TigerDirect News Update for December 19, 2006
Here’s today’s news update for December 19, 2006:
- Making friends by license plate
- New Software allows you to index your friends
- Google and NASA join up, and
- Mass Dog wedding cancelled in India.
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Making friends by license plate
Most people don’t go out driving to make friends, but that’s the philosophy behind a new (and extremely optimistic) social networking SMS service called PL8Scan, which enables cell phone-wielding drivers to contact other drivers by text message via the latter’s license plate numbers.
Having signed up to PL8Scan, drivers who wish to initiate contact with other road users send a text message to a central repository using a five-digit number. In the message, the driver includes the license plate number of the intended recipient (including details of the state in which it is registered), as well as the substance of the message. (Source: Crave)
Facial indexing?
Polar Rose said it plans to offer free software to make photos searchable on both personal computers and across the Web by analyzing the contents of pictures with pattern recognition technology to locate specific faces within them.
The company said it will allow users to annotate photos with descriptive details, harnessing the collective intelligence of the Web to improve what can be done with computational searching alone on sites like Google or Yahoo.
Polar Rose, which takes its name from a flower-shaped mathematical curve used to plot two-dimensional coordinates, will help consumers to label any photo and in turn to search for related photos of the same or similar-looking people.
Google and NASA join up
Web surfers may soon be able to explore the canyons of Mars and experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon thanks to a deal announced on Monday between Web search company Google Inc. and the NASA Ames Research Center.
The Space Act Agreement is the first in a series of collaborations between the Mountain View, California-based Internet company and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA and Google said they will work together on a wide range of technical problems and will make NASA’s space exploration work, much of which is currently scattered across the Web, more accessible to the public.
India cancels dog wedding
A Hindu wedding ceremony of 18 dogs has been called off in India after hardline religious groups and animal rights activists said it was a mockery of the religion and cruel to the canines, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
The marriage of nine dogs to promote canine culture was expected to take place on Sunday in the northwestern town of Jaipur, the Times of India reported.
But the wedding which, according to Hindu rituals involves sitting in front of a sacred fire and exchanging flower garlands, was canceled after groups including People for Animals (PFA) criticized the event.
The marriage would also have included a procession and a huge feast with a special dance party. Event management company B Positive and the Pink City Canine Club were organizing the spectacle.
And that’s your TigerDirect News Update for December 19, 2006
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