Office 2010 can easily be seen as analogous to Windows 7 in that it represents Microsoft’s latest chance to convince people that they’ve really been listening to their concerns.

Like Windows Vista, Office 2007 was an upgrade that relatively few bothered to adopt. Office 2010, like Windows 7, is a do-over. Microsoft, in fact, took a page from the lengthy Windows 7 beta program when, last year, it made the beta of Office 2010 widely available to the public.

Here’s why you should go for an upgrade:-

The ‘ribbon bar’ was Office 2007′s most controversial feature — and one that dissuaded many from upgrading to Office 2007. The ribbon bar did away with conventional menus in favour of a tabbed, context- specific top row that grouped functions likely to be needed or wanted. The idea was to unearth the many features of Office applications that many never found because those features were buried deep within menus or dialog boxes.

Menu addicts will be disappointed to hear that not only has the ribbon bar not disappeared in Office 2010, it has been enhanced. You’ll now have the ability to customize the ribbon bar by adding the tabs that you think should appear, and you can add or remove functions or features within tabs.

You’ll also find the ribbon bar throughout Office 2010. In Office 2007, the ribbon bar was missing from Outlook and OneNote, Microsoft’s note-taking and information management tool. There’s still no option to bring back classic menus, but the improvements will be welcome to those who don’t mind the change.

CONCLUSION::

The Senior Director, Applications Product Marketing from Apple, Kirk Paulsen described the upgrade as” a new version of Aperture runs in 64-bit mode on Snow Leopard”. Actually, Paulsen is proud of this good news, especially for those who have giant files, such as super high-resolution scanned images. All they can now be loaded into memory, performance has highly increased.

Let’s now take a look at the new Aperture 3:
Faces and Places.
Brushes for precision retouching
Dozens of adjustment presets.
True full-screen browsing and editing
And that’s just part of the perfect picture. As follows, let’s see them one by one.

Faces
Faces feature makes it faster and easier to search thousands of photos for shots of a particular person. The searching tool and results get you a quite satisfactory way to find a face in a crowd. Just put a name to the face, and then Aperture 3 will take the following steps.

Together with iPhoto’09, Faces in Aperture 3 will be more powerful. Not only can you view the people you name across the entire library, but you can also see them in individual projects. And the new Show Unnamed Faces pane displays all the detected-but-not-yet-named faces in a project to help you easily add names.

Previously when iPhoto’09 release, Paulsen has introduced “the Aperture discussion boards lit up, asking when they could see”. With Aperture 3, those features have been added—but they’ve also been “extended and enhanced for photographers—and pros, for that matter.”

Places
With Places, now you can use GPS location data to explore your photos by the places they were taken. Better still; find them on an interactive map.

The Places in Aperture 3, performs like Paulsen said, “set a new standard for geotagging for photographs.” Moving one step further from iPhoto’09, THE Aperture 3′s map is much more interactive, dragging and dropping thumbnails onto the map. GPX files can be imported in case of auto-match for the entire se of photos to the GPS data.

Brushes
New nondestructive, edge-aware brushes let you selectively apply powerful adjustments to photos.
Being requested, the new Brushes have added in Aperture 3. With these brushes, users can freely decide the whole image or only a portion to adjust. Total 15 Quick brushes provide contrast, polarizing, dodging, burning, and adjusting saturation. Besides, each brush can be turned on or off individually, you can create with any of them you like. One optional edge-detection feature also included, promising you an analysis on what you’re brushing.

Preset
Dozens of new adjustment presets give your photos a wide range of looks. Simply one click, they work out.

The Preset system in Aperture 3 has also been updated. In new version, users can take combinations of those adjustments and save them together as a single preset. This is more advanced than previously. Paulsen said “dozens of presents” are available. For example, quick-fixes, white-balance fixes, and black-and-white and color adjustments are all packaged in it. All are importable and exportable.

