'Slumdog' child star gets new home

The makers of the hit movie "Slumdog Millionaire" have bought a new home for one of the two child stars discovered in Mumbai's slums.

Both children lost their homes last month when authorities demolished parts of their slum.

The purchase of a 250-square-foot (23-square-meter) one-bedroom apartment for the family of Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, was completed Monday, said Nirja Mattoo, who helps oversee the Jai Ho trust set up by the filmmakers to help Azharuddin and his 9-year-old co-star Rubina Ali.

"They can move in," Mattoo told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I'm just waiting for their consent."

Ownership of the tiny apartment, which cost about 2.5 million rupees ($50,000), will be transferred from the trust to Azharuddin when he turns 18, provided he completes school, Mattoo said.

"He has to complete an education. We are very clear about that," she said. She declined to say what would happen to the property if he does not finish school.

Apple drops entry iPhone to $99 unviels new model

Apple Inc. slashed the entry price for an iPhone in half and lowered some laptops by $300 Monday, the company's first dramatic price cuts since the recession began a year and a half ago.

With co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs absent until his medical leave is over at the end of June, Apple's biggest unveiling at its annual conference for software developers was a new model of the iPhone, the 3G S. It looks the same but sports a faster processor, longer battery life, an internal compass, a video camera and a photo camera with better resolution and auto-focus.

A 16-gigabyte version of the 3G S will cost $199 and a 32-gigabyte version will be $299.

The 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, which came out last year, now costs $99, instead of $199. When the iPhone debuted two years ago, eager Apple fans had to shell out $499 for a 4-gigabyte version and $599 for 8 gigs.

Japan explores using cell phones to stop pandemics

A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls.

If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through thestudent body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school — using mobile phones.

The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.

The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.

A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.

Electronic Arts stages fake protest of game at E3

EA has been playing games with attendees of the nation's biggest video-game trade show.

The game publisher hired a group of nearly 20 people to stand outside the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on Wednesday and appear to protest the upcoming EA game "Dante's Inferno." EA spokeswoman Holly Rockwood says the stunt was arranged by a viral marketing agency hired by EA.

The group claimed to be protesting the third-person action game — loosely based on Dante Aligheri's poem "Divine Comedy" — because they said the game glorified eternal damnation.

The fake religious protesters passed out pamphlets and held up picket signs with messages such as "Hell is not a Video Game" and "Trade in Your PlayStation for a PrayStation."

Common GPS could help better track airline flights

Get lost in the woods and a cell phone in your pocket can help camping buddies find you. Drive into a ditch and GPS in your car lets emergency crews pinpoint the crash site. But when atranscontinental flight is above the middle of the ocean, no one on the ground can see exactly where it is — in the air, or worse, in the water.

The disappearance of Air France Flight 477 and its 228 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean this week has critics of radar-based air traffic control calling on the U.S. and other countries to hasten the move to GPS-based networks that promise to precisely track all planes. Current radars are obsolete more than 200 miles from land.

"The technology's there — we've had this stuff for 15 years and little's happened," said Michael Boyd, a Colorado-based airline analyst. "My BlackBerry can be used to track me, so why can't we do it with planes?"

U.S. officials have discussed setting up such a network since the 1990s and the technology is being tested in parts of the country, including Alaska and off the Gulf Coast. A few carriers, like Southwest, already use GPS to help planes make quicker landings that burn less fuel.

E3 Gaming

Both Microsoft and Sony debuted prototypemotion controllers for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, while the only gadget that gaming leader Nintendo unveiled was a device that Wii users can use to check their pulse.

"I wasn't surprised to see Microsoft and Sony copying Nintendo," said Forrester analyst Paul Jackson. "There tends to be waves of innovation in the gaming industry, like when everyone adopted controllers with rumble functionality. Nintendo proved with the Wii that motion control is the way to get nongamers engaged in using the hardware. Now the others are following suit."

Microsoft's motion controller, codenamed "Project Natal," combines a camera, depth sensor, microphone and processor running proprietary software to end the need for any button-mashing device. Microsoft said the controller can track players' full body movements, recognize their faces and voices, scan images of real items and respond to both physical and vocal commands.

The Xbox maker demonstrated "Project Natal" with three prototype programs: "Ricochet," a soccerlike game that requires players to use their bodies to bounce balls at targets; "Paint Party," an art-making program that uses players' hands as the brush; and "Milo," essentially a virtual boy who communicates and interacts with the player.

