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Google’s Maps Street View service pilots indoor photos
Google has started a pilot project allowing the public to look inside shops and other businesses found on its maps.
The feature is an extension of the firm’s Street View technology, which already lets users view 360-degree exterior images.
The existing service prompted some privacy complaints from people who claimed the technology was intrusive.
However, Google said the new scheme was completely on a volunteer basis.
“Building on the Google Art Project, which took Street View technology inside 17 acclaimed museums, this project is another creative implementation of Street View technology, to help businesses as they build their online presence,” said a company spokesman.
“We hope to enable businesses to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out through professional, high-quality imagery.”
Initially the roll-out is limited to select locations including London, Paris and a number of cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US.
The US company said it was beginning the process by inviting the most searched types of businesses to request a visit by its photographers.
Google said these included restaurants, hotels, shops, gyms and vehicle repair workshops.
However, it has ruled out big-brand chains for the time being. Hospitals and lawyers’ offices have also been excluded.
Business owners are told they must warn their customers and employees about the photoshoot before it begins. Google has promised it will blur out or refuse to publish any images that include bystanders.
The photoshoots will produce 360-degree images using fish-eye and wide-angle lenses as well as stills. Business owners are also invited to upload their own pictures
Bug forces Google to pull Gmail app
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Photo / Supplied
Google unveiled an email application for Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch but was forced to pull it just hours later because of a bug.
“Earlier today we launched a new Gmail app for iOS,” the operating system for the Apple devices, the Mountain View, California-based internet search giant said in a blog post.
“Unfortunately, it contained a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app,” it said.
“We’ve removed the app while we correct the problem, and we’re working to bring you a new version soon,” Google said. “Everyone who’s already installed the app can continue to use it.”
In a Twitter message on its @gmail account, Google apologized for the flub saying it was “sorry we messed up.”
The application was designed to improve the Gmail experience for users of Google’s popular email program on Apple devices.
“It’s designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device,” Google said.
One of the touted features was push notifications to alert users to new messages.
Top Ten Scams in India
Suresh Kalmadi
Commonwealth Games Scam (2010)
The scam that made Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the organising committee of the games infamous involved large scale misappropriation of money estimated to the tune of almost about a staggering 70,000 crores during the initial preparatory phase as well as during the games. Like any other scams in the past, the games scam involved a large network of politicians, bureaucrats and corporates acting in collusion. After extensive inquiry, it was found out that various contracts were manipulated by a corrupt Kalmadi and his even more corrupt team.
Just imagine – liquid soap dispensors were rented for Rs 9,379 a piece , operating expenses escalated from Rs 399 crore in December 2002 to Rs 1,628 crore finally, medical equipment including tread mills were brought or rented at way past the asking rate. Today, Kalmadi and most of the people associated with the scam are in jail.
Madhu Koda mining scam (2009)
During his tenure, former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda was charged with laundering money worth over 4000 crores. Later, when the enforcement directorate conducted raids they unearthed assests allegedly worth 4000 crores. Assets included hotels, three companies in Mumbai, property in Kolkata, a hotel in Thailand and a coal mine in Liberia.
In fact, this scam was listed as the second-largest scam uncovered in India that year. Presently, Madu Koda is spending his time at the Birsa Munda Central Jail at Hotwar.
Satyam scam (2009)
Satyam Computers, the name that has now become synonymous with corruption was founded by Ramalinga Raju in the year 1987. A botched acquisition attempt involving Maytas in December 2008 led to a plunge in the share price of Satyam. In January 2009, Raju indicated that Satyam’s accounts had been falsified over the years. Raju also admitted to an accounting dupery to the tune of Rs 7,000 crore rupees and resigned from the Satyam board.
Subsequently, Raju and his brother, B Rama Raju, were then arrested by the Andhra Pradesh police. Raju was convicted of cheating six million shareholders and is being held in Hyderabad’s Chanchalguda jail.
Scorpene submarine scam (2005)
The Scorpene deal scam has gone down in history as one of India’s largest bribery corruption scandals, in which Rs 500 crore is alleged to have been paid to government decision makers by Thales, the makers of the Scorpene submarine. The amount was channeled via middlemen such as Abhishek Verma. Also involved was Ravi Shankaran, a relative of the then chief of navy staff Arun Prakash. He is the prime accused in the navy war room scandal and was selling defence documents to the Thales.
