Intel to stop making PC motherboards.

Intel Corp has decided to shut down its desktop motherboard business in the next three years. The company has been in PC motherboards business for more than 20 years. The company said it will not develop motherboards after the launch of its fourth-generation Core processor 'Haswell' in 2013.

"As Intel gradually ramps down its motherboard business we are ramping up critical areas of the desktop space including integration of innovative solutions for the PC ecosystem such as reference design development, NUC and other areas to be discussed later," a spokesman for the company said in an emailed statement. The company said it would continue to support all products sold through the warranty period included with the specific product. Recently, Intel said the business was largely focused on PC tower type designs. The company said the employees focused on PC motherboards would be redistributed to address emerging new form factors, including both desktop and mobile computers. Those engineers will also be refocused to expand Intel's form factor reference design work and enable the company's partners to develop new computing solutions, Intel said.

With PC sales contracting last year for the first time in 11 years, Intel and other chip vendors are scrambling to capture more market share in non PC businesses. Intel has for years been trying to increase its presence in Smartphone and other mobile computing devices, as well as embedded systems. Intel said the desktop PC segment continues to be a major focus for the company with hundreds of products across many sub segments and applications. Intel expects the broad and capable desktop motherboard ecosystem—including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and others—to support Intel's roadmap and worldwide customer base.

Only 10% Jelly Bean on Android Phones

Jelly Bean jumped the most in terms of its share among Android hardware. In December, Android 4.2 and 4.1 -- both named Jelly Bean -- were installed on 6.7% of all Android devices. They've climbed to 10.2% in January. Android 4.1 is on 9% of Android devices, while Android 4.2 (only available to Nexus devices right now) grabbed 1.2%. Jelly Bean's increase can be largely attributed to device updates. For example the Samsung Galaxy S III began to receive the update from more U.S. wireless network operators in December. Of course, holiday shoppers helped out, too. All the Nexus-branded gear runs Android 4.2. Jelly Bean 4.1 was first introduced by Google in June. It was revised to version 4.2 in October. Six months from launch, it has finally broken the 10% mark. Considering how quickly iOS users adopt new versions of Apple's Smartphone platform, Google updates are distributed at a snail's pace. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich's presence on all Android devices climbed from 27.5% in December to 29.1% this month. A small gain, but an important one. Android 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 combined amount to 39.3% of all devices. The rest of the Android OS field continues to dwindle. Gingerbread (Android 2.3) finally slipped below the 50% mark. It dropped from 50.8% to 47.6%. Gingerbread has long been the most-deployed version of Android. Android 2.2 Froyo runs 9% of all Android devices, Android 2.1 Eclair powers 2.4%, and Android 1.6 Donut and 1.5 Cupcake together have just 0.2%.

Facebook new messenger app for Android

Facebook today launched a new messenger app for Android phones, using which users, including those without a Facebook account, can send and receive messages to and from anyone with a phone number.
The social networking giant has partnered with all major carriers and device manufacturers for this service.
"Users can now sign up for a messenger account with just their name and phone number, so they can send messages to their phone contacts instantly," Facebook said in a statement.
This is being launched on Messenger for Android, first in India, Australia, Indonesia, Venezuela and South Africa, with other countries shortly after, it
"The goal is to make the new messenger experience better by expanding its reach and giving its users the ability to connect with all of their phone
This is done by adding a significant new feature that allows people to send and receive messages, to and from anyone with a phone number, and not just those on Facebook, it added.
The Messenger is a stand-alone mobile application and is free to download. It will use customer's existing data plan.
People who do not have the Messenger app on their phone will receive chats and messages sent to them wherever they log into Facebook.
While an update to Messenger for Android is available today, the Messenger accounts will become available over the next few weeks.

Intel launches new processor series

Computer chip maker Intel today launched a new series of processors, Itanium 9500, which the company claimed is over two-times faster than its previous generation processors. The new Intel Itanium processor 9500 series is more than twice as powerful as the previous generation, making it ideal for today's most demanding workloads, including business analytics, database, and large-scale ERP applications, Intel said in a statement. Systems based on Intel's Itanium processors run in more than three-quarters of the world's global 100 companies across industries such as aerospace, energy, life sciences and telecommunications, the company said.

