Infotrade

    The system will be open source and free to download on iOS and Android   New technology to help blind people text using touchscreen mobile devices has been developed. Researchers at Georgia Tech produced the app - to be made available on Apple and Android devices - based on the Braille writing system. It is claimed typing with the app is up to six times faster than existing methods for texting without sight. Access to technology for the visually-impaired is a growing issue due to the proliferation of touchscreens. Experts say currently available tools, such as Apple's Voiceover technology, are functional but too slow to be used effectively. Brailletouch, which the team hope to release in the next couple of weeks, uses a system that is controlled with six fingers and, crucially, does not require any movement of the hands . "Users who know how to type Braille well never move their hands," explained Mar...

  Social messaging applications cost mobile network operators $13.9bn (£8.8bn) in lost SMS revenue last year, a report has claimed. Analysis firm Ovum studied global use of popular services like Whatsapp, Blackberry Messenger and Facebook chat. It concluded that mobile operators must "work together to face the challenge from major internet players". Industry experts say operators can offset any losses through effective costing plans by mobile networks. The report gathered usage statistics from the leading social messaging applications typically used on smartphones across the world. As well as well-known names from popular social networks in the Western world, the study also included apps such as MXit - a massively popular program used mainly in South Africa. Social messaging apps make use of a smartphone's internet connection to send messages rather than the usually far costlier SMS - short message servic...

Do you want to know how that applicant you just interviewed will actually perform on the job? Check out her Facebook profile. That’s the advice of a new study from the Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University. The researchers recruited a group of four Facebook-savvy human resources professionals and students to evaluate the Facebook profiles of 56 users. The four perused each of the profiles for about 10 minutes each before grading them according to the so-called Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism). Six months later, the researchers compared the evaluations of the 56 users’ work supervisors and found a strong correlation for traits including intellectual curiosity, agreeability and conscientiousness. The evalauations are, of course, subjective, but job seekers shouldn’t necessarily worry that they need to clean up their Facebook prof...

Last week, we took a look at a report that showed that the most popular pages on Google+ were becoming more consumer-focused. Now, according to a recent report from Socialbakers, those brand pages are growing faster on Google+ than on Twitter. The analytics site is measuring that growth by the number of followers a page has gained in one month. Google+ introduced brand pages in November, while Twitter made the move , in an official manner in December, albeit limited to a few heavy hitters. But Twitter’s official brand pages are really a moot point here, because marketeers took to Twitter, capitalizing on the existing audience long before Twitter afforded them unique features that enhance the brand experience. In reality, Twitter has been home to brands far longer than Google+. The fact that Google+ brand pages have only been around for four months could be part of the explanation as to why the growth has exceeded Twitter’s. On Twitter, out of the top 5 growing bran...

Big data is literally changing what computers can do. You are already benefiting because big data brought you Google . And we've only just begun. Big data is changing things for three reasons: It can handle massive amounts of information in all sorts of formats --  tweets, posts, e-mails, documents, audio, video, whatever. It works fast -- practically instantly. It is affordable because it uses ordinary, low-cost hardware. Big data solves problems for companies like eBay , Facebook , LinkedIn , Netflix , Twitter and Zynga . But it is also allowing completely new types of companies to be built. Big data is not really a new technology, but a term used for a handful of technologies. While some of these technologies have been around for a decade or more, a lot of pieces are coming together to make big data the hot thing for 2012. Click here to read everything you need to know about big data→ Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/big-data-is-the-hottest-t...