Norway's Telenor launches Indian mobile service

NEW DELHI (AFP) – Norwegian telecom group Telenor launched a new mobile service Thursday in India's congested cellular market where over a dozen operators are in a tariff war for millions of new customers each month.

"This is indeed a milestone in a longer journey to become a significant operator in India," said Stein-Erik Vellan, managing director of Unitech Wireless, the new mobile venture of Telenor and Indian property giantUnitech.

Telenor, the world's sixth-largest mobile services provider, holds 49 percent of the cellular company, known as Uninor, but the stake is set to rise to 67.25 percent.

The venture is part of a strategy by Telenor, which already has operations in such countries as Pakistan, Malaysia and Thailand, to boost its revenues from Asia.

The service was rolled out in seven of India's 22 cellular phone zones -- covering a potential 600 million customers -- and Uninor plans to launch in more zones next year.

Uninor, using the slogan "My time is now" targeting India's burgeoning youth population, is aiming for an eight percent share of the Indian market by 2018.

"This is a long term venture, not something we can do as a quick fix," said Jon Fredrik Baksaas, chief executive of Telenor Group.

Telenor joined a clutch of other foreign companies which have teamed up with local partners to tap the Indian market including Britain's Vodafone, Japan's NTT DoCoMo and Russia's Sistema JSFC. Foreign ownership in Indian telecom companies is capped by the government at 74 percent.

Foreign telecom firms have been coming to India in the hope of increasing revenue against a backdrop of sluggish domestic markets.

India, a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, added 16.67 million new mobile phone connections in October, making it the world's fastest-growing cellular market.

But a no-holds-barred price war has driven down billing rates to below a cent a minute, threatening revenues and profits of Indian telecom heavyweights such as market leaders Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications.

Telenor, the second-largest foreign telecom operator in Asia after Vodafone, said it will steer clear of new per-second billing plans offered by rivals.

It will aim to offer more attractive deals for customers who talk longer.

Telenor and Unitech, India's second-largest real estate company, teamed up last year to launch the company.

"This is the fastest rollout we have ever done in this group," said Baksaas.

The company has begun service in southern India, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and the eastern states of Bihar and Jharkhand.

India now has 14 cellular operators, T.R. Dua, director general of the Cellular Operators' Association of India, said, warning that the market has too many players.

"The industry cannot support this many operators. Consolidation is the only way forward," he told AFP.

Telenor's launch is expected to be followed by several others including that of the United Arab Emirates' Etisalat.

AT&T, Verizon end lawsuits over cell ads

NEW YORK -

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless agreed Wednesday to end lawsuits accusing each other of lying in TV ads, taking their rivalry out of the court system for now.

AT&T Inc. agreed to dismiss a lawsuit that sought to force Verizon to pull its "There's a Map for That" commercials. Verizon agreed to dismiss a suit that sought a declaration that AT&T's claims of "more bars in more places" was inaccurate.

Verizon's lawsuit was filed in July, just after AT&T complained to the National Advertising Division of the Council for Better Business Bureaus about Verizon ads claiming that it has "America's most reliable wireless network." That is the usual forum for disputes about advertising, but when Verizon filed a lawsuit, that process was suspended.

With Wednesday's actions, it appears that the companies have agreed to scale back their dispute to stay out of court. The companies would not comment on their reasons.

AT&T filed its lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta early in November, saying that Verizon's "Map" ads are misleading and amount todeceptive trade practices.

The ads show maps of the United States with areas highlighted to depict where third-generation, or 3G, data network coverage is available. Verizon's coverage, in red, is clearly wider than AT&T's, in blue.

AT&T said those maps could mislead viewers because it's not obvious that it has regular voice coverage and slower data service in many areas where it doesn't offer 3G.

Two weeks ago, a judge tossed out AT&T's request for a temporary restraining order and a permanent injunction to stop the ads, but scheduled a hearing to give the AT&T attorneys another chance to make their case.

The slogan "There's a Map for That" plays off Apple Inc.'s "There's an App for That" ads for the iPhone, which tout the thousands of applications available for the phone. AT&T is the sole U.S. carrier for the iPhone.

In response to Verizon's ads, AT&T has launched an ad campaignwith actor Luke Wilson saying AT&T has the "the nation's fastest 3G network."

And given the lack of standards to identify which network is the "fastest" or "most reliable," the competing claims are likely to continue.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC of Britain.

Researchers rethink approaches to computer vision

Intel announced yesterday a 48-core chip that packs 1.3 billion transistors on a single processor. The computing power, according to Justin Rattner, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, will pave the way to machines that “see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities.”

