Google buys voice synthesis company Phonetic Arts
Google is taking us another step towards the space-age computing future TV has been promising us for decades, purchasing speech synthesis company Phonetic Arts, a team of UK-based developers whose work it is to make the way computers read text sound...well, less like a computer. According to the Phonetic Arts website, the company's goal is "deliver technology that generates natural expressive speech, allowing computer games to say any sentence in any type of voice."
WikiLeaks Web address is shut down
WikiLeaks' Web address has been killed, in the latest twist in the tale of the whistle blowing website. The site is at the centre of a storm of controversy and a campaign of online attacks after leaking more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables. wikileaks.org can't open the site, but if you're a corporate sneak or a government tattletale, don't panic: we'll show you how you can still access it. WikiLeaks is under attack in a literal sense, and we're not talking about strongly worded letters: concerted denial of service (DoS) attacks on the site caused California-based hosting company EveryDNS to drop WikiLeaks at 3am today, claiming the hacking campaign was affecting its service to other users. The Guardian describes attempts to take down a website as a game of "whack-a-mole". While WikiLeaks was able to counter hack attacks by changing servers, its DNS has proved to be an Achilles heel.
Skype, eBay and Yahoo urge government to commit to Net neutrality
Online companies have called on the British government to enforce a fair and open Internet. Nineteen organisations, including eBay, Skype, Yahoo and the National Union of Journalists, have signed a letter to Ed Vaizey, the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, who recently advocated a "two-speed Internet" in which websites could pay ISPs to priority their content over other sites. That goes against the principle of Net neutrality, which guarantees all services have the same access to the Web. The 19 companies applauded Vaizey's assertions that "consumers should always have the ability to access any legal content or service" and "content and service providers should have the ability to innovate".
Discount website dares to cut and run from Google
When Sally Blenkey-Tchassova first started her burlesque dance classes in New York last summer, she said she was lucky to get four students. Now she has 800 new clients on her books. Lady Gaga's love of the raunchy dance style and the new movie Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera, have helped. But the British-born entrepreneur credits one company in particular with really giving her business a high kick: Groupon, a two-year-old internet start-up that may be the fastest-growing firm in history and has just spurned a $6bn takeover bid from Google.
WiMAX “better for mhealth”
Mhealth is a topic attracting much of the limelight in the telecoms industry at present, and its regional importance was not lost this week with the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit Middle East taking place alongside the main Telco World Summit event in Dubai. Robert Istepanian, professor of data communications and director of mobile information and network technologies at Kingston University, London, courted controversy with his presentation on “4G health: The Long Term Evolution of mobile health.” Although Istepanian welcomed the advent of 4G, due to its all IP architecture and 100Mbps throughput, which offers lots of opportunities for mhealth in terms of diagnostics potential, he championed WiMAX as the enabler of mhealth services.
Netsize Guide Updated With 2010 Market Data
Netsize has released a new edition of the Netsize Guide 2010, Mobile Renaissance. For the first time in its nine-year history, the book has been updated in its publication year with five new interviews and previously-unpublished 2010 telecommunications market data. The 2009 data has also been retained to provide readers with a quarterly view of the mobile telecommunications market trend in 40 countries globally.
RIM Faces Challenges in Moving to New OS
Research In Motion’s acquisition of Swedish mobile UI designers The Astonishing Tribe will surely lend some lustre to the aging BlackBerry OS, but the deal’s long-term impacts will likely be more prominent in RIM’s upcoming QNX platform. RIM is moving aggressively to extend QNX to its entire smartphone line-up, Jeffries & Co. analyst Peter Misek said last week, adding that, within a year, every new device will be running QNX.
Three cuts pay as you go international call rates
Pay-as-you-go customers are being offered cheaper international calls by the mobile phone firm Three. Today the firm said it is cutting the cost of calls to twenty five countries and prices will start at just 2p per minute to glamorous locations like Ireland and Poland. In order to make their cheaper calls, pay as you go customers need only insert a three digit shortcode before the phone number they want to ring, the firm explained, and can call either mobiles or landlines at the cheaper rates.
My Droid EXPLODED mid phone call, says Texan
A Texas man says he had to get four stitches in his ear after a spanking new Droid 2 smartphone exploded while he was in mid conversation. A bandaged Aron Embry told a local Fox News affiliate he heard a popping noise but didn't think much of it until he realized he sustained minor injuries. “I felt something dripping,” he told the news outlet. “I realized that it was probably blood. I went into the house, and as I got into the bathroom and once I got to the mirror and saw it, it was only then I kinda looked at my phone and noticed the screen had appeared to burst outward.”
Google Earth Engine maps eco-meltdown
Google has unveiled an Earth Engine - a vast repository of satellite images which scientists and researchers and the rest of us can use to track changes to the planet. The image database is available online and is open to everyone. Google says it will allow researchers to plough through trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years. The company will also provide a set of analytical tools to help with delving through the data. On the Google Earth Engine Product Page, Google posted some examples of the images that will be available. These included a map of the vegetation covering in Mexico, a water mask of Central Africa and images of the Amazon.
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