Windows Phone 7 App Store Still Lags Behind Apple, Android

Microsoft has bragged about its growing app store for Windows Phone 7 devices, but the store's offerings are still puny compared to Apple's or Google's stores. The Windows Phone 7 app store has around 10 times less apps than the Android Market and around 30 times less than Apple's App Store. Will Microsoft ever catch up?

Since the store's introduction, Microsoft says that out of the 11,500 apps for the Windows Phone 7 platform, 7,500 are paid apps from around 36,00 developers. Some analysts are predicting Windows Phone 7 will boom in the coming years, overtaking the iPhone by 2015, but the outlook, at least for app stores, is not that bright.

For example, Apple reached the 100,000 apps milestone for its store in 15 months. Microsoft will be hard-pressed to hit that mark by the time it celebrates the 15-month anniversary of the Windows Phone Marketplace in January 2012.

The discrepancy between Microsoft's and Apple's app stores grows ever more when looking at the more than 350,000 apps in Apple's store. The Apple App Store has more than 30 times more apps than Microsoft's.

Even Google, which is activating more Android devices than Apple does iPhones lately, is having trouble catching up with the iOS app store. The Android Market has around 150,000 apps, less than half the amount of apps for iOS. The contrast between Google and Apple is starker in the tablet area, where Android has dozens of Honeycomb apps, while there are more than 60,000 for the iPad. Regardless, the Windows Phone 7 app store has still 13 times less apps than the Android Market.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is taking the playground route to fight Apple's App Store supremacy: they're taking them to court. Microsoft started the fight in January, when it asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to deny Apple's 2008 trademark application for the term "App Store." Apple is fighting back against claims that the term is too generic to trademark, and says that Microsoft should know better.

Technorati Tags: WP7, Windows Phone 7, Microsoft, Apple, iPhone, iOS, Android, Google, Smart Phone, Mobile Phone, App Store, Android Market, Market Place, iPad

Mr Bean blitzes BBC's Top Gear track

Mr Bean blitzes Top Gear track

Car-loving comedian Rowan Atkinson has become the fastest celebrity driver on the popular motoring show Top Gear.

Making his long-awaited debut on the latest episode of the show overnight, Atkinson lapped the track more than half a second faster than the previous record holder.

Atkinson's time of 1:42.2 seconds bested fellow comedian John Bishop's 1:42.8 second lap, and was significantly faster than the previous high-profile record holder Tom Cruise - whose time was a 1:44.2.

"It is remarkable because when Bishop did that time and it was so much faster than Tom Cruise we thought it would never be beaten," Clarkson said on the show.

Atkinson is an amateur racer in historic events in the UK and his driving style was unspectacular but smooth and quick, drawing praise from Clarkson.

"What is interesting is all your times were very consistent, as is the mark of a great racing driver," Clarkson said. "Turns out you're in the wrong career."

The Mr Bean actor's passion for cars is well known but this was his first appearance on Britain's most famous car show. The publicity-shy star said he was reluctant to appear because people assumed he would be quick because he competes.

He currently races an historic Ford Falcon but has previously raced an Aston Martin V8 Zagato and a Renault 5 GT Turbo.

He has written for several leading car magazines and is very particular about choosing the right car to match his various characters. For his latest movie Johnny English Reborn he had Rolls-Royce build a custom car with a unique V16 engine.

His collection of road cars includes a McLaren F1, the one-time fastest car in the world, which he had lent to Top Gear for a previous episode.

He was also famously involved in an accident with the car when he ran into the back of a Rover.

He revealed on the show he has driven more than 65,000km in the three-seater V12-powered machine.

Face-matching with Facebook profiles: How it was done

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook's online privacy woes are well-known. But here's an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you're walking down the street.

A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students' Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.

The results: facial recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average, less than three seconds of rapid-fire comparisons.

In a few years, "facial visual searches may become as common as today's text-based searches," says Alessandro Acquisti, who presented his work in collaboration with Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman at the Black Hat computer security conference here.

As a proof of concept, the Carnegie Mellon researchers also developed an iPhone app that can take a photograph of someone, pipe it through facial recognition software, and then display on-screen that person's name and vital statistics.

This has "ominous risks for privacy" says Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. Widespread facial recognition tied to databases with real names will erode the sense of anonymity that we expect in public, he said.

Another test compared 277,978 Facebook profiles (the software found unique faces in about 40 percent) against nearly 6,000 profiles extracted from an unnamed dating Web site.

About 1 in 10 of the dating site's members--nearly all of whom used pseudonyms--turned out to be identifiable.

Facebook isn't the only source of profile data, of course. LinkedIn or Google+ might work. But because of its vast database and its wide-open profile photos, Facebook was the obvious choice. (Facebook's privacy policy says: "Your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings.")

Facial recognition technology, which has been developing in labs for decades, is finally going mainstream. Face.com opened its doors to developers last year; the technology is built into Apple's Aperture software and Flickr. Google bought a face-recognition technology in the last few weeks, and Facebook's automated photo-tagging has drawn privacy scrutiny.

In the hands of law enforcement, however, face recognition can raise novel civil liberties concerns. If university researchers can assemble such an extensive database with just Facebook, police agencies or their contractors could do far more with DMV or passport photographs--something that the FBI has been doing for years. (The U.S. Army partially funded the Carnegie Mellon research.)

Acquisti is the first to admit that the technology isn't perfect. It works best with frontal face photos, not ones taken at an angle. The larger the database becomes, the more time comparisons take, and the more false-positive errors arise.

On the other hand, face recognition technology is advancing quickly, especially for nonfrontal photos. "What we did on the street with mobile devices today will be accomplished in less intrusive ways tomorrow," he says. "A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20088456-281/face-matching-with-facebook-profiles-how-it-was-done/#ixzz1U98BoDcT