Tech News Geek

In Douglas Adams’s humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned — the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language into whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar. According to Times Online, Google is developing a speech-to-speech automated translator for Android phones. It’s essentially a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online ...read more

This one will definitely put a smile on the faces of all those who think Google’s Street View service is invading their privacy: Members of German Free Art & Technology group (F.A.T.) noticed Google’s Street View car in Berlin and decided to attach a GPS device to it and track its movement.

The result of their efforts can be seen on a large map, and although it doesn’t seem to show anything out of the ordinary — the Google Street View ...read more

Social music player TuneWiki has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funding in a Series B round led by Motorola Ventures and joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel.

TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web. The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products, including an upcoming mobile game.

TuneWiki ...read more

On the heels of the EU’s approval of Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, the tech giant has opened up the purse strings to acquire application management software provider AmberPoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year.

AmberPoint’s software helps organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning where multiple applications need to ...read more

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

If you don’t have an iPhone 3GS, there are now apps available to enable video recording capabilities on the older phones. One of those apps, Drahtwerk’s iCamcorder [US$0.99, iTunes Link], has a ton of features that might make 3GS owners jealous. Some of those features include:

Quad-cam, mirror, pop-art, old movie,color-flip and four more special effects Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube sharing of recorded videos Adjustable recording frame rate Bonjour sharing for downloading videos from your iPhone

Drahtwerk wanted to give away ...read more

Filed under: Hardware

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, I thought it was neat, but I didn’t see how it would really fit into my life. What could it do for me that my iPhone or MacBook Pro couldn’t? It seemed like that gap Steve Jobs said the iPad filled was targeted at a group of people I didn’t belong to. So I asked the TUAW readers if you’d be getting one. Then I began talking to my family about the ...read more

If our attempts at getting such simple information as bus schedules or account balances from automated voice recognition systems are any indication, then we imagine Google has a lot of work to do in its latest endeavor - real-time, spoken-language translation.

According to the Times UK, Google is working on developing software for a mobile phone that would translate what you were saying into the language of the speaker on the other end of the line and vice versa.

Sponsor

As ...read more