastest supercomputer. Of course, the government hopes to have this achieved dream only by 2017.
A supercomputer’s performance is measured in FLOPS or Floating Point Operations Per Second. IBM’s Sequoia pushes itself up to the 16.3 petaflops mark, and is currently being employed by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to run simulations of nuclear weapons testing. India’s supercomputer is geared at beating the current champ, but what it’ll be used for is not yet very clear.
At present, India’s fastest supercomputer is housed at CSIR Center for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bengaluru, delivering a top performance of 303.9 teraflops. Telecom and IT minister, Kapil Sibal has supposedly written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, detailing a Rs. 4,700 crore investment over the next five years to developer "petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers." According to reports, Sibal has proposed that the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) be commissioned to oversee the supercomputing development in the country.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has reportedly been tasked with overseeing the development of the new powerhorse, which is slated to be finished by 2017. "The Minister has written that C-DAC developed first supercomputers in the country, the PARAM series. Presently Param Yuva with 54 teraflop computing power is serving many researchers through Garuda Computing Grid," a government official said.

2017 is far away and there is no telling if another player will develop a supercomputer faster than the Sequoia, much faster even. Hopefully, the plans will be mutable in the sense that if a faster machine does enter the arena, the one being developed by C-DAC will have room for a performance boost.

Apple's 20 Mega Watt Solar Farm

We've seen Apple's North Carolina data center in various states of undress, but never before have we seen its associated solar farm looking so complete. That sure is a lot of solar panels. We're not all that surprised though, with the intense thirst for energy from the servers that it feeds. In fact, initial reports indicated that -- although impressive -- the solar farm would still only be supplying 60 percent of the sites requirements. No fear though, as the remaining 40 is said to come from other equally eco-friendly sources. We'd be happy with enough to keep our iPad permanently juiced.