Summly: Teenager launches top-selling news app

                                           Nick D'Aloisio

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The app, called Summly, was designed by 17-year-old Londoner Nick D'Aloisio, and has received more than $1m in funding from investors.

High-profile supporters include Stephen Fry, Tech City CEO Joanna Shields and Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch.

However some early reviewers have described the app as "confusing".

"Navigation unclear," wrote Oliver Devereux on the app store's review page, while another described it as "quite unintuitive".

But the app is still rating an average score of four out of five possible stars from users overall.

Mr D'Aloisio took time off school to develop his idea for a smartphone application that offers summaries of existing news stories published on the net.

The free-to-download app uses algorithms to process news stories into summaries which users can then swipe to see in full if they wish.

"We worked hard on an interface that looks like nothing else on iPhone," he told the BBC.

"We merged algorithm with beautiful design. It's summarising thousands of articles every minute."

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The app, called Summly, was designed by 17-year-old Londoner Nick D'Aloisio, and has received more than $1m in funding from investors.

High-profile supporters include Stephen Fry, Tech City CEO Joanna Shields and Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch.

However some early reviewers have described the app as "confusing".

"Navigation unclear," wrote Oliver Devereux on the app store's review page, while another described it as "quite unintuitive".

But the app is still rating an average score of four out of five possible stars from users overall.

Mr D'Aloisio took time off school to develop his idea for a smartphone application that offers summaries of existing news stories published on the net.

The free-to-download app uses algorithms to process news stories into summaries which users can then swipe to see in full if they wish.

"We worked hard on an interface that looks like nothing else on iPhone," he told the BBC.

"We merged algorithm with beautiful design. It's summarising thousands of articles every minute."

Facebook flaw bypasses password protections

Facebook has moved quickly to shut down a loophole which made some accounts accessible without a password.

The bug was exposed in a message posted to the Hacker News website.

The message contained a search string that, when used on Google, returned a list of links to 1.32 million Facebook accounts.

In some cases clicking on a link logged in to that account without the need for a password. All the links exposed the email addresses of Facebook users.

Throwaway account

The message posted to Hacker News used a search syntax that exposed a system used by Facebook that lets users quickly log back in to their account.

Email alerts about status updates and notifications often contain a link that lets a user of the social network respond quickly by clicking it to log in in to their account.

In a comment added to the Hacker News message, Facebook security engineer Matt Jones said the links were typically only sent to the email addresses of account holders. Links sent in this way can only be clicked once.

"For a search engine to come across these links, the content of the emails would need to have been posted online," he wrote. Mr Jones suspected this is what happened as many of the email addresses exposed were for throwaway mail sites or for services that did a bad job of protecting archived messages.

Most of the million or so links exposed would already have expired, said Mr Jones.

"Regardless, due to some of these links being disclosed, we've turned the feature off until we can better ensure its security for users whose email contents are publicly visible," he said.

Mr Jones added that Facebook had taken steps to secure the accounts of people who had been exposed by the flaw. Many of the exposed accounts were in Russia and China.

In an official statement, Facebook said the links were sent "directly to private email addresses to help people easily access their accounts, and we never made them publicly available or crawlable."

However, it said, the links were then posted elsewhere online which lead to them being indexed on search engines.

It said: "While we have always had protections on these private links to provide an additional layer of security, we have since disabled their functionality completely and are remediating the accounts of anyone who recently used this feature."

Microsoft Logo: New Look For Tech Giant

For the first time in a quarter of a century, the computer giant revamps its logo as it prepares to launch a wave of new products.

US tech giant Microsoft has unveiled a new corporate logo, setting the stage for a wave of products designed to cast the world's largest software maker in a new light.

The redesign is the first time Microsoft has revamped its logo since February 1987.
The new logo features a symbol made up of four separate coloured squares - reminiscent of the old Windows logo featuring wavy squares - next to the name of the company.
"Today's new Microsoft logo is the first time the company has accompanied its logo with a symbol," a spokeswoman said.

The company is also making an aggressive effort to gain ground in the smartphone market.

