India's e-commerce likely to grow as 3G begins: eBay

Once 3G and mobile broadband services start in India, buying and selling of products over the internet are likely to grow at a rapid space, according to a top official of the e-commerce site eBay.

"E-commerce is taking off slowly here but I think the Indian market can experience significant growth over the next few years as 3G services are launched and mobile broadband gets more ubiquitous," eBay's President and CEO John Donahoe said.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.

"I think what you are going to see here in India is with more people having access to the Internet through their mobile devices, you are going to see changes in consumer behaviour in terms of willingness and an ability to buy online," he added.

In India, at present, the e-commerce business is growing at 30 per cent and eBay itself is growing at 60 per cent. Ebay has about 2.5 million users in India.

Moreover, he added that e-Commerce sites like eBay are not only a platform to buy and sell products but also help the economy by creating direct and indirect jobs. About 12,800 sellers use eBay India as a primary or secondary cource of income.

"We not only help people buy and sell products, we help them to earn a livelihood," he added.

Goods worth Rs. 150 crore will be sold by Indian sellers exported outside the country this year.

Now, make phone calls from your Gmail account

Google will now facilitate Gmail users to call telephones directly from their email. It will be in direct competition with Skype and traditional operators like AT&T and Verizon Communications.

After offering computer-to-computer voice and video chat services, Google will now allow calls to home phones and mobile phones directly from Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canadian phones from Gmail would be free of cost this year and for calls to other countries, there would be certain charges fixed at a lower rate. Google said calls to Britain, France, Germany, China and Japan would be as low as 2 cents per minute.

According to analysts, this service would likely be a bigger competitive threat to services like Skype's than to traditional phone companies, which have already been cutting their call prices in recent years in response to stiff competition.

"This is a risk to Skype. It's a competitor with a pretty good brand name," said Hudson Square analyst Todd Rethemeier. Like Skype, Rethemeier said the Google service will likely be much more popular among U.S. consumers making international calls, than among people calling friends inside the country.

Soon, computer will read minds to search web

Imagine searching the internet simply by thinking. Well, your imagination may soon turn into reality, say scientists who claim to be developing a computer which reads human minds.

A team at Intel Corporation is working on a new technology which will directly interpret words as they are thought, unlike current brain-controlled computers which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen.

In fact, the scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Preliminary tests of the system have shown that the computer can work out words by looking at similar brain patterns and looking for key differences that suggest what the word might be.

Dean Pomerleau, of Intel Laboratories, said, "The computer uses a form of 20 questions to narrow down what the word is." So a food related word like apple produces activity in those parts of the brain related to hunger. So the computer can infer attributes to each word being thought about and this lets the computer zero down on what the word is pretty quickly.

"We are currently mapping out the activity an average brain produces when thinking about different words. It means you'll be able to write letters, open emails or do Google searches just by thinking," Pomerleau said.

Nokia to launch dual SIM phones in India

Nokia is preparing for entry-level dual SIM phones, and now the Finnish giant has announced they're in the final pre-release stages, and will be launching the Nokia C1-00 for Rs. 1,700, and Nokia C2-100 for Rs. 2,500 simultaneously in the next couple of months, following its global launch. Apart from Samsung, no other major international mobile manufacturer currently offers dual SIM mobile phones in India.

Also targeting the rural sector, the phones will also come with Nokia Ovi Life Tools installed. So, for now we can expect a launch either on Tata DoCoMo or Reliance Mobile, the respective GSM services of the telecommunication giants, as they're the only ones who presently offer the service.

According to a spokesperson from Nokia India, the company is undecided whether to produce the phones in India's Chennai facility, or elsewhere.

Bangalore household runs on a robot of few hundred rupees

A "Developer Evangelist" for Microsoft Bangalore, Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu, has been designing the robots over weekends for five-six years, and in the past few months, has connected them to a cloud and to Internet for an integrated "buddyHome", a proof-of-concept system that uses already available face- and image-recognition technology to offer intelligent everyday solutions. All of it cost just a few hundred rupees.

Each machines are custom-made to serve a purpose be it to wake him with a splash of water on his face if he doesn't respond to the morning alarm, to clean the house, or to alert him about intruders and overcooked noodles on the stove.

Chellamuthu says buddyHome is a self-learning system that takes three pictures of him every second, processes them to understand whether he's sleeping or smiling and activates certain features accordingly, recollecting all the information from the cloud - based on Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform - at night to perform better with each day.

Besides security and entertainment features, one of the buddyHome modules enhances his magazine-reading experience by ascertaining his interest in a particular story or picture from his facial expression and pulling out videos on the subject to play on a projected screen. In a video he presented at Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2010, when he reads an IPL advert in a magazine, it offers to book tickets for the next game.

Now Chellamuthu is working on a hand-gesture-recognition system for the speech-impaired that will translate sign language into words and also he working on integrating into the system an autobot that can communicate real-time. "If I'm not on my seat and my boss sends me an instant message, won't it be cool if it can take my place and reply to him?" he says.

Human brain on a microchip

Canadian scientists have developed a microchip that 'communicates' with brain cells, which they claim could help patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. They have successfully connected brain cells to a silicon chip that can "hear" conversation between brain tissues.

The neuro-chip, which has been developed by medicine scientists at the University of Calgary, will network brain cells and thus record brain cell activity at a resolution never achieved before, according to Naweed Syed who led the team that made the breakthrough.

The neuro-chip will help future understanding of how brain cells work under normal conditions and thus permit drug discoveries for a variety of neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, a university statement said on Tuesday.

"This technical breakthrough means we can track subtle changes in brain activity at the level of ion channels and synaptic potentials, which are also the most suitable target sites for drug development in neuro-degenerative diseases and neuropsychological disorders," Naweed Syed, who is professor and head of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, has been quoted as saying.

The new neuro-chips are also automated.

"Previously it took years of training to learn how to record ion channel activity from brain cells, and it was only possible to monitor one or two cells simultaneously. Now, larger networks of cells can be placed on a chip and observed in minute detail, allowing the analysis of several brain cells networking and performing automatic, large-scale drug screening for various brain dysfunctions," the university statement said.

The University of Calgary is excited at the potential of this made in Canada technology, said university vice president Rose Goldsmith.

"The University of Calgary is proud to be the home of this cutting edge Canadian work with a neurochip. The advances in research and healthcare made by possible by this technology are immense. The work and collaboration happening in the lab of Naweed Syed is another example demonstrating our leadership in the field of biomedical engineering."

The new technology has been published online this month in the journal, Biomedical Microdevices.