But vast computing power is but one requisite to achieving an artificial visual system that’s truly perceptive, and it’s by far been easier to deliver than the other key component - the mimicry of biological neural processing.

“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” said David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”

The challenge has led neuroscientists and roboticists to re-framed approaches. For instance, European researchers have recently developed an algorithm that enables a robot to combine data from both sound and vision to enable depth perception and to help isolate objects.

Back in the U.S., David Cox (mentioned above) and Nicolas Pinto, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT and their team of Harvard and MIT researchers haverecently demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems by combining screening techniques from molecular biology with low-cost high-performance gaming hardware donated by NVIDIA.

Below is an image of the 16-GPU ‘monster’ supercomputer built at the DiCarlo Lab (McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT) and the Cox Lab (Rowland Institute at Harvard University) to help build artificial vision systems. According to an article, The 18″ x18″ x18″ cube may be one of the most compact and inexpensive supercomputers in the world.

(Credit: Nicolas Pinto / MIT)

The team drew inspiration from genetic screening techniques whereby a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. So instead of building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, they constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task.

Their models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation.

“Reverse and forward engineering the brain is a virtuous cycle. The more we learn about one, the more we can learn about the other,” says Cox. “Tightly coupling experimental neuroscience and computer engineering holds the promise to greatly accelerate both fields.”

Ruby on Rails becomes latest open-source offering to run on Microsoft's Azure cloud

For a while now, Microsoft has been courting open-source software makersto convince them of the wisdom of offering their wares on Windows. So it’s not too surprising that many of those same apps also are being moved to the Windows Azure cloud platform.

At the end of November, Microsoft architect Simon Davies blogged that he had gotten the open-source Ruby on Rails framework to run on Windows Azure. By using a combination of new functionality in the November Windows Azure software development kit (SDK), plus some new Solution Accelerator technology, Davies said he managed to get Ruby on Rails to run. (The fruits of Davies’ labors are available at http://rubyonrails.cloudapp.net/.)

Davies blogged:

“One of these (new November SDK) features enables Worker Roles to receive network traffic from both external and internal endpoints using HTTP, HTTPS and TCP. This new feature enables many new scenarios, one of then is the ability to run existing applications that receive traffic over sockets in Windows Azure.”

There are a bunch of these Azure Solution Accelerators available for download from the Windows Azure Platform Web site. There are also newSDKs for Microsoft’s recently unveiled AppFabric middleware for Java, Ruby and PHP developers, as well, availble for download.

Davies noted that Microsoft has demonstrated a number of open-source apps, including MySQL, Mediawiki, Memcached and Tomcat, can run on Windows Azure. Microsoft has been working on delivering PHP and Eclipse tools for Windows Azure.

Recently, CNet open-source blogger Matt Asay expressed some concern that Microsoft’s “super-friendly, super-dangerous bear hug” of open-source applications — especially in the cloud realm — could do open-source more harm than good.

Some open-source vendors — SugarCRM comes to mind — have developed their own Azure ports of their wares. But in other cases, Microsoft is the instigator, either moving the open-source applications and tools onto Azure or working with a third-party to do so.

I don’t see the same kind of potential danger that Asay does in this scenario, since what really matters is whether developers and customers are interested in using what’s hosted on Azure, rather than who “put” the apps in the cloud. Do you agree?

Intel sees rush to Netbook app store

As Intel and PC makers prepare to launch an app store for Netbooks in 2010, the emphasis is on speed.

"We have a lot of developers right now jumping all over this and writing apps and getting them ready," Scott Apeland, director of Intel's Developer Network, told CNET Wednesday. "Today, you can actually submit applications and get them in validation and be one of the first in the store when we have that available next year. We don't have specific dates. It's how fast we can get it up and ready."

Intel Atom Developer Program

(Credit: Intel )

How fast? "The whole program is moving extremely fast. Now we're working frantically on getting the store ready," he said.

The store itself will come preinstalled on future Netbooks, according to Apeland. "We're working with OEM partners (PC makers) now to get this ready and preinstalled on systems. So, when a user purchases it, he just runs the app store...and pulls from a catalog of applications that are available and they can make the purchases right there," he said.

The largest suppliers of Netbooks using Intel's Atom processor are Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, and Asus--all of which are readying the next wave of Netbooks based Intel's new "Pine Trail" Atom technology, expected to launch sometime this month. It's a hot market: Intel said Wednesday that more than 50 million Netbooks are expected to be sold by the end of 2009.