"It's been 25 years since we've updated the Microsoft logo and now is the perfect time for a change," said Microsoft brand strategy manager Jeff Hansen.

"This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products.

"From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs.

"This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning."

Bill Gates with the logo in 2003

The logo also includes the name Microsoft in the Segoe font that is used in products and marketing communications, along with the new squares.

It started being used on Thursday on the Microsoft.com website and in three Microsoft retail stores.

This is Microsoft's fifth logo since Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company 37 years ago.

When it last changed its logo in 1987, Microsoft had been a publicly traded company for less than a year and boasted a market value of about $2bn (£1.3bn).

It peaked at more than $600m (£379m) in 1999. Now, Microsoft's market value stands at $254bn (£160bn) - less than half of Apple's market value of $623bn (£393bn).

In October Microsoft is set to release its Windows 8 next-generation operating system tailored for a world shifting from personal computers to smartphones and tablets

Kodak set to quit camera film and photo paper business

Professional photographers still value the unique feel that film gives to their pictures

Debt-struck photography pioneer Kodak says it may sell off its still-camera film and photo paper divisions.

The firm has already stopped making digital cameras as part of efforts to reduce its losses after filing for bankruptcy protection in January.

It has also been trying to raise funds by selling off more than 1,100 digital imaging patents.

It had originally planned to announce a buyer last week, but said "discussions continue" and a deal might not happen.

Apple and Google had been reported to have made rival bids for the patents, but the Wall Street Journal reports they have now joined forces and have added Samsung, LG, HTC and others to their consortium

The WSJ's sources suggested the offer price for the portfolio would be about $500m (£315m) - well below the $2.6bn estimate that Kodak had suggested it could be worth.

The company recently reported a $665m net loss for the first six months of the year, putting further pressure on its finances.

Film's feel

In its latest announcement the US company said it had hired investment bank Lazard to help it sell its Personalised Imaging and Document Imaging businesses.

This would mean an end to it making films for still cameras, photo papers, souvenir photo products at theme parks, scanners and picture print-out kiosks at stores.

It would leave the business focused on printers, cinema film stock and chemicals.

The British Journal of Photography said the news would concern the industry.

"A lot of professionals still shoot with film and like the quality it gives them," Olivier Laurent, news editor at the journal, told the BBC.

"The resolution is still a thousand times higher than most digital cameras can offer so long as a good scanner is used.

"A film photograph has a different mood thanks to its grain - it's about the love of the image and digital still has a hard time trying to reproduce that feeling.

Apple and Samsung get South Korea bans

Apple and Samsung have accused each other of copying aspects of their devices

A South Korean court has ruled that Apple and Samsung both infringed each other's patents on mobile devices.

The court imposed a limited ban on national sales of products by both companies covered by the ruling.

It ruled that US-based Apple had infringed two patents held by Samsung, while the Korean firm had violated one of Apple's patents.

The decision comes as a jury in California is deliberating on a patent trial between the two firms in the US.

The sales ban will apply to Apple's iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and its tablets the iPad and iPad 2.

Samsung products affected by the ban include its smartphone models Galaxy SI and SII and its Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet PCs.

The court ordered Apple to pay 40m won ($35,000; £22,000) in damages to its South Korean rival, while Samsung was told to pay Apple 25m won.

The awards are dwarfed by the damages being sought by Apple in its case in California. It is seeking more than $2.5bn (£1.6bn) from Samsung, for allegedly violating its patented designs and features in the iPad and iPhone.

'Differentiated its products'

A Samsung spokesperson told the BBC that the court had found the South Korean firm guilty of violating Apple's patent relating to the "bounce back" function.

The function lets users know that they have reached the end of a screen that they may be scrolling through on their devices.

Meanwhile, Apple has been found guilty of violating patents relating to telecom standards held by Samsung, including technology that makes the transfer and transmission of data between devices more efficient.

However, the court ruled against Apple's claims that Samsung had copied the designs of its products.

