High quality video, telephone conferencing may be round the corner

October 9th, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO - Google's online video site YouTube now gets a billion hits a day, the site's founder Chad Hurley said in a video posted Friday. "Three years ago today (YouTube co-founder) Steve (Chen) and I stood in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the 'burger kings' of media," read the post, which was titled Y,000,000,000uTube.

October 8th, 2009 LONDON - Birds prefer to choose a mate who appears to be as attractive as themselves and has the same "market value", reveals a new study. In the research, boffins found that female zebra finches never tried to play out of their league and happened to choose low-quality males rather than their superior competitors.

September 23rd, 2009 US complains to Russia about sex tape 'smear'WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has complained to the Russian Foreign Ministry about a sex tape that U.S.

August 12th, 2009 NEW DELHI - Telecom major Reliance Communications (RCom) Wednesday announced it had partnered US-based telecom solutions provider Kodiak Networks to roll out nationwide mobile conferencing service. RCom will roll out the services on both GSM and CDMA platforms, the company said in a statement.

August 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research has found that pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide (CO2) than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions. The findings suggest some woody tree species could, in the future, out-compete grasses and other herbaceous plants that scientists had previously found can also produce more seeds under high-CO2, but of inferior quality.

July 25th, 2009 MUMBAI - Telecom services provider Tata Communications Saturday said its net profit for the quarter ended June 30 fell 67 percent to Rs.32 crore ($6.6 million) as against Rs.98 crore in the same period last fiscal. Tata's stand-alone revenue also fell 3.2 percent to Rs.843 crore for the quarter under review from Rs.871 crore, the company said in a statement.

July 16th, 2009 NASA refurbishes video copies of moon landingWASHINGTON — With the help of Hollywood, those historic, grainy images of the first men on the moon never looked better. NASA unveiled refurbished video Thursday of the July 20, 1969, moonwalk restored by the same company that sharpened up the movie "Casablanca." NASA lost its original moon landing videotapes and after a three-year search, officials have concluded they were probably erased.

July 3rd, 2009 NEW DELHI - The defence ministry has agreed to vacate spectrum for commercial use, Minister of State for Communications and IT Gurudas Kamat said Friday. According to an accord reached between the defence and the telecommunications ministries, the latter will set up an exclusive optical fibre cable (OFC) network for the armed forces.

July 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has developed a new video "perfection tool" to help investigators enhance raw video images to locate terrorists and identify suspects in crime scenes. Professor Leonid Yaroslavsky of Israel's Tel Aviv University (TAU) and his colleagues have developed the new technology.

July 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - You must have seen how cops in TV programmes zoom in on a security camera video to read a number plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist. But in real life, enhancing this low-quality video to focus in on important clues hasn't been an easy task.

June 30th, 2009 MUMBAI - Indian telephony and internet services provider Tata Communications Tuesday announced its partnership with Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide to roll out its video-conferencing facility in the hotel giant's properties. Under the agreement, Tata will increase its network of public Cisco Telepresence rooms by opening 10 new facilities in Starwood's hotels by the year-end, the company said in a regulatory statement.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has found a link between couples' sleep quality and the quality of their relationship. It has shown that couples' relationship quality affects their sleep, and their sleep also affects their subsequent relationship functioning.

June 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study by Robert Morris University researchers in Pennsylvania suggests that the current practice of offering short and low quality samples of digital music on the Internet may not be a great marketing strategy. Yanbin Tu in the Department of Marketing at the university and Min Lu in the Department of Finance and Economics think that an effective digital music free sample strategy should involve high-quality, long samples of the music being marketed.

May 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Women convey a range of meanings and emotions by shaking their heads while chatting among themselves, more so than men do with other men. When women and men converse together, the men shake their heads a little and the women use a little less.

January 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Video games can erode young adults' ties with family and friends. The finding, based on information from 813 college students, shows that as they devoted more time to video games, the quality of relationships with peers and parents went down.