Slideshow
Slideshow in Aperture 3 functions to create spectacular multimedia shows with photos, HD video clips, titles, layered soundtracks, and professionally designed themes.The new slideshow engine offers advanced slideshow features in iPhoto’09. Slide durations and transitions are optional. Slideshows can then be rendered to video and sent to iTunes, and Aperture 3 supports exporting slideshows in 720p and 1080p formats for display on HDTVs.

Browser
Take advantage of your Apple display to get a big, uncluttered, full-screen view of your library.

Aperture 3 offers a new full-screen view, let you to view projects, thumbnails in full screen effect. And with your entire library, this function performs:
* Make selects and compare them side by side.
* Zoom from 25 percent to 1000 percent to study details.
* Even browse your video.
* All on your brilliant Apple display.

Now Aperture gives you more easy-to-use, powerful tools than ever.



Vodafone showed two new handsets aimed at customers in emerging markets in which it has operations, including India, Turkey and eight African countries. Both mobiles — one called the Vodafone 150, priced at less than £10 — are expected to open up the world of data services to users who could not afford expensive handsets.

The phones will offer basic voice and text services but also will have the built-in ability to manage mobile payments, as Vodafone looks to tap into the expanding market for such payments and money transfers in countries where traditional banks are difficult to access or out of reach for many.

Vodafone is not alone in looking to the cheaper end of the market for future growth. Nokia said that it was testing mobile banking services in India this year. It expected to roll these out to all the big cities in the country by the end of the year. With 4.4 billion mobile phones in the world and only 1.8 billion bank accounts, the opportunity was clear, it said.

T-Mobile is expected today to launch a sub-£100 smartphone planned go on sale in the UK in April. The device, made by Huawei and based on Google’s Android software, has a slightly lower resolution than more expensive smartphones. It is intended to appeal to those unwilling to pay £35 a month for an iPhone but want to use e-mail and browse from their phones.

Microsoft unveiled the latest incarnation of its Windows software for mobile phones at the congress. It expects the new system to help to shore up its declining position in the smartphone market.

Microsoft presented new features that will enable users of the new Windows Mobile system to configure their phones to give them a more personal touch, bringing useful or popular friends and features to the handset. It also brings Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform and its Zune music player into the mobile world and will feature touchscreens.

Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, said that the company had dropped the ball with previous developments. “There is no question that we had to step back and recast and reform our strategy,” he said.

Analysts were unconvinced that the phones, to be marketed this year, would prove to be “a new beginning”. Microsoft is expected to back the product with an aggressive advertising campaign.

Branded the Desire, it will go head to head with Google’s own Nexus One and the long-awaited Legend model that is seen as stylish enough to knock the iPhone off its mantle as the world’s must-have handset.

The two handsets, both based on Google’s Android operating system, instantly raised the temperature at the conference and put rival product releases from the likes of Motorola and Sony Ericsson in the shade.

HTC is the fourth-largest mobile phone maker in the world and has grown its market share rapidly at the expense of larger rivals by producing solid smartphones that cost less, and often perform better, than more expensive models from other companies.

The similarity between the Desire, which offers the fastest download speeds of any mobile phone in the world, and Google’s recently launched Nexus One, was notable. The handsets offer matching functionality and look strikingly similar although HTC’s model is likely to be priced below Google’s Nexus One.

The Desire will be perfect for consumers that want to watch high-quality video on their phones or play computer games with advanced graphics.

Apart from the speed of the device, which is enabled by its 1 gigahertz processor, the big selling point for the Desire is the screen which uses a new technology whereby every pixel emits light “like a firefly”. The handset also uses the company’s Sense user interface in conjunction with Android that integrates all the updates from your friends’ various social networking sites on to the phone.

HTC also unveiled the Legend, a phone that impressed analysts with an eye for design. The phone, which is made of a single sheet of aluminium as opposed to plastic and integrates the battery and antenna into the base of the phone.

Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight, said: “Legend’s clever use of milled aluminium casing could scoop Apple’s direction for the next iPhone design.”

UK users will be able to snap up the Desire from T-Mobile and Orange from next month while Vodafone, which also was first out the door with the Nexus One, has secured a deal to sell the Legend from April.