Though most applications are expected to be written for the Linux operating system--Intel's version is called Moblin--Apeland claims that the program has a wide target.

"The Atom Developer Program doesn't favor one OS over another, and at its core, the program is meant to facilitate development across multiple OSes," he said. "Right now it's Windows and Moblin...we plan to expand support to different run-time environments, including Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight."

Apeland said that Intel's software developer network overall has between 700,000 and 1 million monthly users, and 20,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) who are members of the Intel software partner program. Though Apeland couldn't say how many of these developers are doing development specific to Atom-based Netbooks, he did allow that Intel has had "tens of thousands coming and checking out our site (and) thousands actually joining before we had any (software development kit) or tools available."

The developer will get 70 percent of the revenue from the sale, Apeland said--similar to the Apple app store. "The rest (30 percent) will cover operational costs and partner costs that are involved." Intel announced a beta of a software development kit on Wednesday for Atom processor-based Netbooks.

Apeland also discussed the type of applications that are popular. "For example, social networking, on-line chats, sharing of photos, video. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around that," he said, adding that development will also target "a way so users don't have to worry about--keep track of--different sites for log-in."

On the education front, Apeland said, "the Netbook has a lot of natural opportunity because of the keyboard and screen size versus a small handheld device."

Hyundai's new Sonata gets by without a V-6

Debuting at the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show, the 2011 Hyundai Sonata is the first vehicle to feature Hyundai's "Fluidic Sculpture" design language--"Fluidic Sculpture" obviously being market-speak for bulbous and swoopy.

2011 Hyundai Sonata (photos)

The Sonata will debut with a 2.4-liter gasoline direct injection engine and a pair of six-speed transmissions, one automatic and one manual. However by the end of 2010, a turbocharged 2.0-liter engine and a Hybrid Blue Drive model are set to join the lineup. However, the Sonata will not get a V6. This is a four-banger only party. The 2.4-liter launch engine will output 198 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque, while delivering 23 city/35 highway mpg. A performance oriented SE model boosts the horsepower to and even 200-ponies and adds uprated suspension components.

Cabin tech packages include a DVD/MP3-compatible Dimension audio premium audio system with a 6.5-inch touchscreen navigation system that is optional on the GLS and SE trims. Stepping up to the luxury-oriented Limited trim adds HD Radio and makes a navigation-free version of the Dimension audio system a standard feature, as well as opening up the option to choose a 400-watt Infinity audio system with touchscreen navigation. Regardless of trim, choosing the premium audio option also nets a touchscreen navigation system. The nav system's data is stored on 8GB of flash memory, so we expect that it's a similar system to the one found in the Genesis Coupe.

XM satellite radio is standard (with three months of service included), as well as access to XM NavTraffic and XM Data Services when equipped with navigation. Also standard are Bluetooth handsfree connectivity and iPod/USB connectivity.

If Hyundai's Elantra Touring and Genesis coupe and sedan are any indication of the direction the Korean automaker is heading, we may find the new Sonata stealing a few Camry and Accord sales when it debuts in 2010. However, until we can get some wheel time with the midsized sedan, you can check out our gallery of the 2011 Hyundai Sonata.

Uninor India - Eighth GSM Service to Start in India

Here is a happy news for all the mobile freaks, India will get its 8th GSM service provider soon in the form of "Uninor". Recently Unitech Wireless got permission from Indian Government to start their Uninor GSM services in India.

It is a joint venture between the Norway based telecom firm Telenor and Unitech wireless of India. The brand name of this GSM service will be called 'UNINOR'. Uninor in India has got license to start the GSM services in 22 circles. Telenor has already bought around 67% shares of Unitech wireless, and recently it got permission from the cabinet Committee on Economic affairs to rise its stake in Unitech wireless to upto 74%. This is the maximum stake a foreign company can hold in the Indian based company. Unitech is basically a construction company, but they started a division called Unitech Wireless recently.

Uninor India is going to start services in 8 circles by December, 2009, 4 in south India, 2 in Uttar Pradesh, one each in Orissa and Bihar.

Chinese Telecom equipment manufacturer ZTE is going to provide the GSM Network supply to Uninor GSM service. ZTE has signed an agreement with Uninor for 5 years, under which it will supply the network equipments for the circles of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana.

In the other circles like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh Nokia siemens network has won the deal of supplying the Network equipments for Uninor India. At the same time Nokia siemens network will be responsible for network operation and maintenance in the following circles.

