Bangalore based software development organization Legwork Labs have developed an interesting product known as TEXT me which claims to revolutionize the way communications happen between parents and educational institution. The best part about Text Me is that it does not require any hardware or software at clients place. It is a SAAS (Software as a service) product which just requires PC and an internet connection.

Text Me makes use of 2-way SMS notification system and thus ensures that right message is sent to right person. Using this system, parents can check the marks, attendance, performance, etc. and they will be updated using real time communication.

According to Legworks, Text Me will bridge the gaps between the parents and the educational institutions, which is increasing a lot. This service can be a lot beneficial even at the time of admission, telling the applications about rules and regulations.  Any last minute update or changes can be easily sent to the guardian effectively free of cost.

Legworks boast about Text Me stating,

If communicating real time to parent is a problem; if circulating day to day notifications to parent is a problem; if managing attendance is a problem; if updating exam results is a problem, we have a solution for you try TEXT me

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Pranav Mistry, who earlier had made headlines for his invention Sixth Sense and even received Popular Science 2009 Invention Award for it, has now invented yet another similar device and this time its invisible – A mouse and amusingly it costs just 20$ to build its prototype.

The perpetual changes in computer technology & web has seen many evolutions, right from large room size CPUs to miroprogrammed slim netbooks, heavy bulky monitors to thin LCDs, few MBs capacity hard disks to trillion capacity HDs but in all these what remained nearly unchanged and un-evolved is mouse – moving it around to help us interact computer.

Mouseless is an invisible computer mouse project done in in MIT Fluid Interfaces Group headed by Pranav Mistry, this invisible mouse provides the familiarity of interaction of a physical mouse without actually needing a real hardware mouse, hence removes the requirement of having a physical mouse altogether but still provides the intuitive interaction of a physical mouse that everyone is familiar with.

Mouseless consists of – (1) an Infrared (IR) laser beam, (2) an Infrared camera and both embedded in the computer itself. The laser beam module is modified with a line cap and placed such that it creates a plane of IR laser just above the surface the computer sits on. The user cups their hand, as if a physical mouse was present underneath, and the laser beam lights up the hand which is in contact with the surface. The IR camera detects those bright IR blobs using computer vision. The change in the position and arrangements of these blobs are interpreted as mouse cursor movement and mouse clicks. As the user moves their hand the cursor on screen moves accordingly. When the user taps their index finger, the size of the blob changes and the camera recognizes the intended mouse click.

However, the possibilities of this mouse is just beyond the capabilities of a modern mouse we use these days as Pranav Mistry stated on its website – As we improve our computer vision algorithms, an extensive library of gestures could be implemented in addition to mouse movement and mouse clicks. Typical multitouch gestures, such as zooming in and out, as well as novel gestures, such as balling one’s fist are all possible. In addition, the use of multiple laser beams would allow for recognition of a wider range of free hand motions, enabling novel gestures that the hardware mouse cannot support.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Sweet Search is a powerful search engine owned by Dulcinea Media, created exclusively for students that return results which are accurate, reliable, safe and understandable. Accrding to Sweet search, it searches only the 35k websites that their staff of research experts, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved. It gives you the result that you need. Often academic websites make very little effort to optimize their content according to the search engine bots, thus Sweet Search digs out the most credible academic websites for you and saves your educational time from being wasted. The search results are not only influenced by the search engine bots of Google (as sweet search is powered by Google) but also add up the common sense of human brain.

What makes the Sweet Search even sweeter is the Yolink toolbar present on the left side of the Sweet Search results page. In order to scan the results to determine their relevancy, enter a term to narrow your search. Then, Yolink scan the original search results in which your additional keyword appears thus, helps you to mine the appropriate result without navigating anywhere else. It integrates impeccably with Google Docs enabling you to save excerpts of search results as note for future reference. Yolink results can also be shared to Twitter, Facebook and blogger etc.

Sweet Search offers many other sections to trim your search further, like SweetSearch4me for emerging school kids, SweetSites is the collection of web resources for teachers and students organized by subject and academic level and SweetSearch Biographies provides profile information of 1000+ significant people sorted as per their origin and profession.

In the end, is Sweet Search an alternative to forsake Google Search? No, it is only a smarter way to find outstanding information and academic resources which remains buried deep in the search results of famous search engines.

Visit: Sweet Search ; A search engine for Students

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Infosys make it quite interesting as each employee will be getting (as per its closing rate on Wednesday, BSE), at least Rs 14000 approx as stock shares and if one has completed 5 years of service it will make around Rs.28,000. The total amount for this idea of employee bonus or reward is  somewhere around 320 million rupees to 1.6 billion rupees.

Earlier in 2006 Infosys give away bonus of 1.26 billion rupees to its 56,000 employees when it was Infosys 25th birthday and noticeably Infosys is also the first Indian company to give its employees stock options in 1993  which however been put on hold for few years but now the company has again pitch in with the stocks reward system in 2010.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

The launch of new Libretto W100 is part of Toshiba’s 25th Anniversary in Laptop business and am glad that I use the one of the oldest laptop manufacturer’s device. New libretto W100 offers dual 7” diagonal multi-touch screens that work horizontally or vertically hence making it perfect as ebook reader as well.  It also has easy navigation that supports virtual keyboards on other screen plus a soft track pad that let you type, click and browse.

See Pictures below -

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Have you ever faced a problem like, you have received an address in an email and you are not sure of that address where it is exactly located? In such a situation a very obvious step by you would be to copy and paste the address in the Google maps to Google out the address. It is a tedious task for all of us. But from today onwards, we won’t have to carry out the tedious task of digging the address out from the Google maps ourselves.

Google map previews are integrated in Gmail and Google Buzz. Now you can easily see the maps of all addresses you receive in your Gmail and Google Buzz.

