Mobile Minutes: Angry Birds cutbacks; Visa fights back; keyboard apps; Google Glass fights crime
Finnish mobile games maker Rovio, owner of the Angry Birds brand, plans to cut up to 130 jobs in Finland, or 16 percent of its workforce, saying growth has not been as strong as expected and it needs a simpler structure.
A 4-foot-tall robot with a video screen for a head swerves past an orange couch and bumps into the wall of a conference room. A few feet away, an engineer tests a virtual reality headset that can allow a coffee-shop owner to forecast hot-chocolate sales during a blizzard.
One day my grandchildren will gather around my dusty collection of gadgets and stare with bewilderment at the small hardware keyboards found on the first generations of smartphones. They'll laugh and ask if the phones also had to be attached to a windmill to work.
Dubai police plan to issue detectives with Google Glass hands-free eyewear to help them fight crime using facial recognition technology, a police spokesman in the wealthy Gulf Arab emirate said. The wearable device consists of a tiny computer screen mounted in the corner of an eyeglass frame and is capable of taking photos, recording video and playing sound.