If you haven’t already heard, tonight on Jeopardy!, there will be a rather “different” looking contestant named Watson.

The reason that Watson is different than all of the previous Jeopardy! contestants is because he’s not a human, but a supercomputer, which was developed by IBM and is capable of answering questions that are posed in a natural language.

“Watson”, named after the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, is made up of a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers, in addition to some other hardware components, and contains a total of 2,880 POWER 7 processor cores and also has over 16 Terabytes of RAM. Running on this supercomputer will be IBM’s DeepQA software.

Already, “Watson” has been able to beat Jeopardy! contestants in practice rounds, so it will be interesting to see how this computer matches up when he goes up against two of Jeopardy!’s champions – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

There will be three episodes of Jeopardy! featuring “Watson”, which begin tonight at 7:30 PM (Eastern) and last through Wednesday, February 16, 2011.

For more information about IBM’s Watson supercomputer, you should check out IBM’s website about “Watson”, as well as this article on Wikipedia.

Recently, Google announced on their blog that they have developed an advanced security features for Google Accounts, called “2-step verification”, which provides more security than just using a password alone, as “2-step verification” helps to verify that the person trying to log into a Google Account is the account’s actual owner.

The reason that this new authentication method provides more security is because it requires two independent factors for users to access their accounts, which are your password, as well as a code that you can obtain from your phone.

According to Google, over the next few days, users will see a new “Using 2-step verification” link on the Account Settings page of their Google Account. Clicking that link will bring users to a setup wizard, which will guide them through the process of enabling “2-step verification”. This includes setting up a back up telephone number, as well as creating back up codes, just in case a user were to lose access to their primary phone.

After completing the setup wizard and enabling “2-step verification”, users will see an extra page when logging into their Google Account, which prompts them to enter a code and after the user enters their password, they can choose to either receive a phone call or text message with the code.

Alternatively, users can use an application for iPhone, Android, and and BlackBerry phones, in order to generate the code themselves. After the user has entered their password and the code that they received, they will be able to access their account.

This new method of verification is more secure because would-be hackers would have to know someone’s password, as well as have their phone in order to log into a Google Account.

However, users have the choice of choosing a “Remember verification for this computer for 30 days” option, so that they do not need to enter in a code as often, which will cut down on the time it takes to access an account, should a user do so multiple times a day.

This new feature was actually made available to Google Apps users a few months ago, but is now being offered to all Google Account users so that they can better secure their accounts. However, this feature is optional, so users who do not wish to use “2-step verification” don’t have to.

For more information about Google’s new “2-step verification”, you should check out this post from Google’s official blog, as well as this article from Google’s Help Center.

If you’re a FaceBook user, you may have already heard that today is FaceBook’s seventh birthday, as the company was launched on February 4th, 2004 from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room using the domain name thefacebook.com.

However, as we’re all aware, FaceBook has since grown, quite impressively, into a social networking website with close to 600 million users. At the time of this writing, the San Francisco based start-up has over 1,700 employees, with offices in 12 countries.

In order to celebrate FaceBook’s 7th birthday, the company has posted a status message on the their profile saying “To the 1.5 million of you who share our birthday today – Happy Birthday!”. Also included in this status message is a picture of a blue number 7 with a candle sticking out of the top of it. This particular status message has received 55,000 “likes” and over 9,000 comments so far.

With new users joining FaceBook every day, the website is continuing to grow. It will be interesting to see where FaceBook will be in the future, but congratulations to FaceBook on a great 7 years!

Happy birthday, FaceBook!

If you’re a FaceBook user, you may have already heard that today is FaceBook’s seventh birthday, as the company was launched on February 4th, 2004 from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room using the domain name thefacebook.com.

However, as we’re all aware, FaceBook has since grown, quite impressively, into a social networking website with close to 600 million users. At the time of this writing, the San Francisco based start-up has over 1,700 employees, with offices in 12 countries.