In October 2005, defence minister Pranab Mukherjee approved the Rs 19,000 crore submarine deal with French company Thales. Scorpene submarines are now being built in India under a technology transfer agreement that was part of that contract.
Abdul Karim Telgi
Stamp paper scam (2003)
The main accused in the stamp paper scam, Abdul Karim Telgi earned money largely by printing counterfeit stamp paper in India. As Telgi started printing fake stamp paper, he appointed 300 agents who then sold the fakes to bulk purchasers including banks, insurance companies and share-broking firms.
The scam which also involved police officers and many government employees was estimated to be around 20,000 crores. That same year, Telgi and his associates were sentenced to a term of 10 years imprisonment.
Ketan Parekh
Stockmarket scam (2001)
The key figure in the stockmarket scam of 2001, Ketan Parekh, a chartered accountant by training, came from a family of brokers, which helped him create a trading ring of his own. In the period between 1999 and 2001, the stock market in India sprang to life, and following which investment firms, mostly controlled by listed companies, overseas corporate bodies or cooperative banks all were ready to hand money to Parekh which was used by him to rig up stock prices. As a result, scrips like Visualsoft rose from Rs 625 to Rs 8,848 per share and Sonata software from Rs 90 to Rs 2,150.
Parekh’s party ended rather abruptly a day after the Union Budget was presented in February 2001. A bear cartel started disrupting Parekh’s party by hammering prices of the K-10 stocks , precipitating a payment crisis in Kolkata. Later, as SEBI conducted investigations, it became evident that bank funds were used to rig markets. In March 2011, the mayhem wiped off over Rs 1,15,000 crores from the markets. The chief accused Parekh was arrested in March that year and was in custody for a period of 53 days, and debarred from trading in the Indian stock exchanges till 2017.
P Chidambaram
Vanishing companies scam (1998)
Little did the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram know that his passing remark would cause such a furore over what was a badly-kept secret on Dalal street. He was told that hundreds of companies had disappeared after raising money from the public, leading to an informal scrutiny that over 600 companies were missing, leading Chidambaram to order a probe by the SEBI. As ordered SEBI conducted a raid in the same year which revealed that many companies were missing. Chidambaram ordered a probe by SEBI.
The SEBI probe conducted in May 1998 revealed that while many companies are not traded on the bourses at least 80 companies that had rises Rs 330.78 crore were simply missing. Later that year, the Department of Company Affairs (DCA) was asked to probe and penalize these companies. However, investigations continue to this day.
Laloo Prasad Yadav
Fodder scam (1996)
The fodder scam involved embezzlement of a massive Rs 950 crore from the government treasury of the eastern state of Bihar, which involved the fabrication of fictitious livestock for which fodder, medicines and animal husbandry equipment was supposedly procured. Later, it was found out that this had been going on for over two decades. The scam continues to garner attention from the Indian media due to the involvement of tenured bureaucrats, elected politicians and business people. The scam was brought to light by Amit Khare, the then deputy commissioner of West Singhbhum, when he raided the animal husbandry department at Chaibasa, where documents conclusively indicated large-scale embezzlement by an organized mafia of officials and businesspeople.
The CBI took up the issue and subsequently all those involved were dealt wih fittingly, among which the most high profile name was of the then Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav.
Bofors scam (1987)
Bofors scam was largely responsible for tarnishing the clean image of Rajiv Gandhi when the then Prime Minister Rajiv and several of his associates were accused to receiving kickbacks from Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India’s 155 mm field howitzer. The scale of the corruption was far worse than any that India had seen before and led to the defeat of Gandhi’s ruling Indian National Congress party in the November 1989 general elections. It was estimated that the amount involved was around Rs 40 crore. On February 5, 2004, the Delhi High Court quashed the charges of bribery against Rajiv Gandhi and others. On May 31, 2005 the court dismissed the allegations against the British business brothers, Shrichand, Gopichand and Prakash Hinduja.
Later Ottavio Quattrocchi, accused as the middleman in the scandal was let off from the case by a Delhi court due to lack of credible evidence.
