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On Tuesday, an electric car in Germany was drove to Berlin from Munich in a single go i.e, without recharging its battery. This became the new world distance record for an everyday vehicle.

The picture you can see at the top is the yellow and purple electric car "A2" that is manufactured by Audi. This car in one stretch completed 372 mile (approx. 600km) distance which finally reached the courtyard of the economy ministry in Berlin. It just took 7 hours to reach the Berlin from Munich. Rainer Bruederle, the Economy Minister welcomed the team and took a spin in the car around the courtyard. Mirko Hannemann, who drove the car from Munich to Berlin stepped out to show off the battery of the A2 where he told to the journalists that if anybody wants their iPhones to be recharged, there is some electricity left in the car. The government has aimed to have atleast 1 million cars on road by the year 2020. But this is a very slow start from them and have to shoot up in order to catch up with their Asian rivals.

World's leading car manufacturing company, BMW has announced that it will be launching its first vehicle in 2013. Even the Europe's largest car manufacturing company, Volkswagen also has announced that it will launch its first car in the year 2013. On the other hand Japan based car manufacturing company, Nissan has already started mass production of its electric car "Leaf" and soon it will be on sale in Japan and US.

Two days earlier to this, South Korea based Samsung Inc., announced that it would start selling its tablet PC "Galaxy tab" in US from 11th of November this year. The price of Samsung Galaxy tab would be $600 and it will be running on Google's Android OS.

On Friday, Hewlett-Packard launched its tablet computer which is run on Windows Operating System. Right now, HP's tablet PC is the latest entry in the tablet computers market and is mainly aimed at the professionals as it has the ability to handle spreadsheets, documents and other applications from Microsoft. It is called as HP Slate 500.

HP Slate 500 has an 8.9-inch display screen i.e, 22.6cms and is slightly smaller than the Apple Inc.'s iPad. The weight of this gadgets is just 1.5 pounds i.e, about 0.68 kilo-grams. It has got 2 camera's in it - one for stills and another for video, has got USB (Universal Serial Bus) port where users can connect a mouse, keyboard or printer to it. This gadget offers the connectivity for Wi-Fi but doesn't have 3G cellular access. The battery backup for this device is about 5 hours. It runs on Microsoft's Windows 7 OS.

Coming to the cost of this latest gadget, Slate 500 will cost $800 which is almost same price as the Apple Inc.'s iPad.

Recently, MSI unveiled 2 latest laptops which are powerful and are latest in technology. These 2 laptops are called FX700 and FR700.

These laptops has got an 17.3-inch HD(High Definition) LCD display screen with LED backlight, the processor in the laptop is Intel's Core i5 processor, RAM is DDR3 of 8GB which has got a frequency of 1066MHz, has got 4 USB ports in total in which 2 are USB 3.0 ports and 2 are USB 2.0 ports, DVD super multi, Webcam is of HD which is of 30fps (frames per second) at 720p, has got 6 cell Li-ion battery, runs on Microsoft's Windows 7 home premium. These laptops weighs about 2.8kgs including battery. Apart from this, both the laptops features Turbo drive engine technology, Cinema Pro.

Till now whatever features i had mentioned, they are common for both the laptops. Now coming to MSI FX700 features: this laptop uses graphics card nVidia's GeForce GT 425M of 1GB GDDR3 for providing high display performance, it has got GPU Boost and Anti Fingerprint. For MSI FR700: the graphics processor used for the display memory is Intel HD graphics.

As of now, MSI did not reveal anything regarding the pricing of these 2 laptops.

Apple Inc. has now targeted Indian telecoms and is planning to launch its CDMA(Code Division Multiple Access) version of iPhone. India is one of the world's fastest growing mobile markets. Now, Apple is been contacting 2 of the well known Indian telecom operators and is in talks with them to release the CDMA version of the iPhone. The 2 well known operators are Reliance Communications & Tata Teleservices.

Apple has already launched its GSM(Global System for Mobile communications) version in India through Vodafone Essar and Bharti AirTel. In US, Verizon Wireless will start to sell the CDMA version of iPhone in the early 2011.

The Journal said that Tata Teleservices is in talks with the Apple Inc. from past 4 or 5 months. Apple accounts Less than 1% among the smartphones market in India in this first half of 2010. Around 20% of the mobile users among 670 million users in India use CDMA phones. Introduction of the CDMA version of iPhone will help Apple Inc. to give access to more customers in India.

Now, people can deposit their checks to PayPal. This is done by just scanning their PayPal checks with the cameras which are in-built in the iPhones and use the PayPal application to deposit their checks. This was new feature was successfully introduced on Friday.

Apple Inc. recently released its iPhone 2.7 application in which this mobile check capture application was an added feature. This latest application can be availed at the iTunes website that is being run by Apple or it can also downloaded from PayPal.com/mobile.

