Google on Tuesday said it was dabbling with getting computers to simulate the learning process of the human brain as one of the unusual projects for researchers in its X Lab.
Computers programmed with algorithms intended to mimic neural connections "learned" to recognize cats after being shown a sampling of YouTube videos, Google fellow Jeff Dean and visiting faculty Andrew Ng said in a blog post.

India is set to release an upgrade of its ultra-low-cost computer tablet, the 40-dollar "Aakash-2", after the first edition was criticized for its quality and distribution.
The device was unveiled last year as the "computer for the masses" in India, where millions struggle to fund their education, but as yet the tablet has failed to live up to the hype and reached only a tiny number of colleges.

Struggling Japanese electronics giants Sony and Panasonic said Monday they would team up to develop televisions with advanced technology, in a bid to claw back market share from overseas rivals.
Despite a long-standing rivalry, the firms said they would aim to establish mass-production technology for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) television panels next year, as they try to recover from multi-billion-dollar losses.

Text messaging, the simple telecoms service that turned into a global phenomenon is under threat from free smartphone services and operators need to find alternative revenue streams, analysts say.
The short message service, or SMS, started as a way to use spare telecoms capacity but has become a key cash generator for operators, while offering users a cheap way to keep in touch with friends and family and avoid the expense of voice calls.

British police on Tuesday loaded almost 3,000 images onto a smartphone App and invited the public to help them identify people suspected of taking part in last year's London riots.
The Metropolitan Police force loaded 2,880 CCTV images onto its App and urged people to sift through the images and confidentially send the names and addresses of any people identified.

The TED conference, known for taking an innovative look at cutting-edge issues, will delve into whether the Internet is making the world more open or closed at a gathering in Scotland on Monday.
The theme of this year's TED Global will be "radical openness" as talks on and off stage in Edinburgh explore the implications of crowd sourcing, blogs, smartphones and other culture-changing features of the Internet Age.

An American judge has dismissed lawsuits lodged by Apple and Motorola against each other for copyright infringement.
"To suggest that (Apple) has suffered loss of market share, brand recognition, or customer goodwill as a result of Motorola's alleged infringement of the patent claims still in play in this case is wild conjecture," Judge Richard Posner wrote in a 38-page ruling issued from a federal appeals court in Chicago.

The Internet "cloud" has become the hottest topic in computing, but the trend has created a new range of security issues that need to be addressed.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics, the world's largest smartphone maker, said Monday it expects to have sold 10 million of its newest Galaxy S3 model by the end of July, two months after its launch.
J.K. Shin, head of the mobile communications division, said robust sales of the model would help Samsung's mobile business post a second-quarter profit bigger than the first three months.

The founder of Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei, which has faced security concerns in the U.S. and Australia, is calling for global cooperation to improve data protection.
Ren Zhengfei, in a rare public appearance at an economic forum on Friday, did not mention the controversy surrounding Huawei. But he warned data would be "vulnerable to attack again and again" because technology will develop faster than security. He gave no details of possible joint measures.
