Google acquires Indian founded Jambool to take on Facebook

Bangalore: Google has reportedly acquired San Francisco-based Jambool and its gaming product Social Gold even though both the parties have not confirmed any such deal, reports Seher Dhillon from Topnews.

The deal has presumably cost Google around $75 million. The Jambool was valued at about $55 million and an additional $15 million to $20 million, if they reach any agreement.

In 2006, the origination of the Jambool took place, which was founded by Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein, who also runs Amazon.com. Social Gold was introduced in last October, which is an online virtual payment platform that could be incorporated in MMOs, virtual worlds, casual online games, and social games or applications.

Earlier, Google purchased Slide, social games developer for $182 million. Also, the Company injected funds around $100 million to $200 million in Farmville developer Zynga.

It seems that Google is foraying into the gaming segment. The rumors are also hovering around that the Company also had negotiations with the significant social gaming companies like Disney's Playdom and Electronic Arts's Playfish for establishing a games-friendly social network, to give a tough competition to Facebook. There was also news that the network would probably be named as "Google Me". But, there is no sure news that Google would come up with such a network.

New Indian player IndiaPay to compete with Visa and MasterCard

Bangalore: American payment processing service leaders Visa and MasterCard will now be facing competition from an Indian rival. The country is coming up with IndiaPay, a new state-backed payment processing platform in the upcoming two years. It is expected that with the implementation of IndiaPay, the presence of MasterCard and Visa in the payment processing base will be shrinked, reports Ankit Sharma from The Rupee Times.

"The NPCI has indicated that the system will be ready in 18-24 months," said G Padmanabhan, RBI Chief General Manager (department of payment & settlement and systems.


It is also expected to cut down transaction charges for banks. Most of the debit and credit cards operative in the country at present are serviced by these two providers. IndiaPay is being developed with support from Reserve Bank of India and developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which has been assigned the task by RBI.

Robot to explore mysterious tunnels in Great Pyramid

For 4,500 years, the Great Pyramid at Giza has enthralled, fascinated and ultimately frustrated everyone who has attempted to penetrate its secrets.

Now a robotics team from Leeds University,working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is preparing a machine which they hope will solve one of its enduring mysteries.

The pyramid, known as the Pyramid of Khufu after the king who built it around 2,560BC, is the only wonder of the ancient world still standing. At its heart are two rooms known as the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber. Two shafts rise from the King's Chamber at 45-degree angles and lead to the exterior of the monument. They are believed to be a passageway designed to fire the king's spirit into the firmament so that he can take his place among the stars.

In the Queen's Chamber, there are two further shafts, discovered in 1872. Unlike those in the King's Chamber, these do not lead to the outer face of the pyramid

No one knows what the shafts are for. In 1992, a camera sent up the shaft leading from the south wall of the Queen's Chamber discovered it was blocked after 60 metres by a limestone door with two copper handles. In 2002, a further expedition drilled through this door and revealed, 20 centimetres behind it, a second door.

"The second door is unlike the first. It looks as if it is screening or covering something," said Dr Zahi Hawass, the head of the Supreme Council who is in charge of the expedition. The north shaft bends by 45 degrees after 18 metres but, after 60 metres, is also blocked by a limestone door.

Now technicians at Leeds University are putting the finishing touches to a robot which, they hope, will follow the shaft to its end. Known as the Djedi project, after the magician whom Khufu consulted when planning the pyramid, the robot will be able to drill through the second set of doors to see what lies beyond.

Dr Robert Richardson, of the Leeds University School of Mechanical Engineering, said they would continue the expedition until they reach the end of the shafts.

"We have been working on the project for five years," he said. "We have no preconceptions. We are trying to gain evidence for other people to draw conclusions. There are two shafts. The north shaft is blocked by a limestone door and nothing has penetrated that door. With the south shaft a previous team has measured the thickness of the stone, drilled through it and put a camera through it and found there was another surface. We are going to determine how thick that is and we could drill through it. We are preparing the robot now and expect to send it up before the end of the year. It's a big question, and it's very important not to cause unnecessary damage. We will carry on until we find the answer. We hope to get all the data possible which will be sufficient to answer the questions."

How Brilliant Computer Scientists Solved the Bermuda Triangle Mystery

Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.

The Bermuda Triangle. Courtesy: steelkaleidoscopes.typepad.com

(CHICAGO) - According to two research scientists the mystery of vanished ships and airplanes in the region dubbed "The Bermuda Triangle" has been solved.

