Nokia turns people into traffic sensors

On a cool, overcast morning in the parking lot of a hardware store, 100 UC Berkeley students lined up in rows ready to jump into a bevy of idling vehicles, reports News.com.

With media and VIPs from companies like Nokia, Navteq, General Motors, BMW and CalTrans looking on, wave after wave of students left the parking lot to drive a 16km stretch of the nearby 880 freeway as part of a large-scale experiment to test how cellphones can monitor and predict traffic.

The test was initiated by the California Centre for Innovative Transportation, as a joint project between Nokia, CalTrans and Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

With Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign joining the OpenID Foundation's board, the notion of an online universal identifier does not look like a pipedream any more, says Internet News.

The mission to build a common login for all sites across the Internet has taken one giant step forward. Five, actually.

The OpenID Foundation announced today that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign would become its first corporate board members.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's research arm has sued computer chipmaker Intel, claiming the company violated the university's patents in making the popular Core 2 Duo processor, reports Associated Press.

The federal lawsuit, filed last week, alleges technology used in the processor to increase its speed and efficiency was created by researchers at the university and Intel should have obtained a licensing agreement to use it.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a private, non-profit patent management organisation that supports research and controls the university's patents, filed the lawsuit. It claims the computer chip's micro architecture infringes on a 1998 patent based on work by four researchers including Gurindar Sohi, chairman of the computer science department.

Call of Duty (COD) 4 was so good that even Internet hyper-critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw hardly had a bad word to say about it. That all looks set to change though, as Activision has confirmed the next COD will be released on DS, PS2 and Wii, says Computer and Videogames.

In a financial conference call yesterday, publisher Activision briefly mentioned the title would be available on all formats.

Couple this with the last effort to bring a Call of Duty game to the Wii, the rumours that COD 4 developer Infinity Ward is not involved with the project, and the extremely short development period, and it is a fantastic recipe for a sub-par port to Nintendo's consoles.