Technology in your hands.

Microsoft has unveiled a new web search engine, Bing, designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking on the internet and challenge online king Google.

The US software colossus described Bing as a “Decision Engine” and said it will be deployed worldwide at Bing.com.au by Wednesday.

Bing’s launch comes in the wake of Google and Yahoo! announcing refinements to their search services and the launch of a Wolfram Alpha query engine that delivers answers instead of lists of websites.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

“When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web.”…

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The service, a relaunch of GrandCentral, which Google bought in 2007, allows you to choose a local number, which will simultaneously ring up to six phones such as your cell phone, home phone, office phone, and the phone at that vacation home that most of us can only dream about.

In addition to forwarding your calls, it also takes voice messages that you can listen to on the Web, from a phone, or read, thanks to a new feature that transcribes voice messages and sends them as e-mail and text messages.

If you have multiple phones, having a single number to reach them all can make you and your callers’ lives a bit easier, and it can save space on your business card by not having to list separate numbers. The concept is simple: people are trying to reach you–not one of your phones–and Google Voice lets you decide how to route the calls…

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Google will use its software skills to help consumers track their home energy usage and thereby lower demand and the global warming emissions that come from producing electricity.

The move is part of Google’s effort to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into renewable energy, electricity-grid upgrades and other measures that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The company has already invested in several fledgling solar, wind and geothermal companies, as well as two “smart grid” companies.

Smart grid describes a more efficient, less costly method of moving electricity along long-distance transmission lines to local power lines and end-users in homes and businesses.

On its official company blog, Google said it is developing a smart grid tool called Google PowerMeter that will show home energy consumption almost in real time on a user’s computer…

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Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally cash in on the social networking site, once valued at $US15 billion ($23.6 billion), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight…

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The study looked at Internet users over the age of 15, who accessed the net from their home or work computers in the month of December.

Europe grabbed the next largest slice, with 28 percent of the global Internet audience, followed by the U.S. with an 18.4 percent slice.

But Latin America, while holding a much smaller piece of 7.4 percent of the global Internet audience, is the one to watch, noted Jamie Gavin, a comScore senior analyst.

“The U.S. is slowing down in its growth and momentum, but Latin America, with social networking and the mobile Internet, is expected to gain momentum over the next few years,” Gavin said…

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A British scientist is calling for immediate introduction of robot ethics guidelines amid surging use of the machines and concern about their lack of human responsibility while caring for children or the elderly.

In an article published Thursday in the US journal Science, Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, argues that the steady increase in the use of robots in day-to-day life poses unanticipated risks and ethical problems.

Outside of military applications, Sharkey worries how robots – and particularly the people who control them – will be held accountable when the machines work with “the vulnerable,” namely children and the elderly, stressing that there are already robotic machines in wide use such as the Japanese meal assistance robot “My Spoon.”…

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It is often assumed that touch-screen device can be made smaller, because they do away with the need for buttons. But paradoxically, they are often larger than the push button gadgets they replace, according to Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

It’s the “fat finger” problem that is to blame. It is hard to hit small touch targets on a screen because your finger hides what you are aiming for.

Last year, Baudisch and Daniel Wigdor of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a team that developed a fix to that. Their “transparent” LucidTouch device let users interact with a screen from the reverse sideMovie Camera.

A new, smaller prototype created by Baudisch and his student Gerry Chu at the University of Toronto takes the idea further. Called NanoTouch, it has a 6-centimetre (2.4 inch) screen and a touch pad of the same size on the back . It can detect the touch or press of a finger, allowing the user to move a tiny cursor around and click and drag with it…

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If you’ve ever found yourself working at a coffee shop or other locale when your laptop battery is nearing its end—only to find that every outlet in the place has already been hogged—it would seem that you have no choice but to head home. The Voltaic Generator laptop bag ($499) offers the option to plug your notebook right into its solar-charged battery for few more hours of juice. The Generator is the only notebook bag capable of providing a charge to a laptop (other solar and wind chargers to date haven’t been powerful enough)…

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The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings.

The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association’s legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in.

The association said Friday that it stopped sending out new lawsuits and warnings in August, and then agreed with several leading U.S. Internet service providers, without naming which ones, to notify alleged illegal file-sharers and cut off service if they failed to stop…

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Google is introducing new tools that will convert its free email service into a video and audio channel for people who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.

Activating the features, introduced on Tuesday, will require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into laptops.

Once the additional software is installed, Gmail users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving the email application…

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