Mobile phones, bar codes could ease Internet searches

Koji Sasahara, Associated Press An Internet search one day could involve using your mobile phone to photograph a product bar code.

TOKYO -- Checking out the Internet buzz about a DVD, book or candy while on the go is soon to become as easy as taking a snapshot of the bar code on the product.

Toshiba Corp., a Japanese electronics company that makes DVD players, laptops and nuclear power plants, has developed mobile-phone technology that searches for product reviews on up to 100 Web journals, or blogs, in 10 seconds.

Just use the phone's digital camera to snap a photo of the bar code of a product you're thinking about buying.

The technology can tell if the blog chatter is positive or negative and tallies the count to show if a product is getting rave reviews or being trashed by consumers. That's useful if you're in a store about to buy an item.

Some of the more frequently visited blogs will also show up on the screen.

The bar-code information is sent wirelessly to a Toshiba server, which gathers data on blogs from the Internet and analyzes them, and then sends a reply back to the cell phone.

Toshiba expects to have information on thousands of products covering just about anything you might buy at a store in Japan -- from toys to electronic gadgets to food.

Toshiba plans to test the software at Japanese stores next month and hopes to offer it domestically as a service on cell phones before April 2007, although details aren't decided.

-- Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer

Online game addresses gay-rights uproar

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A gay-rights uproar in the popular "World of Warcraft" online game has spurred the game's maker to review its treatment of gay players.

The game, which draws more than five million players worldwide, was hit by controversy last month after a player was threatened with expulsion from the virtual Warcraft world when she sought to recruit others into her gay-friendly team.

Blizzard Entertainment, the game's maker, apologized last week to the player, Sara Andrews of Nashville, Tenn.

It said the warning was a mistake and that it will make some changes to prevent a repeat, Andrews and her attorney from the Lambda Legal civil rights organization said Wednesday.

Blizzard representatives did not return phone calls for comment.

Gay-friendly teams already exist in Warcraft, but the issue here stemmed from Blizzard's enforcement of its policy banning the harassment of players based on sexual, religious or political affiliation.

According to correspondence between Andrews and game officials, the company said it does not allow such recruitment efforts on its general chat channels to help prevent harassment.

Andrews, 25, said she protested because she had done similar recruitment in the past without reprimand and noted that many others associated with a political or other affiliation have done the same.

While the harassment policy is sound, trying to silence players from stating their sexual affiliation is not, contended Brian Chase, a Lambda Legal staff attorney.

"If you want to stop harassment, you should punish the harasser, not the victim," Andrews said.

As part of its review, Blizzard this week instituted a new chat channel specifically for recruitment and told Andrews it also plans to provide sensitivity training to the employees who monitor the online play and communications forums.

-- May Wong, AP Technology Writer

Internet users go online for fun

NEW YORK -- Some people go online just for the sake of it: A new study finds that on any given day, nearly a third of U.S. Internet users log on just for fun or to pass the time.

Compared with other online tasks, recreational surfing ranks behind only e-mail and search and it's about even with getting news online, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

"What it says about the Internet is that it is becoming a full-blown destination in itself," said Deb Fallows, the Pew senior research fellow who led the study released Wednesday. "They are just led there just to see what is going on." Pew credits the growth in broadband connections at home and the increase in the number and variety of Web sites available.

The 30 percent of Internet users who went online for fun on a given day represents an increase from 21 percent a year earlier.

Skeptics may see parallels with television channel-surfing, an activity often dismissed as mindless.

But Fallows said the Internet is different: "It's not a passive activity that you're just sucking yourself into. You are navigating yourself around, you are discovering things, learning things."

The random telephone-based survey of 1,931 adult Internet users in the United States was conducted Nov. 29 to Dec. 31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

-- Anick Jesdanun, AP Internet Writer

Exiled Tibetans protest censored Google

DHARMSALA, India -- Scores of angry Tibetans protested Google Inc.'s launch of a censored, Chinese version of its popular search engine.

The protesters assembled Tuesday in the central square of Dharmsala, the northern Indian headquarters of the exiled Tibetan government, carrying placards reading "Google, Don't be Evil," and "Gulag, Censoring Search by Search."

The protesters also sent out 30,000 e-mails to people around the world urging them to avoid Google for the day.

Last month, Google launched a Chinese search engine that doesn't provide links to some Web sites about human rights, Tibet and other topics sensitive to Beijing. Google defends the move as a trade-off granting Chinese greater access to other information.

"We have come to love Google," said Tenzin Tsundue, general secretary of the Friends of Tibet, one of the protest's organizers. "Now we feel betrayed."

-- Ashwini Bhatia, AP Writer

Experts: India must understand Europe

BOMBAY, India -- Language barriers, a fragmented market and strong local players in France and Germany are some challenges India's outsourcing firms need to confront if they want business opportunities from Europe, industry leaders and software experts say.

For Indian companies, the European information technology market is traditionally considered closed compared with the United States, which makes up nearly 70 percent of the market for Indian software and outsourcing companies. Currently less than 10 percent comes from Europe.

"The challenge India will face will be to understand Europe, how to manage layoffs and transfers of people," said Dominique Raviart, a senior analyst at Ovum, a leading European technology research and consultancy firm.

Indian firms would have to tailor their services to suit European needs, which are very different from companies in the U.S. and Britain where Indian services are established, Raviart said.

Raviart and other experts spoke Wednesday at the start of a three-day international technology summit held in Bombay and attended by some 1,200 top software professionals.

-- The Associated Press