Step aside outer space aliens, time anomalies, submerged giant Atlantean pyramids and bizarre meteorological phenomena ... the "Triangle" simply suffers from an acute case of gas.

Natural gas—the kind that heats ovens and boils water—specifically methane, is the culprit behind the mysterious disappearances and loss of water and air craft.

The evidence for this astounding new insight into a mystery that's bedeviled the world is laid out in a research paper published in the American Journal of Physics.

Professor Joseph Monaghan researched the hypothesis with honor student David May at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

The two hypothesized that large methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor might account for many, if not all, of the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft at specific locales around the world.

Researcher Ivan T. Sanderson identified these mystery areas during the 1960s. Sanderson described the actual shape of these regions as more like a lozenge rather than a triangle. Some of the more famous spots include an area in the Sea of Japan, the North Sea, and of course the infamous "Bermuda (or Devil's) Triangle."

Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.

Because of the correlations and existing data, the two envisioned what would happen when gigantic methane bubbles explode from natural fissures on the seafloor.

The methane—normally frozen at great pressure as gas hydrates embedded within subterranean rock—can become dislodged and transform into gaseous bubbles expanding geometrically as they explode upwards. When these bubbles reach the surface of the water they soar into the air, still expanding upwards and outwards.

Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean. If the bubbles are big enough and possess a high enough density they can also knock aircraft out of the sky with little or no warning. Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting

Reports of Google acquiring Slide emerge

Bangalore: Search engine giant Google has reportedly acquired online entertainment company Slide. Slide is a San-Francisco based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Orkut.

Sources suggest Google made a payment of $228 million to seal the deal. However, the companies have not yet made any comments on the deal. According to TechCrunch, a confirmation of the deal from the companies' end may come by Friday.

Slide was founded by Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal. Some of the apps developed by Slide include SuperPoke Pets, Top Fish, SPP Range and SuperPocus Academy of Magic.

If this deal is confirmed, Google will take another step toward its foray into social gaming. Google, last month, had invested an amount of $150 million in Zynga, the social gaming giant, renowned for the creation of popular games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Now it remains to be seen whether all these acquisitions will lead to the creation of the rumored Google social network, Google Me.

PayPal 2.0 for Android uses Bump to send payments

Bangalore: A new version of PayPal for Android smartphones is coming out with Bump technology on mobile money transfers to Android. Bump technology debits money from one user's account and credits another when two phones are tapped together, reports Jessica Dolcourt of CNET.

PayPal 2.0 with Bump is currently available on the iPhone. Digital payment of this sort is a much more elegant solution than Square, as cool as that credit card-reading peripheral may be.

Apart from this, there are two important that had previously been absent. The update also allows the user to withdraw money from his account and to request a payment.

For splitting the bill, it also inserts a tip calculator. In order to set payment reminders for rent and bills, PayPal 2.0 also adds a scheduling component. The free PayPal 2.0 for Android app is available in the App Market.

Fastest broadband cities

Bangalore: Massan in South Korea is the fastest broadband city in the world, reveals an analysis by network giant Akamai. According to Akamai data, Masan tops the list with an averaging maximum connection speed of 40.5Mbps (megabits per second).

After South Korea with a connection speed of 33Mbps, Hong Kong stands at the second spot with 30Mbps, followed by Japan with 16Mbps. Next in the list are Romania and Sweden with 25Mbps and 19Mbps speed respectively.

The other five countries in top ten are Latvia (19Mbps), Belgium (17Mbps), U.S. (16Mbps), Portugal (16Mbps) and Bulgaria (15Mbps).

Out of 201 countries in the list, UK is ranked 27th with an average speed of 3.8Mbps. On the other hand, twelve cities in the U.S. made the top 100, seven of them in California.

With more than half of the top 100 cities in Japan, Asia dominates the list of fastest wired cities. There are only 12 U.S. cities that have found place in the list.

All the top twenty cites belong to either Japan or South Korea. Umea, in Sweden, which is ranked 18th, is the only exception.

Other European cities in the top 100 included Baden-Baden in Germany, Wageningen in the Netherlands and Timisoara in Romania.

The report also observed attack traffic originating from 198 unique countries around the world. Russia remained the top attack traffic source, accounting for 12 percent of observed attack traffic in total.

The United States and China held the second and third place accounting 12 percent and 10 percent of observed attack traffic respectively.