Microsoft's Universal Translator can translate spoken English into 26 languages

Computer giant Microsoft has reportedly created a software dubbed the " Universal Translator" that can convert English language spoken to it into 26 different languages.

Frank Soong and Rick Rashid -- from the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington -created the software which can also speak in the user's own voice, the Daily Mail reported.

The scientists hope that the software will one day allow visitors to foreign countries have conversations with other people, even though they do not speak the same language.

Soong said his breakthrough could help language students and might also work with navigational devices.

Hypothetically, it could be installed into a smart phone meaning tourists have a ready made translation device sitting in their pockets.

"We will be able to do quite a few scenario applications. For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output in a different language, but still in his own voice," Soong said.

Soong and Rashid created the software with colleagues at the Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, the company's second-largest research lab.

The device needs around one hour to get used to a person's voice, and then works by comparing the words that have been recorded with stock models for the target language

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All About Pinterest [infographic]

Over the course of the past few months, what was once a colorful haven for Midwestern mothers and Mormons is now an even more colorful haven for even more pin-tastic peeps. The growth has been staggering, even in what many would call an overly social era. But surrounded by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., Pinterest has really made a name for itself.

And while many are scurrying to set up their pinboards for FOMO‘s sake, we in the tech world are curious as to what’s going on behind the scenes. What’s the growth rate? What does the demographic data look like? Referral traffic? Marketing? How does Pinterest really stack up against the big guys?

The questions never end, mainly because Pinterest kind of came out of left field and threw the entire model on its head. It’s not for women, but it is mainly women. It’s not overbearing in terms of rules or policies (at least not more so than its competitors), but still seems to be a very “white-bread”, nice place to be compared to the deep black hole of nasty awfulness that is the Internet. The epicenter of its popularity is in the Midwest — that’s not to say that Midwesterners aren’t tech savvy, but they’re usually not the early adopters of anything.

It’s this big question mark, Pinterest, and we all want to better understand it, especially considering that the network is still building itself out. Just recently, Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann teased an iPad app and revamped profile pages at SXSW this week.

Luckily, the folks over at Internet Marketing Inc. took all the data we have on Pinterest, like that comScore study and the Shareaholic referral traffic study, and whipped up a comprehensive guide to “The Power of Pinterest”.

These are the tidbits I found most interesting:

• The number of Pinterest users to visit the site daily has gone up 145 percent since the beginning of 2012
• Pinterest content is very different in the UK, and more centered around venture capital, blogging resources, web analytics and the like
• Over 80 percent of pins are actually re-pins rather than brand new content
• Pinterest user growth is better than that of Facebook and Twitter at the same point in their history
• As expected, 80 percent of Pinterest’s user base is female
• Brands are having a helluva time leveraging Pinterest — Better Homes & Gardens has 25,000+ followers on Pinterest, compared to 21,000 on Twitter

Check out the full infographic below*:

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25 Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

One of the best reasons that I’m  in love with WordPress is the thousands of plugins available. It doesn’t matter what you want to accomplish on your blog, there is probably a WordPress plugin that will allow you to do it. below i'm going to list best 25 best WordPress plugins to use.

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. 

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. W3 Total Cache – This is possibly the best caching plug-in for WordPress and it will definitely help improve your site’s score as far as page speed is concerned. I was previously using Hyper Cache but W3 Total Cache does much more – it lets you minify scripts, cache database queries, add expiration tags to static images and more.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog.Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. 

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScriptinside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

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Window 8 Beta : Visual Tour

The release of  Windows 8 operating  system marks a new beginning for Microsoft as it will be the first touch centric OS released by the company, meant to satisfy both the traditional PC users and the new range of tablet users. The consumer preview which was released last week boast to have more than 100,000 changes from the developers preview which was released on September 2011.