Currently Uninor is under test, we can see its network by using the Manual search in our mobile under the name IND 820 in Bangalore circle. It is going to be launched by this year end in some 8 circles in India. So the customers will be in a great fix to decide about which service provider to opt for.

As the competition increases between the GSM service providers, the customers are befitted by better offers. India is the main target for many external service providers because of the market in India. So lets hope some good service and offers from Uninor.

Autoruns – What is Running on Your Windows 7 PC

If you have wondered what programs are automatically configured and loaded when you startup, Autoruns, by Microsoft will give you that information. Autoruns is an MS download program that will show you locations, and startup order of many programs. It will provide you with information about Explorer shell extensions, and toolbars, as well as helper objects, auto-start services and Winlogon.

AutoRuns Winlogon

What does Autorun provide?

• It shows you the currently configured auto-start applications
• The full list of the Registry settings used.
• File system locations used for auto-start configuration.
• There are 18 tabs that can focus your attention to individual performance or configuration options.

AutoRuns - The Everything Tab: Places information about all settings

It is a configuration tool that can be used by administrators to monitor and tweak the performance of the system. There are multiple tabs to work with. Here is the Logon tab which contains information about what programs load at logon.

AutoRuns-Logon: Files that Load Upon Logon

Another important component is that it allows you to see third party auto-starting programs. Through Autoruns’ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option you can see third-party programs that have been added to your system.

AutoRuns - Other Options Available

If you prefer the command-line equivalent you can run Autorunsc from the command prompt which is automatically included in the download package. The output result is in CSV format.

AutoRunSC - The command line executable

There are a number of command switches that can be used with AutorunSC:

autorunsc [-a] | [-c] [-b] [-d] [-e] [-g] [-h] [-i] [-l] [-m] [-n] [-p] [-r] [-s] [-v] [-w] [-x] [user]

You can download the Autoruns executable from the following locations, and there is a forum available as well:

http://live.sysinternals.com/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

The Autoruns forum can be found at http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_topics.asp?FID=16

Nikon COOLPIX S230

Good ISO performance for its class The screen performs extremely bad in well-lit areas No options for manual settings

The Nikon COOLPIX S230 is another entry by Nikon in the budget camera section. The S230 comes with a 3 – inch touch screen which will make it an upper hand in its category because not many cameras of this range run on a touch screen interface. With the dimensions of 91 x 57 x 20 mm and weighing in at 115g, the s230 is compact and light. From front, the S230 shares its looks with the S570 and just like the S570 the plastic feels cheap. But the S230 does look a bit better than the S570 due to the brush metal finish on it.

The top of the camera is once again reminiscent of the S570, but the facing side is not same as the S570 because the S230 packs a 3- inch LCD screen, with anti– reflection coating and adjacent to it the scene selection and play button. Regardless of the touch functionality, the User Interface (UI) is pretty much similar to the S570’s UI. This is not entirely bad as I stated in the review for the S570, it is good for a low budget point and shoot camera.

The screen of the S230 is really bad. Strangely, the images look very grainy on the screen in broad daylight and if not that, it is almost impossible to preview the picture in a well–lit area. The S230 features a CCD sensor capable of taking pictures at 10 megapixels with 3x optical zoom. The images are not up to the mark as the colors are very saturated and due to this the image loses out on its clarity.

Though our ISO test the images were saturated it maintained a pleasant white balance and image clarity on lower ISO levels. ISO 800 onwards, the images are very noisy and lose out on sharpness. But the images are quite usable till ISO 400.

The Macro mode on the S230 has the same issues found on the S570. The camera fails to focus in a distance less than 3 inches. But the overall clarity of the images taken from the macro mode are crisp.

The Nikon COOLPIX S230 sells at a street price of Rs. 10,990 and delivers a less than mediocre performance. Though there might not be many digital cameras available in the market which feature a Touch screen and 10 megapixels for Rs 10,000, there are many more cameras at a similar price delivering better performance. With the ever growing digital camera market, the Nikon COOLPIX S230 fails to make a mark.

Specs
• Dimensions (WxHxD): 91 x 57 x 20 mm
• Weight: 115g
• LCD Display: 3" 230,000 dots TFT LCD with touch screen control and anti-reflection coating
• Sensor: CCD
• Resolution: 10 megapixels
• Aperture range: F3.1 – F5.9
• Shutter Speed: N/A
• Optical Zoom: 3x
• ISO sensitivity: Auto, 60, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 2000
• Flash: Auto, Red-Eye reduction, Off, On, Slow sync
• Self Timer: 3 or 10 sec
• Movie recording: VGA
• Storage: SD / SDHC card
• MOP: Rs 10,990

Hands On: Dante's Inferno

Anyone who’s seen gameplay videos of Dante’s Inferno has drawn comparisons with God of War but yesterday when I actually sat down to play a preview of the game I was shocked at how similar both games are (in fact I even joked that it was only a matter of time before Sony sued EA).