To get started all you have to do is go to the settings tab of your Gmail Account and just enable the button of Gmail Labs and finally save your changes. Now will be able to see the preview of any of the address you receive in your Gmail by just clicking the expand button to show Map Preview without navigating away anywhere else.

However, at present only the US addresses are mapped, but very soon all the Google maps URLs will work.

(Source)

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Let’s hear from the users of this academy what they have to say about the academy:

“…I just wanted to say that out of every internet learning site I have used yours is by far the best! The maths [are] just so beautifully explained. Thank you so much; now I really think I will pass my maths exams~!”

“My eldest kid is dancing around in my room here because she is so excited that she finally found someone that teaches like this. You’re awesome. Thank you.”

“Half an hour with your presentations taught me more than three months of sitting in my professors class. You seriously saved my grade.”

Salman Khan (Sal) who founded the Khan Academy with the goal of using technology to educate the world. He has the vision to educate anyone with access to computer and Internet, can come to Khan Academy and enjoy world class education. He termed Khan Academy as a world’s free Virtual School.

Khan Academy has a vast video tutorial collection starting merely from very basic mathematics, to all the way to college level Calculus and Physics, in short and encapsulated videos focusing one fundamental concept at a time. All the videos are made my Sal himself. His Videos are not emotionless and monotonous, like usual lectures in your school or other long video lectures by professors. From the videos his great enthusiasm of teaching is clearly revealed. The Videos clearly expresses the concepts and injects the subject matter with the sense of intuition so that you may not forget the basic concepts throughout your life.

Here are the lines from Sal on his teaching methodology.

“I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him. The concepts are conveyed as they are understood by me, not as they are written in a textbook developed by an educational bureaucracy. Viewers know that it is the labor of love of one somewhat quirky and determined man who has a passion for learning and teaching. I don’t think any corporate or governmental effort–regardless of how much money is thrown at the problem–can reproduce this. “

To start learning from Khan Academy you just need to Visit the Khan Academy’s Website and browse the Video library. The extensive video library covers almost all the topics and concepts required at School level and basic college level. The popularity of his videos is clearly reveled from the millions of views of his videos at YouTube. Moreover, Khan Academy has been awarded for the best use of Technology to benefit humanity.

It’s really a great initiative to educate the world. Khan academy is providing the world with the rich and never-getting-old educational resource. Students from all over the world are finding that they are now learning the difficult topics much easily than they have done ever before.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Nvidia will be bringing the 3D PCs out of the box in desktop, notebook range to the consumers, the prices of which will start at around $1,500 which is about half of the price of 3D TV in market. As per Nvidia – “In 3D mode, each eye receives the full resolution of the display for the highest possible image quality for text and objects“.

At Computex 2010 held at Taiwan, Jerry Shen, CEO of ASUS, demonstrated some ready-to-go 3D PCs in desktop, notebook and all-in-one varieties

Microsoft also announced that Silverlight, a web content development platform now supports streaming 3D content over the web to NVIDIA 3D Vision-equipped PCs. NVIDIA and Microsoft demonstrated the world’s first high definition 3D music video ‘We Are The World’ in 3D streamed over the internet.

NVIDIA’s  game developers worked on more than 425 PC games to work with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology. Sony and Fujifilm will be bringing 3D digital cameras to market where consumers can take 3D photos and view as 3D on their 3D PC. A 3D PC can view the Web in 3D including live streaming of 3D video, watch Blu-ray 3D movies and also Cyberlink will be releasing a version of their software player that will support playback of Blu-ray movies in 3D.

As per Nvidia, a 3D PC must have, by definition, the following minimum requirements:

• A pair of 3D active-shutter glasses.
• A 120Hz 3D-capable display which can be a desktop LCD monitor, a 3D projector, a 3D TV, or a laptop with an integrated 3D-capable LCD.
• A discrete GPU such as the latest GeForce GPU’s from NVIDIA that are designed to deliver HD content to a 3D display.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

Lest say you need to know who is prime minister of india or say sachin tendulkar’s birthday Google regular search will now show accurate answers right at the top of your results, sourced from across the web using its own Squared technology.

Noticeably it takes a lot of computing power to dig that search out of unstructured, fragmented and redundant information as data spilled all across the web.

Google Squared which is still in labs has been an early attempt from Google to find and extract structured data from unstructured data or say information overloaded all across the web.

Along with these new things Google now also shows more enhancement called – “Something Different” which is also powered by same Squared technology that bring out new features to the search results page in terms of  related searches. For example – when you search on Google, you’ll see a new section at the bottom of the left-hand panel which contains related search terms. For example, search for ‘zebra’ (without quotes) and you’ll see other related searches such as ‘giraffes’, ‘elephants’ and ‘hippos’.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy

According to report published by NY Times Google is soon to launch it touch screen based Tablet PCs (iPad Killer) that will be Android based OS and will give tough competition to Apple’s iPad and Amazon Kindle and moreover speculations are there if Google will launch it own tablet PCs it more likely that Google could wash away the market of tablet PCs and netbooks.

As per the hidden sources NY Times reports – “Google had been experimenting in ‘stealth mode’ with a few publishers to explore delivery of books, magazines and other content on a tablet”.

Google with its products which already have largest user base to any other such product in the world such as Google Books (most important for tablets), Google reader, Google mail and the most importantly the search engine capabilities in all of its products makes it the right match to put on the peak of this market too.

Most importantly Google’s approach in all of its inventions and discoveries is its open source development and being open to all the developers around the world to build, stretch and widen the capabilities unlike to Apple’s proprietary based approach and close-development and same goes with Microsoft too which are not been open source.

Share and Enjoy

IndianWeb2.com: Indian Web 2.0, Technology Startups, News and Reviews

Share and Enjoy