Hope of Hopeless

YouTube users in the UK will be given the chance to make money from the videos they post on the site.

The project is already up and running in the US and is now being extended to other countries, starting in the UK. In the US some contributors are already earning thousands of dollars each month from their films, according to the video-sharing site.

The amount that is earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos.

Those signing up to the YouTube Partner Programme, as it is called, will be offered a share of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their video. YouTube is not disclosing the exact details of the scheme, but does say that those making “several thousand dollars a month” are regularly producing videos with over one million views.

YouTube hopes to expand the Partner Programme to the rest of Europe soon.

I just stumbled across this interesting video which shows hot to make instant hot ice.

All that you need for this experiment is water, a pan, a small tray and Sodium Acetate. Dissolve the Sodium Acetate into boiling water until saturation. Then pour the liquid into a glass and cool it in the fridge. After the liquid become cool, pour it in to the tray.

Then, just touch the liquid and see the magic.

Everyday there is a new mobile phone model is being released in to the market. Some are trendy, some are smart and well designed and loaded with hundreds of features.

Did you ever wanted to have a phone that’s just a phone. Here comes the lightest and smallest phone: Modu Mini phone. You can think of Modu as an expanded SIM card. It can make a call, send text messages, and hold a contact list—the bare minimum required to be a mobile phone. That is why it is so small—about the size of an iPod Nano.

This Modu Mini Phone is a modular phone, that can be slipped into different device jackets —like an MP3 player, a GPS device, a bigger cell phone, car stereo, or a digital camera. (Although, it will initially only support GPRS, which is slow. Another drawback—there is no WiFi.) In a camera, for instance, Modu can be used to send pictures over the wireless network. (Although, it will initially only support GPRS, which is slow. Another drawback—there is no WiFi.)

According to Guardian report mobile subscribers in UK send more text messages than any other nation in Europe.

An average of 100 text messages are sent by UK mobile users each month, according to a worldwide survey of 10,000 mobile phone owners by media agency Universal McCann.

That compares with an average of 65 for Germans, but both the UK and Germany far outstrip customers in the US, where the average mobile phone user sends only 32 texts each month.

The study also showed that the British are more inclined to use their mobile phones for texting than for talking. UK mobile owners dedicate less than half their mobile usage to direct conversation.

Firefox 3 was released on 17 June. And its already downloaded more than 14 million as of now, heading for a record.

You can watch the live count as it streams in from Mozilla’s raw server logs, and according to the download day page, the majority of downloads have come from the US. Despite some hiccups, Firefox had no problem setting the record (though no one really seems to know if there was any old mark to break — so anything might have been a record with Guinness watching).

Check out the ultimate guide by Mozilla and power users guide for FF3 by lifehacker.

Check out this video which shows what the soon expected FF for mobile might look like.

Nokia announced it will acquire the remaining shares of mobile software licensing company Symbian Limited–moreover, the handset giant will team with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo to unite the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP technologies and forge a single open mobile software platform. The firms will also collaborate with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to establish the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit initiative dedicated to accelerating the availability of new services and mobile experiences. The foundation will be open to all developers and “will provide a unified platform with common UI framework” under the royalty-free Eclipse Public License.

Now, open source software is great for developers because it mean that anyone can easily look at the code, tweak it, and write applications designed to run well on the platform. But there’s also a huge benefit for telecom companies. Nokia will provide access to the Symbian OS royalty-free to members of the Symbian Foundation. And anyone can join the foundation for a nominal $1500 annual fee.

Symbian currently has about 60 percent of the mobile browser market share. The move to make the platform open source should help Nokia and Symbian maintain that lead in the face of challenges from the LiMo Foundation and Google’s Linux-based Android platform.

“Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia. “Nokia is a strong supporter of open platforms and technologies as they give the freedom to build, maintain and evolve applications and services across device segments and offer by far the largest ecosystem, enabling rapid innovation. Today’s announcement is a major milestone in our devices software strategy.”