In order to celebrate FaceBook’s 7th birthday, the company has posted a status message on the their profile saying “To the 1.5 million of you who share our birthday today – Happy Birthday!”. Also included in this status message is a picture of a blue number 7 with a candle sticking out of the top of it. This particular status message has received 55,000 “likes” and over 9,000 comments so far.

With new users joining FaceBook every day, the website is continuing to grow. It will be interesting to see where FaceBook will be in the future, but congratulations to FaceBook on a great 7 years!

Happy birthday, FaceBook!

As you may have already heard, recently Google and Microsoft have been involved in a “fight” over whether or not Bing, a popular search engine, created by Microsoft, is displaying search results that were taken from Google.

According to a post on Google’s official blog, this “battle” began with a search for “torsorophy”, which was a misspelling of “tarsorrhaphy”, a rare surgery that is performed on eyelids.

When this search, using the incorrect spelling, was performed on Google’s search engine, the misspelling was corrected and results were returned for the correct spelling of this surgical procedure. Google says that at the time of this search query, Microsoft’s Bing search engine did not return any results for the misspelled query.

However, later that summer, according to Google, Bing began returning the same result that appeared first in a Google search, but did not offer a corrected spelling for the word. Eventually, this began to occur more and more for many different kinds of search queries, including results that Google considered to be mistakes of their algorithms.

Due to Google’s suspicion of Bing copying their search results, Google decided to set up a “sting” operating, which they did by creating about 100 “synthetic queries”, which included words or strings of text that they did not expect a user to enter into the search engine. Then, for each of these “synthetic queries”, Google matched it with a legitimate webpage, which did not have anything to do with the original search text. This legitimate webpage would then be displayed as the top search result for one of the made up queries.

After doing this, Google gave 20 of their engineers a laptop, with a fresh install of Microsoft’ s Windows operating system, and using Internet Explorer 8, with the Bing toolbar installed, asked their engineers to enter the “synthetic queries” into Google and click on the results that Google matched with the query.

After a couple of weeks, Google stated that their results began to appear in Bing, using the same “synthetic queries” that Google created.

In a quote from the official Google Blog, Google states:

“As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

• Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
• the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.”

However, Microsoft denies that they are stealing Google’s search results and in an blog post entitled “Thoughts on search quality”, Harry Shum, Ph.D., the Corporate Vice President of Bing, said:

“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.”

This is something that will be interesting to see how everything turns out. It appears as though both companies have their own side to the story, but what is really happening between Google and Bing?

For more information about this, you should check out this blog post from TechCrunch, this blog post from SeachEngineLand.com, as well as Google’s blog post regarding this issue, and Bing’s blog post regarding this.

What do you think about this issue? Please feel free to state your opinions in the comments!

ToonPAINT, by Toon-FX is a fun application that enables you to turn a picture, either one that’s in your iTunes Camera Roll, or one that you’ve taken with the application, into an image that looks like a cartoon.

When you first launch ToonPAINT, you will see a sample picture of a girl that comes with the application. However, if you’d like to change the picture, you can do so by tapping on the button that looks like a folder, located in the bottom left of the application. From there, you should be able to either choose a photo from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s camera roll, take a snapshot, or return to your previous sessions.

Once you have either selected or taken a photo, you should see a loading screen for a few seconds and then you will see your photo, which has been turned into a cartoon. However, the cartoon version of the photo will not be in color, though you can choose to color in the photo yourself.

Now that you have your photo in the application and it has been turned into a cartoon, you can make a variety of changes to it.

One way that you can make changes to the photo would be to tap on the button which looks like a rabbit coming out of a hat, which will display some options, such as how thick edges look, as well as how dark the gray and black colors are in the cartoon.

There is also an option to change the sliders from “soft” to “hard”, which have some different effects on the photo. Also, there is a button that “softens” the image, as well as an “Advanced” button, which allows you to configure things, such as the image’s coherence, edge width, as well as edge length.