With the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series, these industries will benefit from a leap in performance and increase in reliability, availability and serviceability capabilities, it said. "Built on a new microarchitecture and providing breakthrough performance, the Intel Itanium 9500 processor family signals Intel's ongoing commitment to deliver unparallelled reliability...  To meet the critical application demands across all industries," Srinivasan Ramaprasad, Country Business Manager, MNC Accounts, Intel South Asia, claimed at a press conference here today.

According to HP, based on HP enhancements and the Intel Itanium processor 9500 series, transactions are processed up to three times faster than previous generations, while using 21 per cent less energy.

"Today's announcement demonstrates HP's continued commitment to transform the server landscape with innovations to the Integrity portfolio--offered with a mission-critical converged infrastructure that will endure into the future," Santanu Ghose, Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India, said.

Wikipedia open to video submissions

Support for the HTML5 format could bring a new level of usability -- and editorial dispute -- to Wikipedia. 

It's taken four years but the crowd sourced encyclopedia finally launched a new HTML5-based video player this week that will greatly simplify the act of adding videos to  the site’s millions and millions of so far text base pages.

Contributors will now be able to upload and edit clips and add captions and subtitles, however, it is yet to be seen how the online encyclopedia's infamous community of editors will deal with this latest feature. For years, Wikipedia has been criticized for its lack of video content save for a handful of clips encoded in the Ogg Theora format. But the reason it has been so slow to roll out the feature is because of the company's own commitment to only using open-source technology and to hosting all of its content in-house, rather than using other companies' data centers.

So Wikipedia has had to bide its time until it had sufficient server capacity to host the videos and until a new open source video format -- the HTML5 based WebM -- gained widespread support (most of the world's most popular web browsers support it as do a number of mobile browsers). To this end it has been working in partnership with Kaltura since 2008 to develop a video player and a set of collaborative editing tools

Women use more text messages than men: Study

 women use sms 

Women use more text messages than men: Study

Women are twice as likely as men to use emoticons in text messages, according to a study by a US university.

The emoticons, which began as happy and sad faces, have developed into dozens of other expressions, and have become hugely popular in text messages and email.

The study by Rice University used Smart phone data from men and women over six months and analyzed 124,000 text messages, the Daily Mail reported.

Texting has become one of the most popular forms of communication. In 2012 alone, it is estimated that eight trillion text messages will be sent out across the world.

In the Rice University study, all of the participants used emoticons, but they did not use them very often. Only four percent sent all of their text messages containing one or more emoticons.

The study confirmed previous research that women are more emotionally expressive in non-verbal communication.

The authors also found that while women may use emoticons more than men, the men used a larger variety of emoticons to express themselves.Participants in the Rice study texted a wide variety of emoticons, the Daily Mail said.

A total of 74 different emoticons were used, but the top three emoticons - happy, sad and very happy - made up 70 percent of the total emoticons sent by the participants.

Google launches free SMS service in India

Search giant Google has started rolling out 'free SMS' for its free email service Gmail and paid email service Google Apps customers in India. The service allows users to send SMSes to mobile phones from chat windows. Users have to add mobile numbers of their contacts in the email address book and they are set. 

The service starts with 50 SMS credits for each user, every sent SMS costing one credit. Every reply received adds on 5 credits subject to the maximum level being 50 SMS at any given time. There is no official statement from Google on the launch of this service; however the service has gone live this evening in the chat windows of many users. 

Google is rolling out the service in partnership with cellular operators, which means they would share revenue with Google out of SMSes users on their network send. It specifies a way to buy more SMS credits. "You can always send an SMS to your own phone, and then reply to that message multiple times. Every time you send a reply message, your SMS credit is increased by five. Effectively, you're buying more messages by paying your phone company for these outgoing messages," it writes on its chat help portal