Live video makes cities bustle

Virtual globes such as Google Earth or Microsoft Visual Earth provide great bird's-eye views of urban landscapes, but those streets are empty, transforming the world's cities into ghost towns, states New Scientist.

Now a system that can draw on real-time video from traffic and surveillance cameras, or weather sensors, is set to change that, populating virtual towns with cars, people and realistic skies.

Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta put the idea into practice using video feeds from cameras around the city.

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, Intel unveiled the Intel Atom CE4100 processor, the latest system-on-a-chip (SOC) in a line of media processors designed to bring Internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes, says InteractiveTV Today.

According to the company, the CE4100, which was formerly codenamed 'Sodaville,' is the first 45nm-manufactured consumer electronics SOC based on Intel architecture.

It supports Internet and broadcast applications on one chip, and has the processing power and audio/video components needed to run rich media applications, such as 3D graphics.

CNN has released a new application that brings live news video from the cable news network to the iPhone 3G and the iPod Touch, while turning the 50 million owners of those best selling Apple devices into potential citizen video journalists, writes The Technology Chronicles.

CNN joins the likes of the New York Times, USA Today and National Public Radio that have news apps on what has become hot virtual real estate - mobile devices.

The $1.99 CNN Mobile app, available to US users only at present, calls up the latest news stories, in full or in bulleted highlights, which CNN calls "snackers", so readers can scan the news quickly.