After the introduction of this latest feature, in just 36 hours more than $100,000 worth of checks were deposited to the PayPal by using this Mobile Check Capture feature. PayPal Mobile senior director Laura Chambers wrote in a blog that he thinks there are many people who are waiting for this feature so that they can easily deposit their checks to PayPal. This feature will definitely be a success because of the demand from the customers to have an easy, quicker way to deal with the checks.

After the success of the Blackberry handset, Research in Motion Ltd. has now started to focus on manufacturing tablets as well. Few days back, Research in Motion Ltd. revealed their tablet pc for the first time. This gadget is been named as the "Playbook". This new gadget will be launched in early 2011 and it will have an international rollout later in the year. RIM has now started to challenge Apple Inc.'s iPad by focusing on their tablets which will be of lighter weight and small in size.

Apple Inc.'s "iPad" was introduced in the month of March and has become the leading seller of tablets in the market. Dell has also launched its very own tablet pc called "Streak" in the month of August. Samsung Electronics co. will be launching its tablet pc "Galaxy tab" next month. Cisco Systems Inc. will be also be launching its tablet pc called "Cius" in the early 2011. So RIM will have lot of competition in this field when Playbook is launched.

Now coming to features of the Playbook, this gadget has got a 7-inch display screen which is half the size of iPad and the weighs almost same as that of iPad. This tablet has got 2 cameras in it, one in the front and other one in the back. This gadget can be used as the second screen for the Blackberry phone with the help of short range wireless link hence an larger display screen for the Blackberry phone is achieved. This gadget will also work as a stand-alone gadget. RIM's main focus is to give complete web experience to the users which can give the ability to display flash & interactive material on the web.

As of now, RIM did not tell about the exact pricing of the Playbook. But it has said that this tablet will be costing in the same range as that of iPad, which starts at $499.

Last week, Jaguar revealed its latest supercar model called Jaguar C-X75. This latest car is an primarily a plug-in electric car with much more added performances & power of micro-gas turbines (often called as jet engines). This added power & the performance helps Jaguar C-X75 to be the fastest electric car on the road as of now.
 
These micro-gas turbines has an revolutionary speed at 80K RPM or 80,000RPM(rotations per minute) and this speed helps in increasing the power or it can also be used to recharge the lithium ion battery which helps in the increase in range(distance covered). Lithium ion battery pack is single floor mounted and delivers 145kW and gives a range up to 110Km. Whenever the battery runs down, we can recharge the battery in 6 hours with the help of a normal household mains.

These micro-gas turbines are very small in size & are relatively cheaper to manufacture. these turbines runs at an fixed & with most efficient RPM in order to recharge lithium ion batteries. By this, efficiency and the performance is increased and the maintanance cost as well as the emissions are lowered. There is no vibrations produced and the noise generated is very less in these turbines because of the jet engine used.

In just 3.4seconds, this 2-seater car reaches 100kmph i.e, 62mph. The top speed achieved is 330kmph (205mph) when the turbines and the batteries are working together. The torque produced with all-wheel drive is 1,600Nm (Newton-metre) or 1,180lb-ft.

This latest supercar Jaguar C-X75 was unveiled in the Paris motor show 2010 which was held in last week. This was just an stage concept and may be this will be never produced and marketed also. But the elements of the design will definitely help and find their way into the future cars that is produced by the Jaguar.

The humanoid iCub robot is an open source robotic platform. This robot will be about 104cms tall or it will be almost same size as a child 3&1/2 years old. This robot has got an freedom of 53 degrees which has been distributed about torso, head, arms, hands and legs. Hence this robot is called as 53-DOF iCub.

This iCub robot has now learned archery. Only things that was taught for this robot was how to hold a bow and then shoot an arrow. Using this, it improved its accuracy and aiming skill all by itself. Later it became so successful that it started to hit bulls-eye after 8 trials.

The distance between the humanoid robot iCub and the archery target was 3.5 meters. The grip of the bow held by iCub was set manually. Robot's index finger is used to pull/release the string and finally shoot the arrow. There was an algorithm written which helped iCub to remember the correct posture of its left arm and the orientation of the right arm. The algorithm used here is called as ARCHER ( Augmented Reward Chained Regression).

We all know that the goal in archery is to hit the bulls-eye. Each time when iCub shoots the arrow, it gains experience and self tunes itself. In the next attempt it modulates and co-ordinates the movements of its hands accordingly. The movement of the robot's arms is controlled by an inverse kinematics controller. Whenever an arrow is shot, a picture of the target is taken by a camera. An image recognition system has been developed based on Gaussian Mixture Models which helps in recognizing where the arrow head has hit on the target. The data or the information that is collected is then sent as an feedback for the algorithm. Thereby the accuracy of the shot is increased in the next round.


ARCHER algorithm was developed by Dr. Petar Kormushev and his colleagues who belong to Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). In the month of December, Humanoids 2010 conference will be taking place at Nashville TN, US where the results of this research will be presented.