Monday, May 13, 2002		Latest in IT world

Winning the World Cup is but a distant dream for South Korea's human team. But for the nation's robot side, the odds are much better. Five-a-side soccer played by pre-programmed, palm-sized plastic robots on wheels is a game invented by a South Korean scientist, and the country has been number one in international competitions for the last four years. South Korea will host the Robot Soccer World Championship from May 23 to 29, a week before the World Cup finals kicks off, The Straits Times reports. The venues will be seven of the 10 cities hosting first-round matches in the human World Cup, and the event will have 32 nations participating. The computer-controlled robots, which measure 7.5 cubic centimetres, are made of plastic tiles and equipped with a micro-controller for a brain, a radio antenna and a battery pack. A match by robots called HuroSot, which have human-like arms and legs, will feature in this year's event, but more time, money and technology are needed for these robots to take the place of the wheeled ones in tournaments.

A start-up, Butterfly.net Inc., and computing giant IBM, have created a global network for online video games capable of supporting a million players or more that will be rented to major game publishers, the companies said last week. The "Butterfly Grid" will also be one of the first major commercial applications for IBM's concept of "grid computing," in which far-flung computers are linked using open-source software to create powerful computing networks, IBM said. Software development kits for console- and PC-games that would plug into the Butterfly Grid are available, after two years of development work on the project designed to reduce the cost for game publishers, David Levine, Butterfly's chief executive, told Reuters.

Security and Web address provider VeriSign Inc., which has seen layoffs and missed its sales target partly as a result of lower-than-expected Web address sales, last week announced it will auction domain names on eBay Inc. The auctions of ".bz" domain names will be targeted at businesses, Verisign said in a statement. Other domain names are likely to follow, a spokesman told The Washington Post. With 46 million users, EBay offers a ready market for everything from vintage baseball cards and diet pills to airline tickets and used computers. The ".bz" domain is the top-level domain for the Central American country of Belize and is different from the ".biz" domain, which is one of the new generic top-level domains that will be entering the ".com" dominated market. VeriSign is overseeing the registry for the ".bz" domain.

Tata Infotech, the premier IT education company, is providing IT Project Management training for professionals from Indonesia. The training of this batch of 41 skilled IT professionals and academicians commenced in the last week of March and concluded last week. The prime objective of this program was to help friendly developing countries with the technical assistance in training and upgrading performance of manpower to meet the challenges faced by them in their respective countries.