BlackBerry's "Traffic-i-cop" stops criminals in their tracks

Traffic-i-cop is the BlackBerry-developed system that helps city police search for stolen vehicles and traffic offenders. It was designed by a team of 30 developers, and won the award for 'Best Innovative Project/Technological Application' from the Ministry of Urban Development at the beginning of December.

 

It was first implemented in Pune city for 13 months, and achieved wide positive feedback. Its very first success was helping to capture four people who beat up a bus driver and left him badly injured, after a dispute over the bus driver flashing his headlights. The offenders got out of their vehicle and proceeded to beat up the bus driver with iron rods, before fleeing the scene.

The bus driver immediately complained at a nearby police station, and the police enter the car registration details into the Traffic-i-cop system. It fed back the name and address of the owner of the car. This allowed the police to arrest the offenders just 15 minutes after the incident occurred, a procedure which could have taken hours using old methods.

The Traffic-i-cop system is developed purely for Blackberry, who released the BlackBerry 9790(nicknamed the BlackBerry Bellagio) across India at the beginning of December. Traffic-i-cop's success means that it is set to be implemented in other cities like Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Kolkata and Cochin. Since the traffic rule is a state issue, the application needs to be tweaked for each instance, and so the development is at various stages for each city. Following widespread interest, BlackBerry are also in talks to extend the application to other cities in India.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com, indianexpress.com

The power of cameraphones

Not so long ago, mobile phones were used for making phone calls, or sending text messages. Later, you could buy mobile phones with an inbuilt camera, but it served more as a novelty, and any more serious photography than a blurry shot of your friends required a separate digital camera, purchased for more money than you would have liked to have spent, and forgotten at home whenever anything surprising or picture-worthy happened.

Now, mobile phones come with an inbuilt, high-quality camera. They're more portable than digital cameras. and you can upload your photos to the Internet with ease. One of the first affordable digital cameras was the Kodak DC40, released in 1996, which came with just a third of a megapixel. Now, popular smartphones like the iPhone 4S or the BlackBerry Bold 9790 pack 8 megapixels, along with a host of  additional features like sophisticated flash mechanisms, special lenses and artistic photo editing software. What's more, the iPhone or BlackBerry Bold price is significantly less than you would have paid for the digital camera alone all those years ago.

It's not just photos of our pets or children, either. Along with social media, cameraphone pictures have played a major role in the transmission of news stories such as the Arab Spring. Police brutality captured on film by Egyptian social media activists caused millions of protestors to take to the streets to demand the end of dictatorial regimes.

Furthermore, a recent study from the Netherlands showed that cameraphones can play a vital role in medical diagnostics, especially in remote or rural areas. The study by Coosje Tuijn of the Royal Tropical Institute showed that a two megapixel camera can capture clear microscopy images that could be sent to a website for analysis by a specialist. The specialist could then email or SMS feedback back to the patient. "Such technological advances could improve diagnosis in peripheral health settings by empowering under-educated and insufficiently experienced health care and laboratory workers to meet quality standards," concluded Tuijn.

The increasing accessibility, versatility and sharability of mobile photography indicates that this is only the tip of the iceberg of what we can expect from cameraphones, and the coming months and years will only continue to demonstrate their power.

Sources: http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/IndustryTrends/Camera-phones-can-play-vital-role-in-diagnostics/SP-Article1-782745.aspx

BlackBerry PlayBook Arrives in India

BlackBerry PlayBook Arrives in India



Research In Motion (RIM) announced the launch of BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in India. It will be distributed nationally through Redington India and Ingram Micro, initially in 1000 retail stores across 8 cities and then expanding to other parts of the country.

"The BlackBerry PlayBook is an incredibly powerful and innovative product in the growing tablet marketplace.  It's perfect for both large organizations and individuals, and it gives users an unmatched mobile experience," said Frenny Bawa, Managing Director, India – Research In Motion.

"With the BlackBerry PlayBook we are stepping into a new era of mobile computing and opening up new and even more exciting opportunities for developers and content publishers with support for Adobe Flash, Adobe Mobile AIR and HTML-5," Ms. Bawa added.

Customers who have a BlackBerry smartphone (running OS 5.0 or higher) can also benefit from BlackBerry Bridge, a feature that allows a user to wirelessly and securely connect their BlackBerry smartphone to their BlackBerry PlayBook over Bluetooth.Also the secure connection allows the user to access their BlackBerry smartphone's email, address book, calendar, BBM and browsing functionality using the large display on the tablet.

BlackBerry PlayBook specifications :


* 7-inch capacitive LCD touch screen

* Multi-touch

* 1 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU

* PowerVR SGX540 GPU

* Adobe Flash 10.1 support

* Camera : 5 MP with autofocus and 3 MP Front facing camera

* BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing

* MP3, AAC and WMA audio playback

* Weight : 425 g