This tech CEO has all the right credentials to steer a digital-music start-up.
In addition to degrees in computer science and economics from Stanford University, Prerna Gupta is expert in all things Britney Spears.
Prerna Gupta, a code-writing former beauty pageant winner who is now CEO of start-up Khush, sings to her iPhone app, LaDiDa. (Credit: Khush)
Gupta is a former beauty pageant winner who aspired to follow in the hip-hop dancing footsteps of her childhood idol, Spears. Now, as the 28-year-old CEO of Khush, the company behind a new iPhone app called LaDiDa, Gupta's performance background may help her as much as anything she learned in college.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20002465-261.html
Updated 7:48 a.m. PDT with additional details, and at 8:18 a.m. following a conversation with Google.
Almost everything you've ever said on Twitter is about to be discoverable through Google.
Google announced plans Tuesday to roll out a timeline of archived Twitter messages organized by topic, allowing searchers to see when Twitter activity spiked with tweets related to their search query. When the user clicks on a particular day that contained an outsized number of tweets related to that topic, they'll be presented with a scrolling list of the individual tweets from that day.
It's sort of like the timeline search feature that Google rolled out several years ago, only for tweets. Searchers will be able to start at "right now" at the far right-hand side of the timeline and scroll back through time by moving to the left.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20002453-265.html
Robonaut 2, the humanoid working robot that's been under development with NASA and General Motors, is finally ready to show its stuff in outer space, GM announced Wednesday.
The Robonaut 2, aka R2, will take up residence at the International Space Station, with a voyage to its new home planned for this September as part of the STS-133 mission on the space shuttle Discovery.
The Canadian Space Agency already has a humanoid robot residing at the International Space Station for spacewalk. Like the R2, it also has two long arms for completing tasks otherwise done by astronauts. Its primary coverage is the exterior of the space station. The R2, in contrast, will be covering the Destiny laboratory, one of the five U.S.-named modules attached to the International Space Station. The robot will be tested for how well it fares with vibrations, zero gravity, radiation exposure, and electromagnetic interference.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17912_3-20002479-72.html
Some iPhone developers that make apps for Facebook got quite a surprise on Tuesday--their developer credentials had been deleted, without warning, leaving their apps and customers high and dry.
All Facebook developers have their own set of credentials so their apps can communicate with the APIs provided by the company. When iPhone apps contact Facebook, the site responds and recognizes the developers' credentials, allowing the apps to do their intended jobs. Without those credentials, apps error out.
NodConcept's Chris Diskin, makers of the Emoti for Facebook app, said he was contacted via e-mail on Monday by Apple saying that Facebook believed his app was infringing on their rights. They provided him with contact info at Facebook and said he had five days to resolve the issue.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20002481-37.html
The European Commission will ask the public for their thoughts on Net neutrality this spring, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has announced.
Speaking at a conference held by French telecoms regulator Arcep on Tuesday, Kroes said the Internet is "not an inherently neutral platform." This means that European regulators have to make choices about whether to allow ISPs to prioritize certain types of online traffic, she added.
For the Commission to draw up a policy on Net neutrality, Kroes told the audience that she plans "to launch a public consultation before the summer."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20002499-93.html
A 10-minute YouTube video called "The Yippity Yo Cooking Show" falls somewhere to the left of "Saturday Night Live" at its most surreal: The host, "Zaylee Jean," alternates between extreme seriousness and manic outbursts, with diction so slurred that it's subtitled (in the cartoonish Comic Sans font). Among other antics, she smears the mix for a batch of chocolate chip cookies all over her face, nibbles ingredients off the counter, and routinely pauses to scream something like "I LOVE COOKIES!" at the top of her lungs.
A key point: Zaylee Jean is three years old. The plucky toddler in a flowered sundress and wispy blond ponytail has become YouTube's most unlikely new hit, with a steady cult following of offbeat hipsters fast propelling it to the milestone of 100,000 views. Like so many videos of cherubic youngsters before her, the clip can prompt a dual reaction: on one hand, she's delightful; on the other, in a few years when Zaylee enters the social Hades known as "middle school," the video will likely still be there.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20002416-36.html
Microsoft says it has launched an investigation into labor practices at a Chinese factory following a report alleging the vendor used large numbers of teenagers working in harsh conditions for low pay to build the company's mice and other products.