Scams are new to India. Through the years they have increased in scale, scope and audacity. We take a look at the top ten, starting from the first big one in Independent India – the Mundhra scam. Read on.
TT Krishnamachari and Jawaharlal Nehru
Mundhra scandal (1957)
It can be said that the media had a large role to play in suggesting that there was a scam involved regarding sale of shares to LIC. Feroze Gandhi was credited with having sourced the confidential correspondence between the then Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari and his finance secretary and raised a question in the parliament on the sale of the alleged shares to LIC by a Marwari businessman by the name of Haridas Mundhra. Subsequently, then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru set up a one-man commission headed by Justice MC Chagla to investigate the matter when it became evident that there was a prima farcie case. Chagla concluded that Mundhra had sold fictitious shares to LIC, thereby defrauding the insurance behemoth to the tune of Rs 1.25 crore.
Mundhra was sentenced to 22 years in prison and as expected T.T.Krishnamachari also resigned.
Black money: WikiLeaks may reveal Indian names
In a shocking revelation, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said black money mainly comes from India.
In an interview to Times Now, Assange said the names of the Swiss bank account holders will be revealed.
He said Wikileaks will coordinate with specialised agencies before publishing the Swiss bank data.
Click NEXT to read on
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Scientists Now Know: We’re Not From Here!
Scientists Now Know: We’re Not From Here!
Summary & comments by Dan Eden for Viewzone
Imagine the shock of growing up in a loving family with people you call “Mum” and “Dad” and then, suddenly, learning that you are actually adopted!
This same sense of shock came as scientists announced that the Sun, the Moon, our planet and its siblings, were not born into the familiar band of stars known as the Milky Way galaxy, but we actually belong to a strange formation with the unfamiliar name of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!
How can this be?
Using volumes of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a major project to survey the sky in infrared light led by the University of Massachusetts, the astronomers are answering questions that have baffled scientists for decades and proving that our own Milky Way is consuming one of its neighbors in a dramatic display of ongoing galactic cannibalism. The study published in the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way, so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the bigger Milky Way.
A new infra red digital survey of the entire sky was made in 2003. Teams from the universities of Virginia and Massachusetts used a supercomputer to sort through half a billion stars to create a — NEW STAR MAP showing our Solar System (yellow circle) to be at the exact nexus crossroads where two galaxies are actually joining.
“It’s clear who’s the bully in the interaction,” said Steven Majewski, U.Va. professor of astronomy and lead author on the paper describing the results.
“If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky,” Majewski said. “But at human, visual wavelengths, they become buried among countless intervening stars and obscuring dust. The great expanse of the Sagittarius system has been hidden from view.”
Not any more. By using infrared maps, the astronomers filtered away millions of foreground stars to focus on a type of star called an M giant. These large, infrared-bright stars are populous in the Sagittarius galaxy but uncommon in the outer Milky Way. The 2MASS infrared map of M giant stars analyzed by Majewski and collaborators is the first to give a complete view of the Milky Way galaxy’s meal of Sagittarius stars, now wrapping like a spaghetti noodle around the Milky Way. Prior to this work, astronomers had detected only a few scattered pieces of the disrupted Sagittarius dwarf. Even the existence of Sagittarius was unknown until the heart of this nearest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way was discovered by a British team of astronomers in 1994.
Here’s an animation of the “marriage”.
The fact that the Milky Way is seen in the sky at an angle has always puzzled astronomers. If we originated from the Milky Way, we ought to be oriented to the galaxy’s ecliptic, with the planets aligned around our Sun in much the same angle as our Sun aligns with the Milky Way. Instead, as first suggested by researcher Matthew Perkins Erwin, the odd angle suggests that our Sun is influenced by some other system. Together with data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey we now know what it is. We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.
“We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalog of half a billion,” said co-author Michael Skrutskie, U.Va. professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the 2MASS project. “By tuning our maps of the sky to the ‘right’ kind of star, the Sagittarius system jumped into view.”
We are from another galaxy in the process of joining with the Milky Way. The Milky Way is actually not our parent galaxy. The mystery of why the Milky Way has always been sideways in the night sky has never been answered — until now.