Microsoft unveils motion control for Xbox 360

Gamers, get ready for your close-up.

Microsoft introduced a prototype camera Monday that can be used as a controller for the Xbox 360. Codenamed "Project Natal," the camera eliminates the need for a handheld input device — instead, the gizmo can track a player's full body movement, recognize their face and voice, scan images of real items and respond to both physical and vocal commands.

Microsoft also debuted 10 exclusive new games and several additions to the Xbox Live online service at their flashy Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference at University of Southern California's Galen Center.

But the biggest gee-whiz moment came when Microsoft senior vice president Don Mattrick and Steven Spielberg introduced "Project Natal."

As web communication shrinks so do links

On the short-messaging service Twitter, space is at a premium: You've got 140 characters to make your point, and you probably don't want to waste half of it on a super-sized link to your latest YouTube obsession.

There's an increasingly popular quick fix: a free URL shortener. On one of these Web sites, you can plug in a long Internet address, known as a URL, and it will assign you a much shorter one that is easier to post in e-mails, on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. Some link-shrinkers let you personalize the new address with a unique phrase such as your name, or show you how many people click the link after you've posted it.

This convenience may come at a cost, though. The tools add another layer to the process of navigating the Web, potentially leaving a trail of broken links if a service suddenly closes shop. They can also make it harder to tell what you're really clicking on, which may make these Lilliputian links attractive to spammers and scammers.

URL shorteners have been around for several years to offer alternatives to long Web links that were too unwieldy to paste into e-mails. Perhaps the oldest and most popular is TinyURL, a free service started in 2002 by Kevin Gilbertson, a unicycle enthusiast from Blaine, Minn., who was tired of seeing URLs get split up in e-mails related to his online unicycle forum.

Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – A powerful earthquake toppled more than two dozen homes in Honduras and Belize early Thursday, killing at least four people and injuring 40 as terrified residents spilled from their homes across much of Central America.

The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 2:24 a.m. (4:24 a.m. EDT; 0824 GMT) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of the beach town of La Ceiba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, ColoradoProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

3C/p>

"People were running for the door," Alfredo Cedeno said from the reception desk at the Gran Hotel Paris in La Ceiba. "You could really feel it and you could see it — the water came out of the pool."

Twitter co-founders

Twitter Inc.'s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it's unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.

"There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money," said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

"We're working on it right now," Williams said at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin' Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don't send messages under its name.

Facebook making money

Facebook is getting a $200 million investment from a Russian Internet investor that values the social networking company at $10 billion.

The investment gives Digital Sky Technologies a nearly 2 percent stake in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's preferred stock. The deal presumes the company is worth $10 billion.

This is below the $15 billion valuation implied by a 2007 investment from Microsoft Corp., even though Facebook has substantially grown since then. However Facebook's own appraisal after the Microsoft deal gave the company a market value of about $3.7 billion, according to details revealed in a legal settlement.

Intel Corp. was fined a record $1.45 billion

Intel Corp. was fined a record $1.45 billion by the European Union on Wednesday for using strong-arm sales tactics in the computer chip market — a penalty that could turn up the pressure on U.S. regulators to go after the company, too.

The fine against the world's biggest chip maker represents a huge victory for Intel's Silicon Valley rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., or AMD, the No. 2 supplier of microprocessors to PC makers.

AMD has sued Intel and lobbied regulators around the world for the past five years, complaining that Intel was penalizing PC makers in the U.S. and abroad for doing business with AMD.

Although the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also investigating, AMD seems to have found its most sympathetic ear in Europe.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by "deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market."

Environmental alarms raised over home electronics

Charge your iPod, kill a polar bear?

The choice might not be quite that stark, but an energy watchdog is alarmed about the threat to the environment from the soaring electricity needs of gadgets like MP3 players, mobile phones andflat screen TVs.

In a report Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates new electronic gadgets will triple their energy consumption by 2030 to 1,700 terawatt hours, the equivalent of today's home electricity consumption of the United States and Japan combined.

The world would have to build around 200 new nuclear power plantsjust to power all the TVs, iPods, PCs and other home electronics expected to be plugged in by 2030, when the global electric bill to power them will rise to $200 billion a year, the IEA said.