Meanwhile Puma has launched a phone with sports lifestyle features such as a pedometer and a GPS system to ensure joggers won’t get lost as well as a solar panel on the back of the device. The feature phone, made by France’s Sagem, hopes to replicate the success of other branded phones such as Prada’s handset by appealing to a specific niche, in this case gym junkies

Porsche company official said “The models can be ordered (in India) today but worldwide deliveries will begin in May.” Turbo S is a six-cylinder boxer engine enhanced by two exhaust gas turbochargers having variable turbine geometry. Turbo S comes exclusively with the seven-speed PDK double-clutch gearbox and accelerates from a standstill to 100 km/h in just 3.3 seconds reaching 200 km/h in just 10.8 seconds. It is also capable of achieving top speed of 315 kmph. Despite the fact that the car offers better performance than 911 Porsche Turbo, it does not consume as much fuel as its predecessor making it one of the most fuel efficient sports cars.

The Porsche 911 Turbo S is expected to be priced at Rs. 1.87 Crore (ex-showroom, Delhi) and Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet will cost above Rs. 2 crores.

Those iPhones really are awful.

Who could possibly imagine people wanting to buy those ridiculous little objects? You know, the ones that only allow you to open one app at a time. The ones that simply don’t believe in the quintessential togetherness of apps.

No, no, I wouldn’t dream of offering such outlandish besmirchment. But you’d be forgiven for imagining that these were the exact sentiments expressed by Microsoft in a little film the company presented at the Barcelona launch of its possibly, maybe, surely excellent Windows Phone 7 Series.

It seems this ultimate phoning machine’s fender is squarely pointed at the iPhone’s rear end, even if the word “iPhone” never left the narrator’s mouth.

In a rather clumsy little piece, what did leave his mouth was prefaced by “don’t get us wrong…we love apps.” This was shortly followed by “but current smartphones make you use them one at a time.” The voice then bemoaned the lack of app togetherness, as if apps were made for coupling.

Now, which current smartphones does one suppose Microsoft might be referring to? Don’t Palm phones and Android phones, for example, run apps simultaneously? Indeed, wasn’t there a Sprint Palm Pre ad that positively trumpeted this feat?

So that must leave, oh, right, yes, the one that sells rather well and was described by Verizon as “misfit toy” and, oh wait, “semi-functional, giggling-brat-vanity.“

While Microsoft’s radical new approach to phone software seems to have received quite a few bravos, the task ahead isn’t so much to persuade people of better functionality. It’s to garner some emotional favor that has been so consistently squandered over so many years by the bellicose fervor of Microsoft’s corporate ways.

Few can breathe while wondering whether Microsoft might support this little amuse-bouche of a film with a radical attempt to smash-mouth the iPhone in high-profile advertising. Somehow, I feel the original BMW 7-Series wouldn’t do that. It would just make you feel so very, very good about its own product that you just had to try it.

The thing is, making people feel good about something is harder than you think.

Good old Wi-Fi could be the fix to an impending explosion of data on wireless networks.

Nearly three years after Apple introduced the game-changing iPhone, wireless operators around the globe are feeling the effects of the wireless data tsunami that is well under way. Even networks that don’t support the iPhone are feeling the pinch as a generation of new wireless devices offering bandwidth-hungry Web applications are hitting networks.

The result, as many iPhone users in New York City and San Francisco will tell you, is a network that drops calls and offers wireless Net surfing at the speed of a turtle.

Savvy smartphone subscribers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices have already been seeking out Wi-Fi hotspots for their Internet surfing, music-streaming, and video watching. But as more devices, such as the Apple iPad come online and the forecast for wireless data shoots through the roof, wireless operators are looking at Wi-Fi as a way to offload some data traffic from their overburdened 3G networks. And as wireless data is expected to continue to grow rapidly over the next several years, they’re looking at Wi-Fi as a part of their long term wireless strategies as well, even as they build out 4G wireless networks.

