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It weighs just 34 grams, is 72 x 35 x 12 mm in size, and costs only the $39: The Google Chromecast looks and feels like a USB flash drive with a glandular problem. Cheap, easy to set up and even easier to use, there's really nothing to dislike about the Google streaming device, except for one thing: Canadian content (which we will get to in a moment). The Chromecast is so small that once it's plugged into an HDMI port in the back of a television set, there's almost no indication that it's a part of your home theatre setup. Only its power cord, which can either be plugged into a wall socket or available USB port, gives a hint that it's even there. Unlike other streaming media devices like the Apple TV or Roku 3, Google Chromecast doesn't come with a remote control, or in fact, any onboard applications or content. Everything, from setting up the device to watching a video from your personal media collection or browsing YouTube, is done through the use of apps on an Android phone or tablet, iOS device or via Google Chrome browser on a Chrome OS, Windows or Mac PC. No matter which device you use with the Chromecast, setup is a cinch. Simply power the device, plug it into an available television HDMI port and follow the Chromecast's onscreen prompts. The device will walk you through the process of connecting it to a Wi-Fi network, pairing with your choice of source device and downloading any available firmware updates. Even with the lousy Internet speeds I suffered while testing the hardware in rural southwestern Ontario I was setup and ready to start streaming content to my Chromecast in under 10 minutes.

The way we navigate in cities has been revolutionized in the last few years by the advent of GPS mapping programs. Enter your start and end location and these will give you the shortest route from A to B. That's usually the best bet when driving, but walking is a different matter. Often, pedestrians want the quietest route or the most beautiful but if they turn to a mapping application, they'll get little help. That could change now thanks to the work of Daniele Quercia at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, and a couple of pals. These guys have worked out how to measure the "beauty" of specific locations within cities and then designed an algorithm that automatically chooses a route between two locations in a way that maximizes the beauty along it. "The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant," they say. Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowdsourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org. Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowdsourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions. The idea here is that the user enters a start and end location and an algorithm then finds the most beautiful route, rather than the shortest one. It does this by searching through every possible route, adding the beauty scores for each and choosing the one that ranks highest.

Regarded as one of the best technical Windows internet security suites for PC and laptop, and Total Security 2015 lives up to that rep. Bitdefender is widely regarded as one of the best technical Windows internet security suites. Its Total Security product offers a very good range of the features you rightly expect in a security suite. The 2015 version aims to make life even easier for customers by introducing Profiles, which adapt the software for particular tasks, like playing games, watching movies or general office work. Also see: Best internet security software 2014. After installation, you're presented with a very Windows 8-looking tiled interface. Rather than having a lot of tiles slide awkwardly through the Bitdefender window, as in the 2014 version, here there are three large tiles and four subsidiary ones, giving quick and easy access to all the program's key functions. The modules provided by Bitdefender Total Security 2015 cover AV, anti-malware and anti-spam, tune-up, online banking protection, a 2-way firewall, parental control, online backup and anti-theft provision. Online backup, which Bitdefender Total Security 2015 refers to as Safebox, is handled from the My Bitdefender online site, which is unusual - it's more usually set up and managed locally.

Mastercard warns: invest or face economic consequences. Many UK businesses are struggling to expand and develop to their full potential due to a lack of proper investment into new technologies such as alternative payment methods, a senior Mastercard executive has told CBR. Marcia Clay, the groups' UK and Ireland head of strategy and commercial development, explained that UK consumers are increasingly calling for innovative technologies such as mobile payments as they look to simplify their everyday lives. "I believe we need to prioritise support for innovative start-ups, businesses in the eCommerce and mobile payments sector for example, which are in a unique position to propel the UK economy forward in 2014 and beyond," she said. Clay detailed how Mastercard is working with London-based Startupbootcamp FinTech, providing the expertise, mentoring and access to a network of industry professionals that most early-stage FinTech start-ups would not be able to access otherwise. Mastercard has found that many small businesses still do not use electronic payments, despite almost 80% of UK businesses having a website or some sort of online presence. A much smaller percentage can currently accept card payments, and the company believes that businesses of all sizes should be encouraged to invest in new technology and services that give consumers more choice. The company also found that UK consumers are using mobile and contactless payment methods and wide-spread adoption is reaching a critical mass; with around 5.7m transactions taking place on UK smartphones every day. This has been spurred on by a major growth in contactless payments, which grew by 383% from 2012 to 2013 across the country a

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523846/how-a-database-of-the-worlds-knowledge-shapes-googles-future/ Compiling a giant database of all the facts in the world could help Google's future products understand you better. For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years. That's why in 2010 Google acquired Metaweb, a company building a database intended to give computers the ability to understand the world. Two years later the company's technology resurfaced as the Knowledge Graph (see "Corliss Tech Review Group: http://thecorlissreviewgroup.com/"). John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering at Google and a Metaweb cofounder, says that will lead to Google's future products being able to truly understand the people who use them and the things they care about. He told MIT Technology Review's Tom Simonite how a data store designed to link together all the knowledge on Earth might do that. What is the Knowledge Graph? It's a distillation of what Google knows about the world. An analogy I often use is maps. For a maps product you have to build a database of the real world and know there are things called streets, rivers, and countries in the physical world. That's creating a symbolic structure for the physical world; the Knowledge Graph does that for the world of ideas and common sense. We have entities in the knowledge graph for foods, recipes, products, ideas in philosophy or history, and famous people. We can have relationships between them, so we can say these two people are married or this place is in this country or we can say this movie is related to this person. How does that make a difference to Google's Web search? We've gone up a level from just talking about the words to talking about what the thing actually is. In crawling and indexing documents we can now have an understanding of what the document is about. If the docum