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Shipments of Blu-ray Disc-based video recorders and players are increasing fast in Japan as the market rallies around the format after the end of its battle with the defeated HD DVD format. Shipments of recorders and players based on Blu-ray Disc hit 122,000 in June marking the first time that monthly shipments have broken into six-figures, according to data published on Tuesday by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA). The data is gathered from member companies, which include all the major consumer electronics manufacturers in Japan.
That figure is a healthy jump on the 82,000 units shipped in May and is likely due to anticipated demand for the devices going into July, when millions of Japanese workers receive a mid-year bonus, and August, when the Olympics are held in Beijing. Both events typically provide a boost to the consumer electronics sector.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

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Facebook will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several US states have announced. The news follows a similar announcement from MySpace after the social networking site was involved in a sexual predator scandal last year.
The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users’ ability to search online for under 18s and a task force will be created to better verify users’ ages and identities.
“Social networks that encourage kids to come to their sites have a responsibility to keep those kids safe,” North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper said. “We’ve now gotten the two largest social networking sites to agree to take significant steps to protect children from predators and pornography.”

View: Full Article @ Pocket-Lint

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Sahar El Khatib speech on Marsel Ghanem’s program “Kalam El Nass”, after the invasion of Hizbullah to the FUTURE TV station in Beirut.

According to thinktank Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in Japan by 2025, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks. The country faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration. Luckily, robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.
“Seniors are pushing back their retirement until they are 65 years old, day care centers are being built so that more women can work during the day, and there is a move to increase the quota of foreign laborers. But none of these can beat the shrinking workforce,” said Takao Kobayashi, who worked on the study. The current fertility rate is 1.3 babies per woman, far below the level needed to maintain the population, while the government estimates that 40 percent of the population will be over 65 by 2055, raising concerns about who will look after the greying population.

View: Full Story at Reuters

Microsoft has been working like gangbusters to create the perception that its cross-platform multimedia runtime Silverlight is a viable alternative to Adobe’s Flash, and the vendor will soon put updated tools in the hands of Silverlight developers. In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft developer Ashish Thapliyal said Microsoft is “targeting late Summer” for its release of Silverlight 2.0, which is currently in its first beta release.
Silverlight 2.0 supports VC-1, WMV, MP3 and WMA content, but Microsoft has no plans to support the Flash video (.flv), used by Youtube and many other Websites, said Thapliyal. Microsoft’s rationale here is to avoid paying licensing fees and to keep the Silverlight download file size as small as possible, he added.
“Silverlight isn’t designed with an extensible codec model in mind, so there is no date/version announced for this,” wrote Thapliyal. A second Silverlight 2.0 beta is due in May, and this version will be very similar to the final release, according to Thapliyal. He said no details are available about the roadmap for Silverlight for mobile, or Silverlight v.Next, also known as Silverlight 3.

News Source: Information Week

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks. It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced. Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade. Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual”. It believes he “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews”.

Google has taken a dig at Apple’s iPhone, saying the device has a much smaller market than phones which run Android, the mobile phone operating system Google helped develop.
The search giant said that despite selling 4 million units within the first 7 months of its release, the iPhone was ultimately a more limited device than phones which ran on the Google-backed platform, because the potential for developers to build new applications using Android was greater.
Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, was quoted by IT Week as saying: “Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone.”
Mr Miner told a conference in Silicon Valley that whereas the iPhone had “a single manufacturer” and was “targeted at a particular demographic”, developers could expect a much wider uptake of applications they developed for Android-based phones, the first of which are expected to be released later this year.

View: Full Article @ Times Online

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years. In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Gates speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.
“I don’t see anything that will stop the rapid advance,” Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000. Gates also said the coming years will bring rapid changes in media as television increasingly becomes a targeted medium, where viewers can select niche content for news, sports and entertainment.
“TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing,” he said.
Gates’ speech came after he testified to Congress on Wednesday advocating greater investment in math and science education and more relaxed immigration rules that would allow foreigners who obtain college degrees in the United States to work here after graduation. Current policy, he said, forces many bright, capable students to return to their native countries after the U.S. has invested in their education. Gates said Thursday he was optimistic that policy makers would make the right decisions about investing in technology and human capital, though he acknowledged that such investments don’t pay off immediately.

View: Full Article @ The Associated Press