"There are lots of external design similarities between the iPhone and Galaxy S, such as rounded corners and large screens... but these similarities had been documented in previous products," a judge at the Seoul Central District Court was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.

"Given that it's very limited to make big design changes in touchscreen based mobile products in general... and the defendant [Samsung] differentiated its products with three buttons in the front and adopted different designs in camera and [on the] side, the two products have a different look," the judge said.

Fish play video game in new behaviour study

The bluegill sunfish were put off by the computer-generated prey when it moved in groups

Researchers have used a video game projected into a fish tank to study the behaviour of predatory bluegill sunfish.

The team at Princeton University developed a simulation based on the type of prey favoured by the species.

The simple "game" featured red dots which moved and swarmed in different ways against a translucent screen.

They found that the fish were less likely to try to attack the dots when they moved in a group formation.

The research has been published in the Science journal.

Senior researcher Dr Iain Couzin is from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.

"By creating immersive video game for the fish we were able to have complete control over the parameters," he told BBC News.

"Trying to do this experiment with natural grouping prey items, it would have been impossible to understand or control what was going on."

Simple prey

The size and colour of the simple prey graphics were carefully designed, he said.

"An undergraduate student worked the entire summer on the exact type of dot to use. We tested out a whole range of different types of dots.

"We knew they liked to target slightly red objects, we knew the speed of their natural prey.

"As far as we know the fish were not aware that (our graphics) were just little dots."

He said it was important that the game had been coded so that the movement of the dots did not become predictable.

"In any computer game if you have one type of enemy it's easy to learn," said Mr Couzin.

"It would be fascinating to understand whether the fish learned to play the game better over time."

The team is now looking at using 3D technology to create a more photorealistic world in which to study fish behaviour.

"We're developing an automating tracking system so we can track the position of their eyes and reconstruct a virtual world of prey items, using conventional projectors," said Mr Couzin.

"It will be a fully 3D virtual world to these organisms."

Cat and mouse

Cat owners can buy games which allow their pet to chase a virtual mouse

The study is not the first time researchers have used gaming technology to research animal behaviour.

Earlier this year a team at the University of Oulu in Finland used a virtual reality system to study cockroaches placed in a simulated forest.

"Virtual reality's key benefit is having conditions that enable naturalistic behaviour but, for example, are constrained enough to record individual nerve cells while an animal is behaving," lead researcher Mikko Vähäsöyrinki told the website Popular Mechanics.

Games designed to be used by cats have even been put on sale to make money from tablet computer owners.

They were released after a series of online videos went viral showing felines swiping at the touchscreen devices

Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data

New software makes it possible to do in minutes on a small computer what used to be done by large clusters of computers.

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer.

The software could help developers working on many modern tasks: for example, designing a new recommendation engine using social network connections. In order to make effective recommendations—"your friends liked this movie, so here is another movie that you haven't seen yet, but you will probably like"—the software has to be able to analyze the connections between the members of a social network. This type of task is called graph computation, and it is increasingly common. But working with large-scale data sets (such as online social networks) usually requires the processing horsepower of many computers clustered together, such as those offered by Amazon's cloud-based EC2 service.

The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers. A graph would normally be stored in temporary memory (RAM) for analysis. With GraphChi, the hard drive performs this task instead.

"PCs don't have enough RAM to hold an entire Web graph, but they do have hard drives, which can hold a lot of information," says Carlos Guestrin, codirector of Carnegie Mellon's Select Lab, where GraphChi was developed. But hard drives are slow compared to RAM for reading and writing data, which tends to slow down computation. So Guestrin's student AapoKyrola designed a faster, less random method of accessing the hard drive.

According to Guestrin, a Mac Mini running GraphChi can analyze Twitter's social graph from 2010—which contains 40 million users and 1.2 billion connections—in 59 minutes. "The previous published result on this problem took 400 minutes using a cluster of about 1,000 computers," Guestrin says.

As technology gets more networked, and data sets get larger, graph computation is becoming more and more relevant in many domains, says David A. Bader, a graph computation expert at Georgia Tech. "Trying to understand how the human brain works or trying to make sense of medical patient records involve graph computing," he says.

