London, October 29: Microsoft researchers have developed a system called SideSight that can allow a mobile phone user to control a handset placed on a table by wiggling his/her fingers in the space around it.

The technology was unveiled last week at the User Interface in Software and Technology symposium in Monterey, California.

Alex Butler, a researcher from the Sensors and Devices Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK, has revealed that the system derives its exceptional ability from infrared sensors that can pick up the movement of fingers up to 10 centimetres away.

"The big advantage of our prototype is the finger does not block any of the screen space," New Scientist magazine quoted Butler as saying.

Washington, October 29: An expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that rapid digitising may ultimately lead to a “digital dark age”, where digital photographs will become unreadable to future computers.

Jerome P. McDonough, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the university, says that the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by the ever-growing information economy — including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos.

He is afraid that data produced with ever-shifting platforms and file formats may eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.

US-based cell phone manufacturer Motorola has made announcement about the availability of its GPS-enabled MOTOMING A 1600 phone in the Indian market.

Packing a host of multimedia features, the newly launched handset offers navigational services and comes preloaded with landmarks of 30 cities.

The new model MOTOMING A 1600 features a transparent flip cover, 1 GB MicroSD card, an expandable memory capacity of up to 4 GB plus a 3.2 mega pixel camera.

The new phone also comes packed with some features of MapmyIndia.

Super Talent Technology, a top maker of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, has made announcement about the launching of a limited edition 18-carat solid gold USB drive, named Pico-C in the market.

The newly USB drive, which comes with a serialized Certificate of Authenticity, is water resistant, fast, and supports up to 200X (30MB/sec) data transfer speeds.

The Pico-C has become the hallmark of style and quality in USB drives.

Washington, Oct 28 : Online shopping can turn out to be more fun when you can try on new clothes on your own computerised image, all thanks to a new program that creates an accurate computerized image of a person''s body even when the subject is clothed.

Developed by Brown computer scientists, the new technology could be put to use in fashion, film, forensics, sports medicine, and video gaming.

The program can accurately estimate the human body''s shape from digital images or video.

"If you see a person wearing clothing, can the computer figure out what they look like underneath?" asked Michael Black, professor of the computer science at Brown.

Frankfurt  - Shares in German software giant SAP AG fell more than 13 per cent Tuesday after it joined the growing list of European companies cutting their business forecasts in the wake of the world financial crisis.

Walldorf-based SAP said its third-quarter net profit fell 5 per cent to 408 million euros (510 million dollars) from 388 million euros in the same period last year.

This was despite a 14-per-cent increase in total revenue from 2.43 billion euros to 2.76 billion euros. However, SAP's key software license sales growth slowed to 7 per cent from 11 per cent a year earlier, the group said.