In Dante’s Inferno you play as Dante, a veteran Crusader who musttraverse the nine circles of Hell to free his love, Beatrice before Lucifer can forcibly marry her allowing him to break free from hell. We were only able to play a fraction of the game but I was told that the game’s pretty authentic when it comes to portraying the source material that by the way is one of Dante’s epic poems, Divine Comedy.

Like I mentioned earlier the game plays exactly like God of War. It’s a third person hack and slash game that oscillates between all out action and platforming. The game employs a fixed camera that basically positions itself at optimum locations throughout the level to give you the best view possible. It works for most of the time but can get stuck at times and is a bit of a bitch when it comes to platforming. Combat consists of taking on waves of diverse grotesque enemies interspersed with mini bosses that can be dispatched using over the top context sensitive moves.

I don’t know how many weapons would be present in the final game but in the demo I got to wield Dante’s scythe that I was told would be upgradable. You had light attacks, heavy attacks and mixing them up unleashed some wicked looking combos. I even got to take control of the game’s version of a Minataur allowing me to dispatch enemies with ease merely by swatting them with my gigantic arms. From then on I had to make it out of there before at least half the level crumbled around me. And finally I was confronted by one of the game’s bosses that once again seemed ripped straight out of God of War. Dodge attacks, slash away at health bar and finish him off using QTEs seemed like the order of the day. It wasn’t revolutionary by any means but it was fun.

And this is what Dante’s Inferno felt like at the end of the day – mindless fun thoroughly inspired by God of War. Thankfully the game’s pretty high on the production values and even though this was just preview code, it looked and played really well. I only hope the game has more tricks up its sleeve not burying itself as a God of War clone.

Either way we’ll come to know how it all plays out when Dante’sInferno releases for the Xbox360 and PS3 in February 2010.

Upcoming Mobiles to Look Out For - My Christmas Wish List

Christmas is coming and as usual, whether we’re good or bad is quite irrelevant as we’re all looking forward to something shiny and preferably with a screen under the tree or stuffed in our stockings. But for the tech community, especially us mobile maniacs we’re also, I’m sure, looking forward to what’s coming at the end of this year and the beginning of next, so here’s a quick look at what we can expect to see soon.

Android is doing quite well and there are quite a lot of devices that are coming up. Here are a few I’m waiting to get my hands on -

Motorola MILESTONE
The MILESTONE is the GSM version of the MOTO DROID handset. It’ll be running on an Android 2.0 OS or Éclair. The large display coupled with a slide out full QWERTY keypad should make for easy data entry. The handset’s display is also designed to support multi-touch. Could this be the N900 killer?

The MILESTONE will also feature -

• 3.7-inch touchscreen with a 480 x 854 pixel resolution
• 3G with HSDPA, EDGE/GPRS
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, USB 2.0
• GPS with A-GPS and a digital compass, Geotagging
• 5 megapixel AF camera with Dual LED flash
• 3.5mm handsfree socket
• microSD card support for up to 32GB

Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica
Samsung’s Spica or Galaxy Lite has just been officially announced globally but I am expecting Samsung to launch it here in India as well, I just don’t know when. I only hope that does better than the i7500 Galaxy though and I’m of the opinion that it just might, as Samsung has managed to incorporate quite a few of their proprietary features into it. To start off with the Spica will have Samsung’s DNSe for audio enhancement and DivX video codec support for video playback.

Other features include -

• 3.2-inch touchscreen with a 320 x 480 pixel resolution
• 3G with HSDPA, EDGE/GPRS
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, USB 2.0
• GPS with A-GPS and a digital compass, Geotagging
• 3 megapixel AF camera
• 3.5mm handsfree socket
• microSD card support for up to 32GB

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
One of the most anticipated handsets to be launched next year is Sony’s first Android powered handset the Xperia X10. Running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset it has potential to be a speedy handset and with UI support from Timescape and Mediascape we’re looking at a swanky new user interface as well.

Other features include -

• 4 inch touchscreen with an 480 x 800 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE/GPRS,
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, USB
• GPS with A-GPS support and Geotagging
• 8 megapixel camera with Smile Shutter, Face Detection, image stabilization and an LED Flash
• Micro SDHC card support
• 3.5mm handsfree socket

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