Consumer electronics is "the fastest growing area and it's the area with the least amount of policies in place" to control energy efficiency, said Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst at the IEA.

Electronic gadgets already account for about 15 percent of household electric consumption, a share that is rising rapidly as the number of these gadgets multiplies. Last year, the world spent $80 billion on electricity to power all these household electronics, the IEA said.

Microsoft to raise $3.75B in first debt offering

Microsoft Corp. priced a $3.75 billion debt offering on Monday, a first for the world's largest software maker.

Microsoft said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it is offering five, 10 and 30-year senior unsecured notes. In a press release, the company said it will sell $2 billion of 2.95 percent notes due June 1, 2014; $1 billion of 4.20 percent notes due June 1, 2019 and $750 million of 5.20 percent notes due June 1, 2039.

The software maker said it will use proceeds from the sale for general corporate purposes, including possible acquisitions and stock buybacks.

Last September, Microsoft's board authorized it to take on up to $6 billion in debt. Standard & Poor's Rating Services gave Microsoft an "AAA" corporate credit rating.

The authorization came just before interest rates soared. Microsoft, which is sitting on more than $25 billion in cash, could afford to wait until rates came down to make a move.

Corporate debt offerings dropped off last fall but picked up again in January. Microsoft's issue comes on the heels of offerings byWhirlpool Corp., Nokia Inc. and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.

Asking a machine to spot threats human eyes miss

The surveillance cameras at Big Y, a Massachusetts grocery chain, are not just passively recording customers and staff. They're studying checkout lines for signs of "sweethearting."

That's when cashiers use subtle tricks to pass free goods to friends: obscuring the bar code, slipping an item behind the scanner, passing two items at a time but charging for one.

There simply aren't enough watchful human eyes to keep it from happening. So Big Y is using technology to block it — with implications far beyond dishonest cashiers.

Mathematical algorithms embedded in the stores' new security system pick out sweethearting on their own. There's no need for a security guard watching banks of video monitors or reviewing hours of grainy footage. When the system thinks it's spotted evidence, it alerts management on a computer screen and offers up the footage.

The possibilities that researchers envision for this kind of technology have the ring of science fiction. Think of systems that spot abandoned packages on a train platform or alert an airline crew to a potential terrorist on board. Already, cities like Chicago have invested in "anomaly detection" cameras around town, linked to emergency headquarters. The city plans to announce this week that it is using the technology at Navy Pier, one of Chicago's best-known attractions.

But just how smart have these cameras really become?

Verizon wireless

Verizon Wireless has shortened the period in which it demands exclusive rights to new cell phones from LG and Samsung, to give small rural carriers a better chance to sell up-to-date phones.

Rural carriers have complained that big carriers like Verizon andAT&T Inc. lock up hot phones with "exclusivity periods" that can last for years.

Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the company two months ago started allowing LG and Samsung to sell their phones to rural carriers six months after the devices' launch at Verizon.

The Associated Carrier Group, which represents rural wireless carriers, says Verizon's move is encouraging, but in practice, its members can't start selling the phones six months after Verizon. The companies need to modify the phones' software to work on their networks, which can take more time.

Nintendo profits 8.5%

Nintendo's annual profit rose 8.5 percent, propelled by its hitWii and DS game machines, but a forecast for lower sales shows even the resilient video game maker isn't totally immune to the global slump.

Still, Nintendo is faring much better than other big name Japanese manufacturers like Toyota Motor Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., both forecasting record annual losses, lending weight to president Satoru Iwata's boast the game maker is "recession free."

The company said Thursday it racked up a record 279.09 billion yen ($2.8 billion) net profit for the fiscal year ended March 31, up from 257.34 billion yen the previous year.

Fiscal year sales edged up 9.9 percent to 1.839 trillion yen from 1.672 trillion yen, with overseas sales accounting for 87.5 percent, according to the Kyoto-based maker of Pokemon and Super Mario games.

20% of US homes have cell phones no landlines

For the first time, the number of U.S. households opting for only cell phones outnumber those that just have traditional landlines in a high-tech shift accelerated by the recession.

In the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of cell phones, 20 percent of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday. That was an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003.

The 20 percent of homes with only cell phones compared to 17 percent with landlines but no cells.

That ratio has changed starkly in recent years: In the first six months of 2003, just 3 percent of households were wireless only, while 43 percent stuck to landlines.

