Monday, December 10, 2001		Latest in IT world

Electronics engineers at Dutch consumer-products giant Philips have found a simple way for people to identify an enjoyable but anonymous piece of music, AFP reports. As the tune is playing, all they have to do is to call the number of a service provider and place their mobile phone near the radio speaker. A computer system analyses the music, checks it against a database and sends a text message back to the listener, identifying the tune. The technique provides a digital 'fingerprint' of a recording by breaking down a musical piece into 33 narrow frequency bands and then measuring the energy in each band. When the cell phone sends a burst of unknown music, the computer measures the energy levels of the bands in the sample and compares them against its archives to see if there is a match. Philips is working to set up a database of 1,00,000 commercially-available recordings.

Coral Telecom, an EPABX products and solutions provider, announced the launch of its IRIS (Integrated Voice & Data Services) series of high-end EPABX systems. IRIS is an indigenously designed switch capable of simultaneous switching of data and voice and is the first of its kind available in the market. Till now most of the vendors have been supplying voice and data switching equipments as stand alone systems. This new switch can meet the exacting demands of the New World communications, which would have IP (Internet Protocol) as a predominantly major protocol upon which services would be developed. The product is targeted at large enterprises, SMEs, SOHO and large housing societies that need switches which are compact and have the capabilities of city exchanges along with a host of other features.

China has destroyed about 200 million copies of pirated Hollywood films and software in 200 cities as a part of the country's pledge to better protect intellectual property rights (IPR) as a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The effort is reportedly the largest campaign of its kind ever launched by the Chinese ministry of culture, the state-run China daily reported last week. While the Chinese capital, Beijing smashed one million pirated discs, officials in the east China metropolis, Shanghai destroyed 4,00,000 illegal discs bringing the city's total this year to three million. In Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei province, 1.4 million pirated discs were smashed while in south-west China's Chengdu city 8,00,000 discs were crushed. Also, authorities in north China's Tianjin city destroyed more than 2,85,000 pirated audio and video products, Xinhua news agency reported. In all, at least 90 million illegal audio and videodiscs have been destroyed, the paper said. China has been taking stringent actions against pirated publications and discs to protect intellectual property rights, and the effort has increased after China entered the WTO.

Techspan, a leading e-business integration company, announced that it has entered into a strategic relationship with BioNetrix Systems Corporation, a leading provider of authentication management solutions for enterprise and the Internet security to provide authentication-based security solutions for the financial services, healthcare and government markets. Techspan is now certified to deploy BioNetrix's user authentication platform, and its technicians will serve as an extension of BioNetrix's professional services and development teams in order to accelerate delivery of large-scale implementations. In addition, Techspan is also a BioNetrix customer and is deploying the company's solution internally as well as in external client deployments. Techspan is a Web integration firm delivering end-to-end solutions