Manchester airport has introduced holographic customer service staff to help passengers with the security search process. The holograms, which are modelled after real-life airport staffers John Walsh and Julie Caper, will be deployed at Terminal 1. Airport authorities said the security holograms use the same technology that is used to bring animated music group Gorillaz to life for stage shows. The technology has been developed by entertainment company Musion, which had designed a special Frank Sinatra hologram for Simon Cowell’s birthday party.

IT Pro Portal 

When the London Stock Exchange (LSE) went caput early November last year there were whispers of sabotage. A report in The Times suggests that, yes, there was dirty work afoot. "Make no mistake, the UK's critical infrastructure is under attack. The threat is advanced and persistent," an insecurity expert said to The Times. You may or may not remember other stories on TechEye last year which suggested that it's not just that we have been under attack, rather that we are constantly under attack: and only some of what you hear about, the tip of the iceberg, will surface in reports. 

Japanese chip firm Elpida is set to take over the DRAM production of Taiwanese outfit Powerchip in a bid to stabilise the memory chip market. Powerchip has previously outsourced work for Japanese firm Elpida since 2003, and the two have also worked on a joint production venture in the past. Now Powerchip will pull the plug on its own DRAM chip production, with Elpida acquiring the  firm’s production facilities in the deal.

Tech Eye 

Android Honeycomb might have had tongues wagging at CES thanks to an awesome reveal video and a slew of tablets packing a rough and ready version of the OS. But this week Google will finally flesh out what it’s got planned for its tablet-friendly OS. The Big G is holding a press bash in California on Friday at 6pm UK time, promising an, “…in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos”.

T3 

Chinese manufacturer ZTE has surpassed Apple in the number of mobile phones shipped worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2010. In a report named "Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker", research firm IDC places Nokia top of the pile, ahead of Samsung and LG in 2nd and 3rd, with ZTE and Apple ranked 4th and 5th respectively. ZTE shipped 16.8 million units compared to Apple's 16.2 million. In comparison, Nokia and Samsung reached 123.7 million and 80.7 million respectively. LG Electronics and Nokia were the only two suffering a drop in year-on-year shipments. Nokia now accounts for only 30.8 per cent while ZTE and Apple both added 1.4 per cent to their marketshare.

IT Pro Portal  

Shocker of shockers, folks: people do more than just watch TV when they're watching TV. A study of over 8,000 willing individuals from Nielsen and Yahoo recently discovered that some 86 percent of mobile internet users tinker around on their devices while situated in front of the tube. It seems that Googling random facts, checking their Facebook news feed and seeing who has tweeted in the past 30 seconds were atop the list of activities to do while watching, but strangely, a full 20 percent confessed to search for more information about a commercial they recently saw.

Engadget 

UK retailer Marks & Spencer has topped the overall league table in the second mCommerce benchmark study, undertaken by eDigitalResearch. The company assessed the shopping process on both optimised and non-optimised mobile sites, looking at first impressions through to product delivery. Results show that general customer satisfaction with the end-to-end mobile journey is starting to increase, as retailers invest more heavily in the channel. However, the report concludes, mCommerce still has a considerable way to go to rival more established online platforms adding that some retailers, such as Waitrose, despite developing an mCommerce site, are “confusing and complicating” the mobile journey by limiting shoppers to certain product ranges.

Mobile Marketing 

RIM's BlackBerry range is the most successful smartphone platform of 2010 in the UK, according to data by GfK. Using data exclusively from consumers sales channels (ie the networks and consumer electronics stores), the research concluded that not only did BlackBerry handsets command 28.2% of all smartphone sales in 2010, RIM also managed to gain 36% of the Christmas sales, with over 500,000 shifted. RIM is bragging about its performance over the busy Christmas month, with nearly one in two pre-pay handsets being a BlackBerry, and nearly one in four contracts the same, with the likes of the BlackBerry Curve 8520 and new BlackBerry Torch proving enticing to customers.

Tech Radar 

Augmented reality (AR) firm metaio has released details of an experiment conducted last Wednesday, in which viewers of the science TV programme Galileo on the German ProSieben channel were able to take part in a live quiz during the show using their smartphone, equipped with metaio’s junaio AR browser. By pointing the phone’s camera at the displayed choice of answers and clicking on one of the possible answers received instant feedback on their choice. AR image recognition ensured that only those actually seeing the show could participate. junaio uses a technology called digital image recognition. The scanned screen image triggers communication with the station’s server via internet and thus establishes a bi-directional transmission of information. With a click on the smartphone’s touchscreen, the viewer’s response is transmitted. Results are displayed instantly, both at the station’s end and on the smartphone. The viewer then sees immediately whether his answer was right or wrong, which percentage of viewers answered correctly and how many questions he has ans correctly to that point.

Mobile Marketing 

At the MobiSocial lab, in Stanford, they're showing off some new uses of the NFC chip, already in the Google Nexus S, forthcoming Orange SIM cards and is also rumoured to be inside future iPhones and iPads. NFC is still relatively new to phone technology, but they have been able to show off several demonstration videos of what they’ve managed so far. Although Google’s phone is setup to only read data at this point, the researchers tinkered with Android’s Gingerbread, and have managed to get two phones to ‘communicate’ together. One video shows the researchers using a collaborative white-board style app, and in another, they were able to send cat photos via NFC, by simply touching the phones together, and okaying the download. Check out this grainy video, showing it in action.

Recombu