E-Marketing

Online retailers are shifting their marketing from traditional advertising to less expensive tools like Facebook.comand Twitter and e-mail as they seek market share or just work to retain customers, according to an industry study being released Tuesday.

Conducted by Internet analysis firm Forrester Research forShop.org — the online arm of the trade group National Retail Federation — the survey found that merchants believe online business is better suited to withstand an economic downturn than physical stores or catalogs, though they acknowledge challenges for both.

The study involved 117 online retailers polled between Feb. 18 and April 1.

The companies, which Shop.org didn't name, reported scaling back hiring and their increasingly expensive search marketing programs, which include paying for top billing in the results consumers see for their Web searches. Online merchants whose business is beating expectations will likely fuel much of the e-commerce investments in the coming months, the survey found.

Windows 7 near done

Microsoft Corp. has released a near-final version of the Windows 7 operating system that adds a few new features, including a way to run Windows XP applications.

The Windows 7 "release candidate" was made available to a large group of technology-savvy testers Thursday and will be ready for anyone to download and try out starting Tuesday. The release candidate is typically the version used by Microsoft's corporate customers to test how the new system will work for them. Software developers, hardware makers and other partners also base their next-generation products on this version because they trust that it's stable and close to finished.

Microsoft published the Vista release candidate about five months before the final version went on sale to consumers. If Windows 7 were to follow the same trajectory, it could be available by the start of October. Officially, Microsoft expects to start selling Windows 7 by the end of January 2010, but has said this week that it is possible it could launch in time for the holiday shopping season.

The software maker is counting on Windows 7 to win over businesses that put off upgrading to Vista, which got off to a rough start because it didn't work well with many existing programs and devices.

Disney joins NBC and News Corp. with Hulu stake

The Walt Disney Co. is taking a stake inHulu.com. This means titles from The Walt Disney Studios library of films and full-length episodes of ABC television shows will join the online video site.

Disney joins NBC Universal, News Corp. and private equity firmProvidence Equity Partners, who own Hulu in a joint venture.

Disney said Chief Executive Robert Iger, Disney/ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney and Kevin Mayer, a Disney senior vice president, will join Hulu's board.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Obamas first 100

The President almost seemed apologetic. "This may be a slightly longer speech than I usually give," he told his audience at Georgetown University on April 14. "This is going to be prose and not poetry." What followed, as promised, was not poetry. Barack Obama doesn't do much poetry anymore. But in prose that was spare and clear and compelling, the President proceeded to describe how his Administration had responded to the financial crisis, the overriding challenge of his first 100 days in office. He had covered this ground before, nearly as well, in his budget message to Congress. But now Obama went further, using a parable from the Sermon on the Mount - the need for a house built on rock rather than on sand - to describe a future that was nothing less than an overhaul of the nature of American capitalism. "It is simply not sustainable," he said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40% of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets."

Cablevisions fast internet

Cablevision Systems Corp. on Tuesday unveiled the fastest Internet speeds available from any cable or phone company.

Starting May 11, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator will offer speeds of up to 101 megabits per second downstream throughout its service area, and 15 megabits per second upstream.

That means a 4-gigabyte, high-definition movie can be downloaded in 5 1/2 minutes. It would take two minutes for a 1.6-gigabyte standard definition movie.

Cablevision, which has 3 million subscribers in the New York metro area, also plans to double the downstream speed of the Wi-Fi Internet service it offers at "hot spots" in New York's Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County, and in parts of New Jersey.

Cablevision is in a race against Verizon Communications Inc., which is rolling out its fiber-optic FiOS service in New York City.

At present, Verizon's top Internet speed is 50 megabits per second with a starting cost of $140 a month plus a free wireless router. Cablevision is offering its service at $99.95 a month.

Hollywood vs DVD ripper

Hollywood calls it "rent, rip and return" and contends it's one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry's annual $20 billion DVD market — software that allows you to copy a film without paying for it.

On Friday, industry lawyers urged a federal judge to barRealNetworks Inc. from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool.

RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased.

The same federal judge who shut down the music-swapping site Napster in 2000 because of copyright violations is presiding over the three-day trial, which is expected to cut to the heart of the same technological upheaval roiling Hollywood that forever changed the face of the music business.

Facebook adopts new rules

Facebook will adopt new rules governing the social network even though a vote fell well short of a minimum threshold.

