NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 6 February
06-02-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
Google brings you books on the move | Voting opens for top Irish doodlers
Google has adapted its Book Search site for the Apple iPhone and for its own Android mobile platform. Google has digitised some 1.5 million of the world's books and featured them on its Book Search site, which was available to computer users. Now it's modified the PDF scans of these books to suit the smaller screen of a mobile phone. To do this it has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract plain text from its digitised books, making the end result easily readable on a small screen. If the OCR technology hasn't correctly processed a page, users can view the original scanned page image provided by Google by double-tapping on their mobile screen.
Voting for the first Doodle for Google competition in Ireland has kicked off, with 103 primary and secondary school students battling it out for the honour of having their doodle grace the Google homepage to commemorate St Patrick's Day. Members of the public can vote for their favourite doodle in each of the competition's four age categories on www.google.ie/doodle4google, and voting will close at midnight on 16 February. The winning doodle will be chosen by Google's Chief Doodler [what a job title] Dennis Hwang at an event in Google's Dublin headquarters at the beginning of March. The winning doodle will appear on Google's homepage in Ireland, the UK, Australia, Canada and the United States on St. Patrick's Day and the winner's school will receive a EUR10,000 technology grant from Google.
Hot on the heels of supporting Gmail in offline mode, Google has made its Calendar function available offline also. The move sees Google making more of its applications available to users while they're offline; the firm offered an offline option for Google Docs last year. Like Gmail, Google Calendar has been added to Gears, its open source technology. Users will be able to access and view their calendar, but will not be able to make edits to it while offline.
Fellow search giant Yahoo has unveiled a demo of its SearchPad application, which allows users to save notes and links to sites they've visited. SearchPad is similar to a notepad-type tool, allowing users to copy and paste information from webpages onto a separate window. Yahoo claims the tool will be useful for those researching holidays via Yahoo, or for people looking to buy a new laptop online. The tool is also aimed at those doing academic research. To find out more about SearchPad Yahoo has put together a demo video here.
Japanese electronics firm NEC has announced it plans to withdraw from its loss-making PC business in Europe as it focuses its efforts on the Japanese market, reports Reuters. The news follows the firm's announcement last week that it is to slash 20,000 jobs worldwide in a bid to cut costs.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 