Apple iPhone 4 launched in India at Rs 34,500 for 16 GB model

KOLKATA: Eleven months after Apple's next-generation smartphone hit stores worldwide, the iPhone 4 was launched on Friday in India, the world's second biggest market for mobile phones.

Mobile phone carrier Aircel launched the iPhone 4 with a new pricing model, allowing customers to recover the upfront cost of the smartphone on select plans over 24 months, the company said in a press release. Aircel will charge Rs 34,500 for iPhones with a 16 GBcapacity and Rs 40,900 for the 32 GB model, it said.

Google Map Maker visits Chicago

The Google Map Maker campus tour recently visited the Windy City to talk to students about how they can use Map Maker to map their campuses and make updates to places they care about on Google Maps. While in town, we also hosted a Map Maker event at the Google Chicago office to share the tool with folks working in the public sector. We had a great time meeting so many enthusiastic mappers from the area, and look forward to seeing how they put Chicago on the map.

Our first stop was the University of Chicago campus, a beautifully historic area with architectural gems galore. Students who attended this event were excited to map not only their campus, but neighborhoods near the university, showing the diversity and development of the population and culture.

Our second stop was Northwestern University, where a packed room of students learned about mapping while sampling some traditional Chicago style deep dish pizza. Delicious! Students were particularly interested in adding details to their campus, naming the buildings, adding locations of the sororities and fraternities, and marking the building outlines or footprints of their favorite restaurants and stores nearby.



Our Google Map Maker team loved partnering with Google Student Ambassadors from these campuses, who creatively and passionately helped plan these events. You guys did an amazing job! The Google Student Ambassadors from Northwestern University had this to say about the Map Maker visit:

“Our event brought together over 120 Northwestern students who were eager and excited to learn about how they could make an impact by adding to Google Maps using Map Maker … Map Maker was a welcome product that put the power to shape the map in our hands. All in all, it was an incredibly fun and engaging experience!”

-Sourya and Minjae, Google Student Ambassadors at Northwestern University 

The last event—a meeting with public sector officials at the Google office in Chicago—gave us some great insights about how Map Maker can be used for large metropolitan areas. University educators, Department of Transportation employees, Census Bureau representatives, Chicago Health Department folks, and many more shared how they would like to see Map Maker applied to what they do. We really appreciate all their feedback and suggestions, as well as their enthusiasm for how this tool can help them share their work with each other and the public.

Chicago and the surrounding areas were such enjoyable places to visit, full of vibrant and passionate people. We look forward to visiting other campuses in the fall, but don’t wait until then toleave your mark on your campus!

Microsoft and Facebook team up to fight child porn

Microsoft and Facebook team up to fight child porn

Facebook is expanding its efforts to fight child pornography using Microsoft technology, Redmond announced in a blog post yesterday.

The world's largest social network has joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's PhotoDNA program. The service, which was developed by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College in 2009, uses image-matching technology to find known depictions of child pornography across the Web.

Facebook plans to use the technology across its network to ensure child pornography is not circulating through the site.

Microsoft has been using PhotoDNA with great success since the service's development. According to the company, it has analyzed more than 2 billion images through its Bing image search and SkyDrive. So far, it has found 1,500 matches and 1,000 matches on Bing and SkyDrive, respectively.

apis

New Google APIs Console features a new Custom Search API

Today, we announced theGoogle APIs console, a new tool to help you use our product APIs in your applications and on your websites. Included in the console is a new Custom Search API.

We’ve enhanced our Custom Search offering with the introduction of new output formats and a new API. Now, in addition to using the Custom Search element or the XML API, the new API offers search results using your choice of Atom or JSON syndication formats. For more information, please refer to our post on the Google Code blog.