The new documents specify, among other things, that users own their information, not Facebook. An earlier attempt to push changes led to user confusion and protests over who controls the personal information people share on the site.

More than 600,000 of Facebook's 200 million regular users voted over the past week, with nearly three-quarters in favor of the changes. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook said Friday an outside auditor is verifying the results.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said turnout is "a small number" compared with the site's user base. Facebook had set a minimum threshold of a 30 percent voter turnout for the vote to be binding. That would have been about 60 million people, or about 100 times the actual turnout

Myspace cofounder steps down

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe will step down soon as the social networking site's chief executive, amid the site's stalled user growth and the rapid rise of rival Facebook.

MySpace owner News Corp. said Wednesday the decision was made by mutual agreement with former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, who was appointed News Corp.'s chief digital officer April 1.

DeWolfe, 43, helped launch the site in January 2004. He will remain on the board of MySpace China and be a strategic adviser to the company.

AT&T earnings fall, but the iPhone helps

Cost-cutting and the lure of the iPhone softened the effect of the weak economy at AT&T Inc., helping the country's biggest telecommunications carrier beat analyst estimates for the first quarter.

AT&T said Wednesday it earned more than $3.1 billion, or 53 cents per share, in the first three months of 2009, down 10 percent from almost $3.5 billion, or 57 cents per share, a year earlier.

The earnings were reduced by 5 cents per share for increases in pension and retiree expenses. Excluding that item, the earnings were 58 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, which generally excludes one-time items, was for earnings of 48 cents per share.

Despite strong wireless sales, AT&T says revenue slipped to $30.6 billion from $30.7 billion a year ago. That was short of analyst expectations for $31.1 billion

Washington is the first to try Mobile TV

Washington will be the first U.S. city to get free digital TV broadcasts for mobile devices like cell phones, laptop computersand in-car entertainment systems, broadcasters were set to announce Monday.

Broadcasts using new "mobile DTV" technology are expected to begin in late summer from five stations: local affiliates of CBS,NBC, PBS and Ion and one independent station owned by Fox.

The initial broadcasts will be identical to those beamed to TV sets, including the advertising.

It's unclear what devices might be available with the special receivers needed for the new signals. Cell phones are main candidates for the technology, but the wireless carriers have shown no enthusiasm, and the largest two have their own TV services, which require subscriptions.

Behind the scenes with Windows 7

To design Windows 7, Microsoft analyzed billions of pieces of data. It studied exactly what PC users do in front of their screens. It tallied hundreds of thousands of Windows surveys. It got feedback from people all over the world who tried different versions of the software.

As a result, every change or new feature in Windows 7 comes with a back story. Here is a sampling of things you'll see in the next operating system and explanations of how each came about.

• New feature: You decide the left-to-right order of icons in the task bar at the bottom of your screen.

• Back story: Microsoft's research showed Vista users commonly launching a series of programs, then closing and immediately reopening some. Microsoft realized that these people wanted their programs to appear in the same order on the task bar every time.

• New feature: Right-click on a task bar icon and get a "jump list," a menu of important or frequently used options for the program.

• Back story: Microsoft had resisted the idea of hiding a key feature behind a right click, worried people wouldn't find it. But the data showed most people right-click on icons to see what that might do.

• New feature: Drag one open window to the left side of the screen, then another to the right side to line them up so they are the same size and side by side.

• Back story: Microsoft couldn't initially figure out why people were spending so much time resizing windows and dragging them around. It turned out that users were trying to give themselves a side-by-side view of documents for easy comparison.

• New feature: Libraries, or virtual folders that have shortcuts to files that are actually stored in many different places on a hard drive or home network.

• Back story: From its Vista data, Microsoft could see people's photos, music and other files were swelling in number and stashed all over the place, not organized into the dedicated folders Microsoft had set up.

• New feature: "Shake" an open window with your mouse to make all the other ones "minimize" into the task bar.

• Back story: Microsoft's research showed that people often had six or even 10 windows open at once, which gets distracting. Shake is one of several features designed to help people tame all the open windows.

• New feature: Move your mouse to the bottom-right corner to make all your windows temporarily transparent. Then click the mouse, and all the windows minimize.

Back story: What's notable here is what Microsoft didn't do. There's no tutorial or bubble advertising the feature, a small step toward making Windows 7 quieter than Vista. "We want people to confidently explore the system," said Sam Moreau, a user experience manager.