The investigation follows a report from the Pittsburgh-based National Labor Committee that found the KYE facility in Dongguan City, Guangdong, China allegedly uses significant amounts of teenage labor and has workers laboring as much as 80.5 hours a week for wages that amount to just over 50 cents an hour in take-home pay.
The National Labor Committee uses this photo at the top of its report alleging harsh working conditions at a China factory that makes Microsoft mice and other accessories.(Credit: National Labor Committee)
"We are like prisoners," one worker told the NLC, according to the report. "It seems like we live only to work. We do not work to live. We do not live a life, only work."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20002500-56.html
LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--The U.S. auto industry needs to "go green' in more than one way, says Bill Ford.
Ford is committed to making its vehicles more fuel efficient by investing in a number of technologies, including electrification, biofuels, fuel cells, and more efficient gas engines.
But auto manufacturing itself needs to be "reconsidered" so that it's not all about smokestacks and environmental hazards, Ford said Wednesday during a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference here. Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford, is the executive chairman of the company's board of directors.
Bill Ford speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Green(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)
"It's incredibly important to the economic vitality of the country that we make things here. But we won't make things the way we did in the past--we have to do it differently," he said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20002512-54.html
WASHINGTON--The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission told a Congressional panel on Wednesday that a recent court ruling that the agency lacked authority to regulate the Internet should not prevent it from carrying out its plan to broadly expand the country's high-speed Internet service.
But the chairman refused to say if the commission would try to reclassify Internet service as a utility similar to telephone service to overcome the court decision, a move that some Democratic senators supported but that several Republican senators strongly warned against.
http://news.cnet.com/Despite-ruling%2C-FCC-says-it-will-move-forward-on-expanding-broadband/2100-1028_3-6250559.html
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev already has a LiveJournal.com page, a video blog on kremlin.ru, and a Twitter account is in the works.
But the full extent of Medvedev's unalloyed geekiness wasn't apparent until a question-and-answer session in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Putin was in town for the 47-nation nuclear summit.
During an appearance at the center-left Brookings Institution, the head of the Russian Federation suggested that he and President Obama should dispense with their legions of aides and chat on iPhones through text messaging instead.
"We don't e-mail each other (but) that would be the fastest possible way to talk to each other," said Medvedev, according to a translation. "In this case, we could just have a couple of iPhones and we could just exchange text messages or e-mails. I am quite familiar with that, as well as President Obama, as far as I understand." (Obama has a BlackBerry.)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002555-38.html
An unpatched hole in Java was being exploited to target visitors to a song lyrics Web site and more attacks are likely, researchers warned on Wednesday.
The flaw in Java Web Start, disclosed last week by several security researchers, affects Windows systems running Firefox and Internet Explorer, said Roger Thompson, AVG chief research officer. He said he couldn't get it to work on Chrome though, despite reports that it does.
Thompson found exploit code for both the Java hole and one in Adobe Reader on servers in Russia that was triggered by computers visiting English-language site Songlyrics.com. The site was later cleaned up, he said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20002530-245.html
Hewlett-Packard is being scrutinized by authorities in Germany and Russia for paying bribes to win a contract to sell computers to the Russian government, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal cites "people familiar with the matter" in reporting that German prosecutors are investigating whether HP paid $10.9 million for the chance to sell a sophisticated computer system providing secured communications to the Russian prosecutor general's office through a German subsidiary company.
HP's offices in Moscow were reportedly raided Wednesday by Russian investigators looking into the matter on behalf of the German prosecutors. Specifically, they were looking for evidence that HP used a series of shell companies in a variety of countries--Britain, Austria, Switzerland, the British Virgin Islands, Belize, New Zealand, Latvia, Lithuania, and the U.S.--to create a fund that paid the Russian prosecutor's office.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20002546-260.html
SAN FRANCISCO--The atmosphere, predictably, was one of sunny world-changing collaboration as Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams took the stage on Wednesday morning for Chirp, the company's first-ever developer conference. The two spoke separately: Stone discussed the company's past, and Williams went into what it's working on to get to the next level.
