Smartphone wave

When it comes to smartphones, the world remembers two giants - Apple and Samsung. But analysts say that buyers are more willing to look at alternatives because the difference among smartphones are less pronounced these days. Some of the companies that are trying to make a comeback in smartphone market are the familiar names - Sony, Nokia and HTC. Individually, none of these companies pose a threat to the top two. However, collectively the three companies have showed an excellent growth over the past years. The proportion of phones running Google's Android system keeps rising and technical specifications are converging.Chinese smartphone makers have an edge and this is an increasingly important selling point. What happens in China is also important because success there help smaller companies develop the strength to move into emerging markets around the globe. While most smartphones are made in China, Chinese handset makers have so far struggled to export phones under their own brand. So if Samsung and Apple does not maintain a strong position in China, other players, mostly Chinese players, will do that instead, and then use that as a springboard to attack them in other markets. However the smartphone market is still a rising tide waiting to lift many other smartphone vendors across the globe.

Fingerpoint-enabled Touchscreen

Have you ever wondered of a touchscreen display identifying finger prints? If so, wait for some more time as it is almost closer to reality. In a way it would redefine online security and revolutionize human and computer interaction. To make the current touch screens identify fingerprints, it is essential that a supplement sensor needs to be accommodated. Researchers Christian Holz and fellow researcher Patrick Baudisch have modeled a prototype that uses a glass screen, made of millions of 3 millimetre-long optical fibres that are bunched together vertically. From an  image projector that is mounted below the glass, each fibre is able to pipe out visible light rays. Meanwhile, from a source adjacent to the projector, an infrared light bounces off the fingerprints and back down to an infrared camera.

Wait and watch for this about-to-come new technology!

Dexetra's App - FRIDAY

Dexetra is a privately owned start-up organization developing innovative products targeted at the mobile market. They had built an application Iris that mimicked the iphone's voice recognition software Siri. Since then, the three-year-old company, founded by a group of software engineers, has gone to build more applications that personalize data to suit a user's need. Bangalore-based Dexetra uses artificial intelligence to build apps. With nearly four million downloads on the Android platform so far, Iris was the product that built the team's reputation.

Dexetra team is now betting on their new product FRIDAY- a mobile application that almost functions as a second brain. The app captures events happening around the user, the people he talks to, places he visits, images he captures, and the songs he listens to. Using this raw data, it then anticipates the user's mood and initiates actions such as playing the right song. The app has received over two lakh downloads. Friday is not just a backup service, on the contrary, it collates all the information and presents you with a digitized form of memory which is searchable or may be you can consider it your best friend !

Hack India 2013 : 2-day hacking event in Hyderabad

Programmers, developers, designers across the industry and students from top-tech universities will gather at Hyderabad for a 2-day hacking event. For the first time, Yahoo! Hack India is being organised in Cyber city, Hyderabad. This will be Yahoo's first event in India hosted outside Bangalore. These hackers will now participate in the two-day event which brings forth a series of technical workshops, followed by a nonstop 24-hour coding Hackathon on July 13 and 14. The two-day event involves a hacking competition using a great collection of new web tools, services and geo-location and Flickr APIs (Application Programmable Interface). Hackers team up to turn their ideas into working prototype, or hack, as it's called in just 24 hours. It gives developers a chance to work together and build applications and product ideas using market-leading technologies.

Yahoo! Open Hack was started as an internal event in 2006 at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, US with an aim to bring Yahoo! developers together. So far, Open Hack has been hosted in seven countries with representation over 30 countries. This year Yahoo! is planning to host another event in Bangalore too. So watch out for this!