Graph analysis also drives the development of new web products, says Jeremy Kepner, a researcher at MIT. "Document search, ad placement, route planning, travel reservations, and cyber security all rely on graph analysis," he says. "Enabling web developers to construct these analyses on their desktop computers catalyzes these industries and accelerates product development."

Guestrin adds that GraphChi can handle "streaming graphs," which more accurately model large networks by showing how relationships change over time. Bader and others at Georgia Tech have created a graph computation framework, called Stinger, that's optimized for supercomputers working with massive streaming graphs.

"The scales of these problems will obviously keep growing," says Guestrin. But he says GraphChi is capable of effectively handling many large-scale graph-computing problems without resorting to cloud-based solutions or supercomputers.

"A researcher in computational biology could do large-scale computations on their PC; a developer working on a data-center algorithm can test it on their laptop before pushing it to the cloud," Guestrin says. "Big data is everywhere now, but some big data isn't as big as it once was, relatively speaking. Tools like GraphChi will let many companies and startups solve all their graph-computing needs on a single machine. It's cost effective, and it drives innovation, too."

Cybercriminals in developing nations targeted

Cybercriminals in developing nations are being targeted in a new effort to combat the illegal activity.

The International Cyber Security Protection Alliance has launched a research project to identify how attacks are likely to evolve over the next eight years.

It said that faster links to the net in parts of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe were likely to create problems.

The ICSPA will advise governments and local authorities on how best to react.

The organisation is a coalition of law agencies, security companies and businesses, including Visa Europe and the defence firm EADS.

"It's not just about putting a black mark against a particular nation because many of these countries are the unwilling hosts to cybercriminal networks," John Lyons, the organisation's chief executive, told the BBC.

"We know the countries that provide 'organised cybercrime' with the ability and the hosting capability to attack the West in terms of its business and customers.

"So, what the ICSPA is looking to do is to work with those nations to provide support to help them improve the cyber-resilience of their national infrastructure, to aid their own economies, and to help their law enforcement groups tackle cybercriminals who work out of their country."

Advising Africa

Although the research project has only just got underway, the group has already started to co-ordinate action.

Members of the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) began work with the Ghanaian government in February to help it take technical steps to prevent cybercrime, and ensure offenders are prosecuted.

Mr Lyons said Nigeria, Botswana, Uganda and Rwanda were among nations likely to be targeted by the campaign.

The countries were starting to benefit from improved internet access, but would struggle to "suppress the criminality that will come with that connectivity," he said.

Other countries on his group's watch list included Bulgaria, Romania, India, the Philippines and parts of Latin America.

October report

The ICSPA wants companies based in developing nations to contribute to the costs of its efforts.

However, Mr Lyons acknowledged that the richer nations also needed to do more to combat internet crime.

"Something like 67% of malware which is used to attack Western businesses is hosted in the US on servers," he said. "The US needs to take steps to tackle that particular issue."

The ICSPA plans to issue a report covering its initial findings before the end of October.

Nigeria's low-cost tablet computer


Nigeria's Saheed Adepoju is a young man with big dreams. He is the inventor of the Inye, a tablet computer designed for the African market.

According to the 29-year-old entrepreneur, his machine's key selling point is its price - $350 (£225) opposed to around $700 for an iPad.

He believes that, because of this, there is a big market for it in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, particularly amongst students.

He is also hoping to sell his tablet - which runs on the Google Android operating system - to the Nigerian government and plans to have at least one computer in each local government area

"The Inye is a mobile internet device. It gives you access to the internet; it allows you to play media files and watch movies. What we have is an 8-inch device, a device that is half-way between a laptop and a mobile phone," he told the BBC's series African Dream.

"You have the standard software applications that come pre-installed and then you have the ones that we are working with various local developers to bundle on," he added.

Among those local apps there is one designed to raise awareness about HIV and others related to water and sanitation.

"We work with local developers that have expertise in particular areas so that we don't end up doing so much work and we just have a collaborative way of doing things together," he said