They had to keep things positive. Much of the audience consisted of developers who aren't really sure what will happen to the flexible communication platform now that Twitter has begun announcing official mobile clients and rolling out an advertising program, dual moves that have alarmed many creators of Twitter client and advertising apps.
"Twitter has always been about developers," Williams said. "Twitter is the ecosystem much more than any other Web service that exists. You guys have not only made Twitter better, you've helped shape it, you've helped define what it is for us and millions of users."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20002483-36.html
The PC industry bounced back during the end of 2009, and was able to continue its momentum through the first quarter of 2010.
PC shipments rose 24 percent from the same quarter a year ago to 79.1 million units worldwide, according to IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker report, issued Wednesday. It's the second straight quarter of double-digit growth, and indicates the industry is on its way to recovery after a disastrous late 2008 and most of 2009.
"We had such a strong fourth quarter that there was a risk of having addressed the urgent demand, which was largely (coming from) consumers in the fourth quarter. Channels might have still had inventory or the holiday promotions having passed so consumers and small business buyers just wouldn't be buying as much" this quarter, said Loren Loverde, IDC analyst. "We normally expect a seasonal decline from Q4 to Q1 and this didn't happen."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20002523-260.html
[AT&T announces plans to invest $1 billion to upgrade its network, services and products worldwide as well as efforts to continue to expand and deploy LTE and Wi-Fi based applications.]
Dallas -- AT&T plans to invest approximately $1 billion in 2010 to scale its delivery of applications, mobility and cloud services for global companies, to expand small business services within the United States and to continue extending its network globally.
The 2010 investment program for businesses is part of AT&T's overall existing capital plan. With business customers seizing the opportunities created by the continued proliferation of high speed communication networks and mobile computing devices worldwide, AT&T's 2010 program includes:
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/06/143543.html
[Microsoft reported to be set to launch a new line of cell phones next week.]
"Targeting youngsters, new line of cell phone is planned to be unveiled by Microsoft accompanied with social networking facilities next week. An event will be organized by the company on April 12 but the whereabouts of the event are still not disclosed."
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/06/143916.html
[Apple introduces the iPhone 4.0 OS that includes multitasking capability,lets users organize their mobile apps into folders, a unified inbox for mail and new security features.]
BY P.J. Connolly, Cupertino, CA -- "Device management, multitasking and a unified inbox for e-mail are expected to make Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 release a must for corporate users. The iPhone 3G and the second-generation iPad Touch will be able to run the new OS. However earlier generation iPhones will are not capable of running the new version, according to Apple officials."
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/09/114608.html
[Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 offers iAds, a new way of displaying and viewing ads on a mobile platform.]
By Brad Stone (NYT) -- "Echoes of the last Apple hype cycle have not yet faded, and another begins. Today (April 8) on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., the company offered a “sneak peek” into the future of the iPhone OS — the software that will likely run the next version of Apple’s iPhone, which may be released this summer."
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/09/115351.html
[TD-SCDMA handset shipments forecast to grow 600 percent annually in China this year.]
Boston -- According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, China’s 3G TD-SCDMA handset shipments will grow 600 percent during 2010. With the backing of the world’s largest mobile operator, China Mobile, TD-SCDMA will be one of the fastest growing mobile technologies in the world, making China an important 3G market.
Tom Kang, Director at Strategy Analytics, said, “We forecast TD-SCDMA handset shipments to grow an impressive 600 percent annually in China during 2010. Aggressive marketing and subsidizing of new phones and keener pricing of services by China Mobile will make TD-SCDMA one of the world’s fastest growing mobile technologies.”
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/12/125139.html
[The Dell Mini 3Ti and Mini 3iX are expected to debut soon in China.]
By Owen Fletcher (Computer World) -- "Pictures of two Dell smartphones, including one with China's 3G mobile standard and a new body shape for Dell's phone series, have been posted on the Web site of a Chinese regulator."
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2010/04/12/130121.html
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