“The thirst for bandwidth that new devices and applications on the network create far exceeds what 3G or 4G technology can offer,” said Jeff Thompson, CEO of TowerStream, a company that provides fixed wireless access using WiMax. “And you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Data tsunami
Mobile data traffic is growing unabated, largely due to an onslaught of new devices that provide access to a bevy of Web-based applications. Internet infrastructure equipment maker Cisco Systems predicts that by 2014 there will be more than 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks, as well as billions of machine-to-machine devices also connecting to networks.

Wireless data traffic throughout the world has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs, Cisco said in a recent report. And by 2014, that figure is expected to increase 39-fold to about 3.6 exabytes per month (or 3.6 billion gigabytes).

Already some networks are crumbling under the stress. AT&T, the exclusive carrier in the U.S. for the iPhone, reported recently it has seen wireless packet data on its network increase more than 18 times in the last two and a half years. The extra traffic, particularly in densely populated regions, has caused problems for consumers in the way of dropped calls and slow Net access.

AT&T’s chief executive of operations, John Stankey, said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that during certain periods in some sections of Manhattan nearly 70 percent of the phones active on AT&T’s network are data-intensive devices.

AT&T’s problems are a harbinger of what’s to come for other operators that are just now getting data-intensive smartphones. AT&T has already said it will boost capital spending on its network in 2010 by $2 billion, bringing the total to between $18 billion to $19 billion. The company didn’t break out how it would spend the money, but it mentioned plans to add cell sites, increase backhaul capacity, and upgrade its network to the next generation of HSPA. It will eventually upgrade to 4G wireless using LTE technology.

Wi-Fi as the solution
Even with new 4G networks coming online and more backhaul capacity in the network to help open up the lanes of traffic, there will be so much demand that wireless operators are going to need to use every solution they can to address the problem. And this is why AT&T plans to continue investing in its Wi-Fi hotspot network. Today, the company has 20,000 hotspots around the U.S. in retail locations like Starbucks coffee shops, hotels, and airports.

“Wi-Fi is a very important technology for us,” said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. “And it will be considered as a factor in our network plans in the future.”

AT&T subscribers are already using Wi-Fi to offload some 3G traffic. A recent AT&T survey indicates that in the past month 43 percent of smartphone users said they had connected to an AT&T hotspot at least once, Siegel said. In 2009, AT&T consumers connected to an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot four times more often than they did in 2008.

Momentum is growing. In the fourth quarter of 2009, there were more than 35 million connections to the Net via an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. This is up by 10 million over the fourth quarter of 2008, Siegel said. He also pointed out that the majority of these Wi-Fi connections are being made by smartphones, such as the iPhone, rather than laptops. In fact, 73 percent of Wi-Fi connections in AT&T hotspots came from “integrated devices” in the fourth quarter compared with 61 percent for all of 2009.

One of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi is the fact that it’s already in most devices. Laptops come with Wi-Fi pre-installed, and now most new smartphones also come with Wi-Fi built in.

Advances in Wi-Fi technology over the past couple of years have also made it more useful for mobile operators. The latest version of the technology–802.11n–can transmit over longer distances at faster speeds. Multiple radio technology also helps Wi-Fi signals move around corners and better penetrate walls for more coverage.

For example, at a distance of about 500 meters, 802.11n Wi-Fi device can transmit signals at 15.5 Mbps. This is compared with about 5.2 Mbps using the older 802.11g Wi-Fi standard. Compare this with average speeds of 3G wireless, which is about 400 Kbps to 700 Kbps and it’s easy to see why consumers would choose to use Wi-Fi when given the opportunity. Wi-Fi is also faster than WiMax, a 4G wireless technology that offers average downloads around 1 to 2 Mbps.

“The newer 802.11n technology changed the game for Wi-Fi,” said Selino Lo, CEO of a Wi-Fi networking company called Ruckus Wireless. “It offers better range and coverage. And it offers the ability to service more simultaneous customers, which allows wireless carriers to use it to build much more scalable networks.”

Towerstream, a company that specializes in providing wireless backhaul solutions to wireless carriers and large companies, is exploring using its rooftop rights in densely urban areas to create Wi-Fi hotzones. Since the technology today creates larger Wi-Fi hotspots, Thompson thinks operators could extend their Wi-Fi hotspots beyond a single cafe, covering entire downtown areas.

