iPhone Banned in the USA

Eastman Kodak is after your iPhone AND they want to take away your BlackBerry.
They won't come and pry the device out of your hand, but they definitely want to halt the phones from being imported until they get their piece of the pie.
Eastman Kodak claims that Apple Computers and Research in Motion are guilty of infringement of patents. Kodak has taken the step to request the U.S. International Trade Commission prevent both companies from importing their smart phones into the United States. Nokia filed a similar complaint in December 2009.

Kodak says both companies have infringed on patents regarding digital imaging, Apple for its iPhone and Research in Motion for its BlackBerry phone. The companies had been negotiating with Kodak to settle the potential compensation matter, but those talks broke down after neither side could break the impasse.
Kodak wants to ban devices with touch screens, like the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry Storm and other camera phones such as the Tour, Bold, Curve and Pearl. The main issue is the built-in cameras. Kodak has more than 1,000 patents involving digital imaging.
Kodak's complaint says the iPhone and BlackBerry infringe on the patent approved in 2001 regarding the ability to preview images. Kodak made more than $622 million on intellectual property last year and expects to receive more than $450 million in royalty this year from Samsung. It is seeking a similar agreement with Apple and Research in Motion.
The ITC has 45 days to decide whether it will consider the complaint and would hold a hearing about the matter within the next year. Kodak has filed a similar suit against Samsung and LG and currently has licensing agreements with both companies, as well as Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia.
This is just another round in the smartphone war. Apple filed a complaint against Nokia with the USITC last month that was designed to block the import of Nokia's Oyj phone into the United States. The ITC has agreed to consider the complaint. Nokia, the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, filed its own complaint to ban imports of the iPhone, iPod and MacBook. The USITC said it would review that complaint, too.









Source: Better Trades

Top 10 Google Settings You Should Know About

As the outcry over Google Buzz's privacy has shown us, it's smart to explore settings in Gmail, along with other places you're sharing data with the search giant. Let's take a look at 10 privacy, convenience, and annoyance fixers you should know.

10. Turn off auto-displayed pictures from Gmail contacts

By default, Gmail hides images embedded into emails from chain letters and unknown sources—and that's a smart move, given spammers' tracking tactics and malware tendencies. But it still shows images from contacts you've previously sent mail to, which can be a pain if you've got relatives who just love hi-larious forwards. Head to your Settings page, and look for the "external content" setting, which you can switch off to always ask you to confirm showing images in any email. If you've got just a handful of offenders, open up one of the egregious emails, hit the "Show details" link near the bottom of the to/from/subject details, and click the "don't display from now on" link. (Original post)

9. Fine-tune Google Apps for your domain

Google Apps, formerly know as Apps for Your Domain, has a lot of goodies tucked inside it for anyone who owns their own site, runs a family name domain, or operates a small business. Unlike Gmail, however, the new features and disabled offerings aren't as apparent (or blogged about). Gina gave us a great tour of Google Apps, showing how you can control privacy and access, choose which Labs features make it into your domain's email, and otherwise set up your site to your liking.

8. Prevent Android from automatically signing into Gchat

Simple and easy, but also easy to miss: If you've got an Android phone and have launched Google Talk from it just once, you might notice that you seem to catch any and all chats throughout the day. That's because Talk can sit in the background upon launching, ready to pick up messages. That's fine if that's what you want, but if you want a choice in the matter, head to the Google Talk app, hit your Menu key, and choose Settings. Un-check the "Automatically sign in" option, hit your back button, and then hit Menu and sign out of Google Talk. You'll need to sign back in if you're downloading apps from the Market (odd pairing, indeed), but you're otherwise free to chat when you want to. (Original post)

7. Turn off Buzz, Chat, and Labs in Gmail

Not big on Buzz? Chat more distracting than useful? Gmail Labs making your inbox feel lag-ish? You can kill all of them, if you'd like, and get back just a plain vanilla inbox. Scroll all the way to the bottom of any page inside Gmail, and at the bottom, you'll see two links to turn Gmail's chat sidebar and Buzz inbox on or off. Actually, you don't really "turn off Buzz" so much as remove it from your inbox, so be sure and check your Buzz settings at your Google Profile, if you have a Google Profile. If Labs features seem to be slowing down, or even breaking, your Gmail experience, you can turn them off entirely by loading Gmail from this URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0#. Bookmark it as your main Gmail link, or title it "Gmail (Safe Mode)" if you'd like to still venture into all the goodies on occasion.