The Symbian Foundation is expected to begin operations during the first half of 2009, subject to completion of the Nokia/Symbian acquisition. Financial terms were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reports Nokia will purchase Siemens AG’s 8.4 percent stake in Symbian for about $109.4 million, bringing its overall ownership in the software firm to 56.3 percent. According to Nokia, there are currently more than 200 million phones, 235 different models and tens of thousands of third-party mobile applications already based on the Symbian OS. The first devices based on the Symbian Foundation open-source code are expected to arrive in 2010.

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for mobile phones. Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world’s leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. During Q1 2008, 18.5 million Symbian mobile phones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators, bringing the total number of units shipped up to 31 March 2008 to 206 million. Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom, with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Asia (India, P.R. China, and Korea) and Japan. For more information, please visit www.symbian.com.

Livescience.com listed out the following ten future technologies that are potential to change the living.

1. The Hydrogen Economy: Expected to replace oil economy.
2. Therapeutic Cloning: Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.
3. Computing Power: Moore’s law still holds good and expected to be valid for some more time.
4. Desktop 3-D Printing: When your favorite gadget of the future breaks, you might select a replacement model online, download its design file and make a true 3-D replacement on your home printer.
5. Location-Based Computing: Location based services will evolve that could bridge real and virtual worlds seamlessly.
6. Better, Cheaper Solar Cells: The cost of photo voltaic cells will come down drastically and solar power expected to wide spread in use in house hold usage, space and vehicles.
7. Mobile Robots: Why drive to the deli to pick up your order when you can just send your robot car?
8. Pervasive Wireless Internet: WiMAX, 3G, 4G, etc., all point to a pervasive wireless Internet, where being on-line everywhere, all the time, will be routine.
9. Gene Therapy and Stem Cells: scientists are working to change the genes causing inherited diseases and trick defective cells into growing correctly.
10. Digital Libraries: The time will come when any straightforward factual question can be answered immediately, online.

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.” The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

A full-fledged display won’t be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational “fairly quickly,” according to Parviz.

Nearly two weeks after its historic landing, the US Mars probe Phoenix has scooped up its first sample of Martian soil and begun analyzing it for water and organic compounds.

The test dig made Sunday by the Phoenix Mars Lander’s 8-foot-long robotic arm uncovered bits of bright specks in the soil believed to be ice or salt.

Mission controllers will send instructions to the lander to dump the sample into one of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) ovens. The TEGA ovens, which are about an inch long and the diameter of a pencil lead, will heat up the soil samples and use a mass spectrometer to detect the gases that come off the samples, which will shed light on some of the materials in the soil, specifically those formed by the process of liquid water.

Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains on May 25 for a three-month hunt to study whether the far northern latitudes could support primitive life. Its main task is to excavate trenches in the permafrost in search of evidence of past water and organic compounds considered the chemical building blocks of life. The cost of the mission is $420 million.

Close-up images beamed back by the lander over the weekend revealed that its three legs are resting on what appears to be a slab of ice. It apparently was uncovered when the spacecraft’s thrusters blew away the topsoil.

Lets hope we will find some water also in the soil sample!

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch ten satellites, including eight from abroad, which will be carried by PSLV-C9, on April 28 from Sriharikota.

The cluster of satellites being carried on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C9 will also include the advanced remote sensing satellite, Cartosat-2A, which will carry high resolution stereo cameras and scientific instruments and will have intelligence gathering functions.

This will mark the first time that ISRO will attempt a simultaneous launch of ten satellites, ISRO officials said.

The mission will also see the launch of eight micro-satellites. The 5-20 kg satellites have been provided by three European countries, as well as from Canada.

The satellites would be ejected into a 635 km orbit. Cartosat-2A, which is of one metre resolution, would be used for mapping purposes and management of natural resources.

The second Indian satellite of the cluster, weighing 85 kg, was an experimental remote sensing satellite. It would also be used as a platform for trying out advanced technology during the coming launches, the official said.

The launch is scheduled at 0920 hrs from ISRO’s launch port Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on 28 April. ISRO considers the launch very important as it was a major step forward in its commercial launch operations.

Technically also, it is an important mission, as satellites have to be put at the right time in precise orbit one by one.