Microsoft and Yahoo are preparing to link together their free instant messaging services as they take on entrenched messaging leader AOL and market newcomer Google, a source close to the companies said on Tuesday according to the news agency Reuters.

If the deal was to go ahead, it would allow users of both systems to talk to each other via the two programs and be the first major alliance between two of the web’s main providers of instant messaging.

Source: pocket-lint.co.uk

A 21-year-old in England is hoping an idea he had in the middle of the night will help pay his way through college.

Alex Tew, who will start his studies at a university in England at the end of the month, has come up with a scheme to make himself an easy $1 million dollars. Tew built a Web site called the The Million Dollar Homepage, which he is selling off to advertisers, pixel by pixel. The page is broken up into 10,000 100-pixel squares; Tew sells the 100-pixel squares off for $100 each, or $1 per pixel.

The Million Dollar Homepage

Are you a jerk on the phone? You might want to be a bit nicer the next time you take that call.
That’s because there’s new technology coming out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called the “Jerk-O-Meter.” The software measures stress levels in your voice and rates you on a scale of zero to 100 to let you know just how annoying you might be sounding.

Project leader Anmol Madan, a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab, said his wife came up with the product name as they were discussing his research on using speech patterns to measure interest in conversations.

The result is speech software that measures vocal activity and stress during a call and then translates that into a couple of actions. The group is also working on better reading empathy.

“The value that comes from this technology that you can build machines and computers that gauge when people are….

source: news.com

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