Since the images are turned into cartoons without color, you have to manually color in the photo, which you can do by tapping on the button that looks like a paint can. From this menu, you should see four colors, which you can change by double-tapping on a particular color. After double-tapping on a color, a menu should come up that allows you to either select a color from a color-picker, adjust the shade of a color that you’ve chosen, as well as use a “dropper” tool to select a color from the original image that you uploaded.

Also from the paint menu, there is a button that looks like a paintbrush, which brings up a slider that changes the brush size. This tool can be useful for when you’re trying to fill in small areas and require a different brush size.

The last button in this menu looks like a bomb and enables users to undo their recent paint strokes or clear the image of any color that has been added.

If you’d like to zoom in so that you can paint in small or difficult areas, you can do so by pinching the image. The same process can also be used to zoom out of the cartoon.

Once you’ve finished editing your cartoon, you can save it by tapping on the button that looks like a green floppy-disk. This button brings up a menu, where you can configure your image’s settings, such as whether or not you’d like to save your image in high or low resolution, as well as if you’d like to save your image with any paint that you may have added.

When you’re ready to save your image, you can save it to your iPhone or iPod Touch’s camera roll by tapping on the “Save to Device” button. There are also buttons that enable you to share your image to either FaceBook and Twitter.

Here is an example of a photo of my family’s dog, Dusty, that I turned into a cartoon using the ToonPAINT application.

If you’d like to try using ToonPAINT, you can purchase the application from the iTunes App Store for $1.99.

Yesterday, social news and bookmarking website, Digg.com, announced on their blog that they would be rolling out three new features.

These new features include a new redesign of the website, which incorporates frequent suggestions that were made by the Digg community.

The two other new features are everyone’s historical number and percentage of stories that were promoted to the “Top News” section of the website, as well as the option to receive on-site notifications and e-mails when stories that you have submitted or dug that were promoted to the “Top News” section.

According to Digg’s blog, the new design includes a new way to browse through the different sections of the website, as well as an easier way to filter content. In addition, the design was simplified so that stories are more prominent and easier to read.

In addition, the reorganized profile pages makes it easier for users to view their statistics. Another new feature included in the redesign, is a “new submission flow”, which makes submitting stories easier than before.

For more information on these updates to Digg.com, you should check out Digg’s Official Blog.

If you’ve used the Internet for any amount of time, chances are that you’ve seen  or used a toolbar in a browser before.

While toolbars can be useful, sometimes after downloading too many, a browser can become cluttered and bogged down. Sometimes, however, people can accidentally or unknowingly download and install toolbars while they’re trying to download another program.

Some of the more popular toolbars may include the Google Toolbar, Yahoo! Toolbar, as well as the Bing Toolbar, both of which allow users to perform searches, as well as provide the user with one-click access to news, finance information, e-mail, and more.

In addition, various websites, services, and companies offer toolbars as well, with one example being Zynga, which is the company that created the popular FarmVille and CityVille games. The Zynga Gamebar is a free toolbar that enables players of either FarmVille or Mafia Wars to know when updates are available for their games, as well as other information.

However, if a browser has too many toolbars, they can be hidden or even uninstalled completely, which will help to free up viewing space, and perhaps even speed up the browser.

If you’d like to hide a toolbar and you’re using Internet Explorer 8, you can do so by right clicking below the address bar and unselecting the toolbars that you would like to hide. Should you want the toolbar to be displayed again, you can simply follow the same steps to do so.

Mozilla FireFox users can hide their toolbars in a similar way to Internet Explorer users. To hide toolbars in Mozilla FireFox, you should right click near the address bar, until you see a menu with the toolbars that are present in your browser and then unselect the ones that you’d like to remove. The same process can be used to unhide the toolbars again.