The Metro style, color filled user interface of the new OS successfully fills the gap between phone, tablet and PC’s, by allowing input from keyboard to touch. User experience of Windows Phone 7 influenced the interface design of windows 8 to a high extent.The product, which is expected to ship later this year will support both ARM and x86

Inside The Launch

Microsoft had unveiled many functions including the improved multiple screen support and displayed a wide range of systems from hardware partners ranging from tablets to concept devices like an 82 inch monitor made of optically-bonded Gorilla Glass with subpixel depth. According to Michael Angiulo, corporate VP of Microsoft Windows planning,“the OSmakes you feel like you're actually moving each Windows tile by hand and this could become the next-generation TV experience."

Man behind the Scene

Steve Sinofsky, President of Microsoft's Windows division is the man who played the lead role in Windows 8 preview event. He is the driving force behind Windows 8 who is determined to make a new computer era with users as the first preference.

 

Windows 8 powerful Multitasking

Windows 8 brings a lot more to you on multitasking. You can simply resize a task window and lock it anywhere on the screen. Say it will allow you to have your message window alongside your YouTube window. The OS will itself shut down the apps which are no more used, but resume the previous status when you click it again

 

The Signature

The main ingredient of the new OS is the Windows 8 Metro interface, which allows you to do a lot of things ranging from a single touch for performing multiple functions. You can simply terminate an app by dragging it to the bottom of the screen and also move your widow sidewise by touching the edges with your mouse.

Pushing Windows 8 to Edge

Microsoft has played a lot around HTML 5 for providing the extreme to your web browsing. Noe the Company called “edge-to-edge browser experience will provide you with full screen display with browser controls and tabs appear only when you need them.

 

Windows 8 Built-In Services

Windows 8 multiple apps will work smoothly with Microsoft's built in services. It will allow the developers to take advantage of app to app services or app to OS services. Say, if you want to share a link from a website, just click the share button and the OS will pop up the share apps, which will easily help you with mailing or posting.

Office Made Easy

Microsoft had made Office apps easier with Windows 8. Now you can simply perform functions like copy and paste between office apps.

 

 

Search Anything

Windows 8 searches displays you the result from everywhere- within the system to the web. Say if you search for Harry Potter, it will display all the results from the images stored in your system to the game from Xbox live to a movie in Flixter.

Hardware Partners

Microsoft displayed a range of hardware partners at the launch event, including designs from System On Chip players like NVidia and Qualcomm. The hardware's will start up in the system quickly, some of them within 8 seconds. The apps will work even when the PC is in standby mode with Microsoft's "connected standby." A feature called "storage spaces" considers every storage as a single pool, disregarding type, size or technology.

 All about Apps

With Microsoft's new app store, you will have a number of apps which are organized in a beautiful and efficient way ranging from music, video, social, food to entertainment apps. Microsoft showed many application partners like Amazon Kindle in the event and also hosted an app developer contest.

Source: Silicon India

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create a Nokia app for your Blog

While Nokia gets little love from tech pundits in the west, Symbian powered mobile phones still command the highest market share worldwide and this number is significantly higher in Asia, South America and African countries.

Nokia’s Ovi Store has around 140 million users worldwide and thus, if you are content creator, the store presents an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your stuff to such a large audience in the form of an app.

Build an app in 60 seconds

If you have ever tried building an app for your blog for distribution through Apple’s App store, you know the drill. First, it requires you to have the technical know-how, you need an Apple developer account and, if you are writing the app on your own, you also need to have a Mac.

With Nokia’s Ovi Store, a person with no programming skills can build an app in minutes through an online wizard – all they need is a blog with an RSS feed. There’s no fees involved and your Ovi App created through the wizard can be downloaded on almost all Nokia devices except for some of the recent ones.

The wizard offers limited customization options –  you may change the background and text colors but nothing beyond that. If you have more than one feed, you may publish them all in a single app without having to merge them separately.

To give you an example, I created this mobile app for Tech Impulsion using the wizard, it got approved by the Ovi QA team in about a day (they need to confirm that you own the content) and now anyone, anywhere may download the app on their mobile through the Ovi Store.

How is the app any different from directly reading an RSS feed on the phone? Well, the biggest advantage is that the Ovi app optimizes your blog images for the mobile screen and thus the entries should load a lot quicker.

Also, when people have your blog installed as an app on the home screen of their mobiles, they’re probably going to check it more frequently.

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