What’s going on

Google’s working on a way to rank images the way its PageRank system does text in Web pages. The new system called VisualRank weights and ranks images that look similar. The goal is leverage advances in computer vision to do this and the company’s started with product image search—a monetizable offering. By picking up on the top two thousand product queries on google.com, researchers have created a scoring system that returns 83% fewer images that are not relevant.

Back in 2005 Gartner had forecasted that global cell phone sales would top a billion in 2009. With cell phone sales hitting 282 million in the first quarter of 2008 and projected to reach 290 million in Q2 it looks like we will get there a year earlier. The Q1 and Q2 figures add up to over half a billion in H1 and a likely billion plus number for the calendar year.

In other news, Metallica’s apparently going to follow in Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and release a ‘free’ or rather ‘pay as you please’ album online. Profits from the digital download of In Rainbows, Radiohead’s ‘free’ album, are said to have outstripped the combined profits from digital downloads of all of the band’s other studio albums. Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV did $1.6 million in sales revenue in the first week of the album’s availability online. Of course, this number included free and paid downloads as well as orders for physical product. All said, it’s heartening that when artists offer their music for free and leave it to the public to put a price tag on it, they are still rewarded.

Last but not least, Service Pack 3 for Windows XP follows on the heels of Vista’s first service pack and will be out on 29th April. The pack will be 72 MB through Windows Update and 326 MB as a standalone download. Other than all the patches since SP2, SP3 will include Network Access Protection (NAP) to help organizations that use Windows XP take advantage of new features in Windows Server 2008.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com