6. Disable SafeSearch (or lock it in semi-permanently)

Google's SafeSearch isn't an entirely comprehensive solution to preventing impressionable eyes from the worst realms of the internet. It is, however, a good stopgap until they learn to grow up and install other browsers, wipe out cookies, and customize user scripts. Whether you don't have any young ones in the house and want to turn SafeSearch off altogether or you want a complete SafeSearch lockdown on your computer, head to your search preferences, scroll down to the SafeSearch section, and find the setting that fits you. (In Google Image Search, they've helpfully placed the control right under the search box on your first result.) If you want to permanently enable SafeSearch, click the "Lock SafeSearch" link—and repeat for any browsers the little ones use. Now when they're performing a Google search, you should see some giant Google-colored balls in the upper-right corner—or else they've gotten too smart.

5. Set your default SMS location

For those without web-connected smartphones, or at least a decent data connection, Google's SMS service is seriously helpful—it's how I (used to) get by with just an iPod touch and a standard phone. To make it even more helpful, text set location, followed by the city and state or ZIP code where you spend the most time. Now you can just text "weather" or "pet store" to get the skinny on what's happening. (Original post)

4. Link and integrate your apps

Taking off the privacy and preference hat for a moment, Google's apps have a lot of neat settings just beneath their surface that make using them all together a tight experience. You can turn emails into tasks, and then map those tasks on your calendar. You can send voice messages and SMS from Google Voice to Gmail, and mark them as read when you open them there. Gina previously ran down seven easy ways to integrate your Google apps, and even more seem to come along every week.

3. Turn off Search History, logged in or not

If you're logged into Google for Gmail or any other service, there's a good chance Google's keeping tabs on all your searches, months after you made them. If you aren't logged in, Google's probably still tracking and personalizing your searches based on what you previously typed in. This one-stop solution should work for most users, but if it doesn't, log into Google and head to google.com/history. A notice at the top will tell you if you've "paused" or otherwise stopped your search history, or else you'll see your recent searches listed with dates and times. You can clear out this history by hitting the "Remove items" link on the left. If you aren't logged in, look for the "Web History" link in the upper-right corner. From there, you can choose whether Google tracks your searches via cookie and IP address and customizes your results.

2. Back up Google apps' data

For all you've heard about Buzz, privacy, and Google this week, you still can't fault them too much for their efforts to let you take your data with you if you decide to leave their app ecosystem. The Data Liberation Front site, a pet project from Google's engineers, explains how you can pull your information, documents, and other data out of nearly any Google product. Gina's also covered some of Google's apps in a cloud backup feature, and Adam tackled the best-at-that-time tools for Google backups in 2007. (Original Data Liberation Front post)

1. Control what Buzz says about you on the web

Google's new social service Buzz showed up suddenly in everyone's Gmail accounts this week, and right away it wanted to get you connected with the people you contact over email and chat the most. Before you let it turn you loose, though, consider whether you want the world to see exactly who you "follow." Google has since improved the on/off visibility, but if you want to make sure you're not broadcasting your inbox to the web at large, we suggest visiting your profile and checking your follower counts. If you don't see a profile at all, or don't see the followed/following numbers, you're likely in the clear, but as with many aspects of Buzz in this early stage, you can't be too careful. And when you actually start using the thing, be careful not to broadcast private email addresses yourself. (Original posts: Buzz update, private emails).

Bonus item: Open search results in new tabs

Lifehacker copy consigliere Dustin Luck mentions yet another reason to hit up your search preferences from time to time. With a single click, you can choose to open the results you click on in new windows. If you've set up your browser the right way, those new windows become new tabs, and little research projects on Google just became far more convenient.

Source:lifehacker

iTunes Nears 10 Billion Music Downloads And Prize To Downloader

The 10 billionth iTunes download is fast approaching, and Apple's offering up a $10,000 iTunes gift card prize to one lucky winner. That winner will either be the downloader of the 10 billionth song, or the person who submits the first non-purchase online entry form immediately following the download of the 9,999,999,999th song.

Based on those rules, considering there are still over 100 million songs to go, it makes no sense to try to enter at the time of this writing. It's totally based on when you enter, not some random drawing of entries, unless you happen to tie for the 10 billionth entry.

Last year, Apple had a similar promotion for the 1 billionth App Store download. However, they must value App Store downloads much more than iTunes downloads, as that promotion included a lot more than just the $10,000 iTunes gift card: the lucky winner collected an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro, as well.

Apple calls it "one huge milestone for music," and it is, but Apple hit a bigger milestone much earlier. In 2008, iTunes became the number one U.S. music retailer.
Source:Apple

Real Time Voice Translation is On the Way, Thanks to Google.

Real time voice translation is on the way and Google aims to pioneer it.

The Internet giant wants to develop its smartphone technology to translate speech in real time.
The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.
Head of translation services Franz Och said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.“Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”
‘Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,’ said Mr Och. ‘But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.’
Google has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.
However Google admits speech will be an even tougher challenge than text but says a customer’s phone would adapt to its user by ‘learning’ their style of talking.
Source: The next web