“You can build an 802.11n hotspot that isn’t much smaller than some of these cell sites in densely populated urban areas,” Thompson said. “It’s still a little early for us, but we’re talking to carriers to see if there is an opportunity for us to leverage our rooftop rights to help them build out these networks. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to install than setting up a new cell tower and it offers a lot more capacity.”

AT&T has been the most vocal U.S. carrier to talk about its use of Wi-Fi to help alleviate capacity issues. In fact, during the company’s earnings call, when asked how AT&T expected to handle additional traffic from Apple’s iPad, an executive said he expected many consumers to use Wi-Fi.

T-Mobile has also been a big proponent of Wi-Fi. In 2006, the company began offering a service for $10 extra a month that allowed people to make unlimited phone calls using Wi-Fi. The company has since discontinued the service when it introduced an unlimited calling plan for all its cell phones, but it still allows subscribers to seamlessly switch to Wi-Fi for voice and data calls on certain phones.

All of its Wi-Fi-enabled handsets are able to switch to Wi-Fi for data. But company executives say T-Mobile doesn’t view Wi-Fi as a technology for offloading data traffic, so much as it sees it as a way to extend the T-Mobile network.

Sprint Nextel is also using Wi-Fi to offload some data traffic and to extend the reach of its network. At CES in January, the company announced the Overdrive, a 3G/4G wireless router that creates a mini-hotspot for up to five Wi-Fi devices.

Verizon Wireless seems to be the least enthusiastic U.S. operator over Wi-Fi. For the past few years, Verizon has downplayed the importance of Wi-Fi. And up until recently, it routinely disabled Wi-Fi on many handsests. The company experimented with deploying its own Wi-Fi hot spots several years ago in New York City, turning old phone booths into wireless hot spots. The service never took off, and Verizon dismantled the hotspots. The company was also a vocal critic of many municipal Wi-Fi projects, including the one in Philadelphia.

But in 2009, the company had a change of heart toward Wi-Fi. It announced that some of its Verizon Fios subscribers would get free access to its own Verizon Wi-Fi hot spots as well as to hotspots offered by Boingo as part of their broadband service.

While Verizon sees the value in extending Wi-Fi to broadband customers, the company still doesn’t appear to be embracing it for offloading data traffic. A spokesman for the company was not available to talk about the company’s Wi-Fi strategy.

That said, Verizon has been very public about its aggressive plans for deploying its 4G network using LTE. The company will be launching some markets in 2010 with more to follow in 2011.

Even though operators may not be talking publicly about their plans for Wi-Fi, Steven Glapa, director of business development at Ruckus, said they are talking to him about deploying solutions.

“Operators are definitely interested in Wi-Fi for offloading data traffi,” he said. “The normal process for a tier 1 carrier may take 12 to 24 months to evaluate, test, and deploy new radio technology, but many of the people I am talking to are telling me they need to make decisions much sooner than that.”

He said carriers around the world who have had the iPhone the longest are the most eager to expand their Wi-Fi networks for offloading traffic. Glapa said consumers may start seeing more hotspots and hotzones for offloading data traffic as soon as this year. But he expects many carriers to get these Wi-Fi offload networks up and running in 2011 and 2012.

“When you start seeing CEOs talking about capacity issues, that’s when you can expect to see some changes pretty quickly,” he said. “So I am sure wireless subscribers will start seeing something by the end of the year.”

KAALRAV is the 2nd biggest cultural fest of north-east India (after IIT-Guwahati) involving active participation from colleges of Sikkim and nearby states. More than 2700 students and 300 faculty, staff and their families reside in the 26 acre campus of Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology. The 3 day mega event features several inter-college music and dance competitions involving big bands such as Euphoria, Pentagram, Crosswinds. The dimension of KAALRAV is enough to bring a sudden rush of adrenaline inevitably magnifying the true meaning behind thrill, energy, spectacle and glamour.

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