Another way to remove toolbars in Mozilla FireFox would be to go to the “Tools” menu and then click on “Add Ons”. From there, you should click on the “Extensions” button, where you should be able to remove certain toolbars completely.

In order to remove some toolbars completely, either in Mozilla FireFox or Internet Explorer, you may have to do so from the “Uninstall a Program” section of the Control Panel. Once you’ve opened the Control Panel and clicked on the “Uninstall a Program” link, which is located under the “Programs” section, a window containing a list of the programs that are installed on your computer should open.

All you need to do in order to remove a toolbar is find the toolbar you’d like to remove in the list, click on it, and then click on the “Uninstall” button, located above the list.

Hopefully this post has provided a good amount of information about toolbars and how to hide or remove them if they’re taking up too much space in a browser. If you have any tips or information about removing toolbars, please feel free to post a comment below!

As you may already know, yesterday FaceBook posted a new blog post, announcing two new security features.

The first new security feature is that users can now access FaceBook over a secure, “HTTPS” connection. Previously, FaceBook used a secure connection to encrypt users’ log in data, but as of this update, users can choose to use FaceBook, entirely with a secure connection.

Some people who may want to enable a connection using “HTTPS” include those who frequently access their FaceBook accounts from a public computer, such as at a library, school, airport, coffee shop, as well as other public places.

If you would like to enable “HTTPS” on your FaceBook account, you can do so by logging into your account and then clicking on the “Account” button, located at the top right side of the page. From there, you should click on the “Account Settings” link, which will take you to a page that contains a list of your FaceBook account’s preferences and settings.

After that, you should scroll down and click on the “Change” link, located right above the “Account Security” section. Then, you should check the box for “Secure Browsing (https)”, which will enable you to access FaceBook from a secure connection whenever it is possible to do so.

Also in this section, there is an option for users to receive an e-mail whenever a new computer or mobile device accesses their FaceBook account, which may be something that you should consider using if you frequently use FaceBook in a public place.

However, enabling a secure, “HTTPS”, connection for your FaceBook account will cause pages on FaceBook to load slower, as encrypted pages take longer to load. In addition to this, some features on FaceBook are not currently supported with a secure connection, including a variety of third-party applications.

According to FaceBook’s official blog, they will be rolling out this new feature over the next couple of weeks.

Another new security feature that was announced yesterday is “social authentication”, which is a new way for users to verify that a human is trying to access their account and not a computer trying to “game the system”.

Instead of the regular “Captcha” system that many websites use, which displays a string of text that users have to type into a box to verify that they are an actual person and not a computer or spammer, FaceBook will be using “social authentication”.

Social authentication is similar to a “Captcha” system, in terms of its purpose, but rather than displaying a string of text for users to enter, it will display a few pictures of people they’re friends with on FaceBook. In order for users to verify themselves, they will have to identify the friend who is in the pictures.

According to FaceBook, they will continue to test the new social authentication feature and gather feedback on how to make this and other features useful and more secure.

If you’d like more information about these security updates to FaceBook, you should check out this blog post, from the official FaceBook Blog.

Recently, Google has announced that Eric Schmidt, their current CEO since 2001, will be stepping down from the position in April and will be replaced by one of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page.

However, Schmidt will not be leaving the company altogether; he will remain with Google as the Executive Chairman of the company and will focus on things, such as working “externally, on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.”, according to a post on Google’s official company blog.

Larry Page, one of the Google’s co-founders who will be taking over as CEO of Google starting on April 4, will be focusing on leading product development and technology strategy, which according to Google’s blog post, are his greatest strengths.

Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google with Page in September of 1998, while the two were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, has decided to devote his time and energy to working on strategic projects and in particular, new products.

As Google’s Executive Chairman, Schmidt will be focusing wherever he will be able to add the most value and will serve, internally, as an advisor to Page and Brin.

For more information regarding Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, stepping down from his position in the company, you should check out this post on Google’s Official Blog, as well as this article on TechCrunch.