Google adds geolocation

Google has released a geolocation Application Programming Interface (API) designed to let users to work with Web-based applications when they aren't online, says The Industry Standard.

The new API will let developers create applications that can obtain information from Gears about end-users' geographic location.

Currently, the API allows mobile devices to obtain the location data from nearby cellular towers or on-board GPS systems, and later it will be able to detect WiFi connection coordinates on both desktop PCs and mobile devices.

New research from the University of Michigan suggests computers could be better protected from viruses without sacrificing performance, if anti-virus software was moved from the PC to "the cloud" - a collection of servers working seamlessly as one powerful machine, states Technology Review.

Researchers have found they could detect 35% more recent viruses than a single anti-virus program.

By using the distributed software, called Cloud AV, they caught 98% of all malicious software, compared with 83%, on average, for a single anti-virus solution.

The Emerging Companies Summit held at the NVision 2008 Visual Computing Conference, in San Jose, showed how graphics technologies are being used in businesses, reports Venture Beat.

David Kirk, chief scientist at Nvidia, said many new companies are moving into the "first cousins" of graphics processing, such as image processing, computational photography and video editing.

DisplaySearch calculated that the number of pixels in the world has grown to eight trillion in 2008, up four-fold from 2004, largely because of the growth of all digital displays. Therefore, making applications for these displays is predicted to be a good business.