Mountain View, California (CNET) — Google’s first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.

On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what’s been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

“It is our goal to be able to identify any image,” he said. “It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.”

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the “nascent nature of computer vision” and with the service’s present shortcomings. “Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories,” he said.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone. Continue reading →

(TIME) Probably not a big shocker that the minds behind Facebook are a little dweeby. Proof positive? They’ve incorporated an old video-game code into the site.

The Konami code, named after the Japanese company behind classics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series and the Nintendo Contra classics, is one of video-gaming’s most storied cheats. During development of the 1985 Konami arcade game Gradius, a programmer found the game to be too difficult and programmed in a key sequence — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A — that, if entered, gave the player a set of the game’s power-ups. As word of the shortcut spread, other programmers aped his cheat, working the same sequence into their own games. The Konami code works in nearly 100 video games now, including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution. (See the 50 best websites 2009.)

And now it works for Facebook. Try it for yourself — log in to Facebook and type the code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter. It doesn’t matter where you type it: just have the Facebook page open and active. The result? Lens flares — those groovy circles that appear when pointing a camera into the sun — appear on your page with every click of the mouse. Useful? Not in the slightest. But they’re easy enough to get rid of — logout and they’re gone. (Facebook users, comment on this story below.) Continue reading →

(CNN) — Her choppy blue-and-blond hair hiding the fear in her eyes, a 15-year-old voiced her dislike for a hip-hop music group and got punched in the face by a classmate. The whole thing was caught on tape and social media helped police in their investigation.

A crowd of six to 10 classmates were following the self-described emo girl and her boyfriend home from school in Newark, Ohio, on an autumn day in September. Some kids were taping it and others were egging on the assailant, who was on the school wrestling team. It all started because Alexis Xanders doesn’t like Insane Clown Posse.

One of the students who recorded the incident contacted Xanders on MySpace and sent her the video two months later. The teen says she wanted something done, so she uploaded the video to YouTube and CNN iReport last week.

While only six to 10 people witnessed the alleged assault, the video has received more than 1,000 views on CNN iReport to date.

A local newspaper reporter saw the video and alerted the local police department, says Newark Police Sgt. Scott Snow. A police report was filed on September 24, and authorities are now investigating the other kids in the video who were goading the suspect. Continue reading →

Tampa, Florida (CNN) — Dianne McLeod recalls her husband, Stanley, getting so visibly upset when the debt collectors called that she had to take the phone away from him. She believes constant harassing phone calls and other tactics eventually killed him.

“I think they were a major contributor to his death because of the stress and what I saw it doing to him,” she said.

McLeod is suing her mortgage company, Green Tree Servicing, for the wrongful death of her husband. McLeod said she thinks he would be alive if not for the stress caused by Green Tree’s debt collectors. She said they sometimes called up to 10 times a day and also called the McLeods’ neighbors.

“He would begin to sweat; he would also get very red in the face and complain about chest pains,” McLeod said. “We were worried he was gonna have a heart attack right there on the phone.”

Stanley McLeod had a heart condition and in 2002 was airlifted to a hospital after a second heart attack. He went on disability and Dianne McLeod says they fell behind about three months on their mortgage payments. Continue reading →

If you go to this web site, www.LetsSayThanks.com you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq. You can’t pick out who gets it, but it will go to a member of the armed services.

How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!!  It is FREE and it only takes a second.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the soldiers received a bunch of these?   Whether you are for or against the war, our soldiers over there need to know we are behind them.

This takes just 10 seconds and it’s a wonderful way to say “thank you”.

Please take the time and please take the time to pass it on for others to do.

We can never say enough “thank you’s”.