Nobel Peace Prize: US President Barack Obama for extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples and for hiswork on nuclear non-proliferation.
Physiology or Medicine: US trio Elizabeth Blackburn, CarolWGreider and JackWSzostak won
the Nobel Medicine Prize for discovering an enzyme which helps chromosomes in cells stay
eternally young.
Literature: Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born writer who produced tales of the disenfranchised and fought for free speech, has won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature. She made her debut in 1982 with a collection of short stories.
Physics: Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics for work in fibre-optics and in semiconductors.
Chemistry: Indian-American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan haswon Nobel Prize in chemistry. He shares it with Thomas Steitz, an American, and Ada Yonath, an Israeli.
Economic Sciences: Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson of the United States won the 2009
Nobel Economics Prize for their work on the organization of cooperation in economic governance.
Google just announced the launch of Google Earth 5.0, with a new feature “Ocean” in it that enables users of Google Earth to dive beneath the water surface and explore the 3D underwater terrain, or browse lots of ocean-related content contributed by researchers.
The Global MBA Rankings for the year 2009, which is published annually by Financial Times, London, is now available on their website. The Financial Times is a British international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and is printed at 24 sites. Its rival is the New York City-based Wall Street Journal. In the list of Top 100 B schools of world, University of Pennsylvania is at number 1 position, while London Business school is at number 2. For the first time the Shanghai-based China European International Business School (Ceibs) has been ranked eighth, whereas this time Indian School of Business, Hyderabad is at 15th position.
World’s top 100 B schools list
Ajay Pathak
3 February 2009
News
MBA
The chipmaker will attempt to promote its silicon for sophisticated game effects at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in March, as it strives to make a case for quad-core processors in lieu of graphics chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The pitch goes like this: "Learn how to easily add real-time 3D smoke, fog and other fluid simulations to your game without using up the GPU." That’s according to an Intel Web page entitled Intel at Game Developers Conference. (The CPU is the central processing unit, or main brains of a computer; GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)
Lenovo on Thursday said it has acquired Switchbox Labs, a mystery startup co-founded by a former Microsoft executive. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The development projects of privately held Switchbox are confidential, but will continue under Lenovo, the latter company said. The "consumer technologies" under development by the Seattle-based startup will be integrated into upcoming Lenovo products.
Acer is to launch its first smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. "Now Acer enters the Smart Handheld market with an exciting range of easy to use devices designed to offer phone capability, simple one hand usability and complete connectivity," according to the company’s exhibitor page on the Mobile World Congress website. The notice suggests that Acer may unveil more than one model and that the phones may use multiple kinds of networks, such as Wi-Fi and mobile.
In the opinion of some industry pundits, Google’s decision to add offline functionality to Gmail amounts to a validation of Microsoft’s "software-plus-services" strategy, which advocates a mix of on-premise and cloud-based software as the best future computing model. Microsoft has for the past couple of years stressed the importance of building an offline experience into cloud applications, and claims that software-plus-services is something the entire industry will eventually embrace. Cynics believe Microsoft’s embrace of software plus services is just an attempt to remain relevant in the age of cloud computing, and to maintain revenue from on premise software.
Content network Glam Media announced on Thursday that it has acquired AdaptiveAds, a company specializing in the targeting and optimization of display ads. Glam Media claims that its acquisition of AdaptiveAds will help it solidify its offering in the advertising market. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Glam did say disclose plans to open an office in Mumbai, India, as part of the acquisition.
With each passing day, the moments when I’m disconnected from the Internet become fewer and fewer. For me, one of the last meaningful barriers began to fall with American Airlines’ announcement last year that they would be offering in-flight wi-fi service. Though wi-fi is being offered by more airlines, there are still plenty of flight routes where Internet isn’t an option, at least for now. And this poses a problem for those of us who get a lot of our work done online.So what can you do the next time you’re bracing yourself for that long flight? Well, we’ve been cooking up a feature in Gmail Labs, our testing ground for Gmail features, that should help: offline Gmail. If you enable offline access, Gmail will load in your browser even when you don’t have an Internet connection. You can read messages, star, label and archive them, compose new mail and more. Messages ready to be sent will wait in your Outbox until you’re online again.
offline access in Gmail Labs
Could These Features Make Their Way to Chrome?
Google has highlighted a few Firefox add-ons that could be of great use to AdSense publishers. These include:
"Do you regularly work with your webpages and AdSense implementation, tinkering with HTML or PHP and creating images and code on the fly?" asks Laura Prado of the Inside AdSense Team. "If you do, Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages
