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Internet - Say hello to Generation 'M' [Northern Echo (England)]
[January 21, 2013]

Internet - Say hello to Generation 'M' [Northern Echo (England)]


(Northern Echo (England) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Qualcomm makes chips that make smartphones do the smart things they do. And it's desperate to tell you about them. Giles Turnbull reports on the weirdest technology demo from this year's CES show THE lights went down over a vast stage in a Las Vegas conference centre, and three teenagers stepped forward spouting poorly scripted cliches about how they belong to "Generation M" because they were "born mobile".



So began one of the most bizarre keynote speeches in the history of the technology business.

Qualcomm, a huge company in the microchips and wireless technology sector, went to extraordinary lengths to entertain an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).


It showed an entirely inappropriate clip from a gory movie, and invited its director on stage. It got Sesame Street's Big Bird on too.

Then Desmond Tutu made an prerecorded video appearance.

All of this was designed to push home what boils down to a simple message: children these days expect to be able to do amazing things with their phones and tablets, and those expectations will grow as the gadgets themselves shrink.

Oh, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors would be the ideal chip to have inside those gadgets.

Qualcomm's efforts got it the attention it wanted, butmostly for the wrong reasons. Commentators were baffled by the over-the-top stunts and set pieces. You can watch the whole thing at qualcomm. com/ces Ultimately, the blame lies with Apple. It pioneered the art of turning a tech announcement into a stage show.

PEOPLE-POWERED SEARCH Twitter has revealed part of itsmasterplan: people- powered search.

Searching anything that moves as fast as Twitter is very difficult. Software can spot trending topics as chunks of text, but can't always tell what they relate to in the real world.

So Twitter is paying people via Amazon's Mechanical Turk system (mturk. com) to be "judges", annotating trends as they come in. Twitter wants to be the place people go to for real-time news updates, especially when big stories are breaking.

LIFE ON MARS Want to be on TV Want to go to Mars If you answered yes to both of those, you should head over to the Mars One website (mars-one. com/en) and fill out an application form.

Mars One is a space mission and a reality TV show that aims to get people on the surface of Mars by 2023.

It's hoped that the profits from the TV show will more than pay for the spacemission, with enough left over to send more astronauts as time goes on. Anyone over 18 can apply, and space suits and training will be provided.

LIKE MAGIC The Magic Cube isn't really a cube and doesn't actually work by magic, but it is an amazing piece of kit. It's a tiny metal box of tricks that projects a virtual keyboard on to any flat surface, and communicates your taps to your computer, tablet or smartphone wirelessly.

The computer thinks you're using a normal wireless keyboard, but in reality you're just tapping on a table.

The technology is impressive and the customer reviews generally positive. For more information, visit at www. celluon. com. You can expect to pay about [pounds]130 for one.

Browsing around - best of CES websites Samsung's huge new TV sets global. samsungtomorrow. com/ cat=14 The FitBit Flex activity tracker qa1static7. fitbit. com/ Big phone or small tablet How about phablet is. gd/AbvYXH The XO-4 touch, for kids wiki. laptop. org/go/XO-4Touch Fujifilm's new X100S camera is. gd/0V2moS Lenovo's huge 27inch tablet youtu. be/C59VqSUPM2Y Thing of the week Catmoji is like Pinterest but just for cats catmoji. com (c) 2013 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved.

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