Your Thoughts Are Your Password

 What if you could one day unlock your door or access your bank account by simply "thinking" your password? Too far out? Perhaps not.

Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person's thoughts to authenticate her or his identity.

Their idea of utilizing brain-wave signatures as "pass-thoughts" is based on the premise that brain waves are unique to each individual. Even when thinking of the same thing, the brain's measurable electrical impulses vary slightly from person to person. Some researchers believe the difference might just be enough to create a system that allows you to log in with your thoughts.

[Source]

Researchers Use Tongue as Interface

 
At the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, researchers are developing a system that will use the tongue as the interface for Navy SEAL divers, Army Rangers, and other front-line soldiers.

"Most of the human-computer interaction so far has been on using the eyes, ears, and hands," said Dr. Geri Gay, professor of Communications and Information Sciences at Cornell University and an expert on interface design.

"Everything nowadays is so ubiquitous with mobile computing, and we need to find new, hands-free ways of interacting for environments where your hands and eyes are busy," she noted.  "I could see something like this being used in cars."

[Source]

Windows Live Mail Beta

 Microsoft is promoting Windows Live Mail Beta with a sweeptakes campaign. All you have to do is to browse to this page and enter your hotmail address. Although it is not as good as gmail, this new hotmail bestows 2GB space along with the new outlook interface. It is nice to have a taste of different flavours...

Made in Express Contest

 Microsoft has announced a contest where you can attendees submit their idea and get paid 10k to implement it with Visual Studio Express Edition. 
Interested? 
More info is here.

MS Office 2007 Preview

Microsoft is preparing Office 2007 for beta users. A preview is available from the following link.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview

Academic Search

Microsoft Announced Windows Live Academic Search
[Press Release]

The website for the search is http://academic.live.com

The interface looks good and user-friendly but database is not as large as Google's Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)

Neo free email organizer for Microsoft Outlook

This is a free and useful add-in to Microsoft Outlook. If you have ever used Outlook you would know how slow it is to search through emails and how difficult it becomes to browse through emails. This free tool solves this problem. It doesn't change any settings or datafile so it is safe. It indexes your files, list them according to correesponder and makes it very easy to search. It is a must have tool for Outlook users. Homepage for Neo Free is http://www.emailorganizer.com

Tunatic

Tunatic is a nice, free and small application for both Windows and Mac. Unique feature of Tunatic is that, it promises to identify a song you are listening.

It captures sound from mic and sends this to the server where classification is performed among a community driven database. Then you can see the song title/singer...

Tunatic homepage is http://www.wildbits.com/tunatic/

Yahoo Mail Beta

Yahoo, as one of the head-player of web-based free email, is answering back Google's gmail with the new yahoo mail beta which is now in test by many. You can get on the waiting list from here:
http://surveylink.yahoo.com/wix/p0473306.aspx

Although it is not yet optimized and work as fast as gmail, the interface looks much like Outlook Express and has the similar functionality. It is definetely nice to have such an interface accesible from various computers.

Here's a yahoo mail beta review with screen-shots and here's the a blog from the yahoo mail team.It seems Yahoo is catching up with Google and playing hard for hotmail. Anyway, it's always the user that benefit from competition. :))

Online ClearType Tuner for WinXP

If you have WinXP, you should have ClearType turned on. Here's a tool from Microsoft to adjust it online within Microsoft IE
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx

For more information about ClearType:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartypeInfo.mspx

Windows Live services online and on tap

Windows Live Messenger and Mail are just two popular member of Windows Live family. Here's a list of others and their competitors...

http://news.com.com/2009-1032-6049254.html

3x battery power with biomedical research

Researchers at MIT accomplished to design a new battery that utilizes genetically modified virus that attracts cobalt oxide and gold, and assembled the metals into ultra-thin wires just six nanometres in diameter...This allows battery to store two or three times more energy for its size and weight compared to previous battery electrode materials. And adding the gold further increased the wires' energy density.
[vnunet]

Job Hunt 2020

U.S. News asked some leading business executives to offer advice...

Full article @ U.S. News

"Figure out something that you really like. Because you'll be competing against students in Russia, China, India, and the Czech Republic."
Craig Barrett, chairman, Intel

"I want them to think of the world as their neighborhood. I'd take them to Korea, China, India, Japan, and the former Soviet bloc."
Sky Dayton, founder, EarthLink

"I hope my son learns Spanish and Chinese, and I would love for him to be a computer engineer, but I also hope he studies literature. It's more about how your brain works than about specific jobs."
Scott Meyer, CEO, About.com

"Figure out if your job can be digitized. If it can, it's only a matter of time before it becomes geographically movable."Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer, Wipro Technologies"Learn Chinese. There's going to be a lot of action in China."
Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO, Cognizant Technology

"Make sure you are really good, because you are competing against people who are very, very good. Instead of going to Disney World, spend three or four weeks living with a family in a poorer country."Roy Singham, CEO, ThoughtWorks

Introduction

Technojection (Technology Projection from my angle) is the place for news and updates about developments in computer and internet industry....