Flashy Army recruitment center in Pa. mall closing

PHILADELPHIA — The Army is shutting down a flashy, high-tech information and recruiting center inside a mall, calling it a successful marketing experiment even as it attracted protesters and video-game enthusiasts as much as potential soldiers.

The Army Experience Center will close July 31 after nearly two years at Philadelphia's Franklin Mills Mall, military officials said Thursday.

"It's been a great success," Army spokesman Brian Lepley said. "Basically it's mission accomplished."

The $12 million center opened in August 2008 with interactive video exhibits, nearly 80 video-gaming stations, a replica command-and-control center, conference rooms, and Black Hawk helicopter and Humvee combat simulators.

Since then, the center has hosted about 40,000 visitors and enlisted 236 recruits, Lepley said.

It was also repeatedly targeted for protests by those who said the Army's use of first-person-shooter video games desensitized visitors to violence and enticed teens into the military. Anyone over 13 could play games, though the most graphic ones were restricted to those 18 and older.. Nokia N900

Lepley said the demonstrations had nothing to do with the decision to close the center, but activist Elaine Brower, of Staten Island, N.Y., said she was thrilled. She had been particularly galled by the center's mall location, between a skateboard park and an arcade.

"We really consider this a major victory for us," Brower said. "We are happy that they are not going to be in the mall."

Billed as more than a recruiting station, the center was designed to teach any curious mall shopper about the Army.

Officials initially said it might be replicated in other parts of the country. But as the recession set in and unemployment rose, enlistments increased and the Army began spending less on marketing.

Yet the Army Experience Center provided valuable information on how to connect with a generation used to getting information from computers and mobile devices, Lepley said.

Touch-screen kiosks showing the location of global Army posts and a "career navigator" displaying the service's jobs and salaries proved popular and will likely be used at recruiting stations and ROTC schools, Lepley said.

"We can't just print brochures anymore," he said.

The Army had closed five traditional recruiting stations when it opened the center. It's now planning to open a pair of more modern recruiting offices in nearby Levittown and northeast Philadelphia, Lt. Col. Chris Belcher said.

The offices will have some elements found at the Experience Center, including gaming stations and a more casual atmosphere with informal seating, as opposed to the old-fashioned desk with chairs on either side, Belcher said.

Online:

www.thearmyexperience.com

Trade group: Chip sales to jump 28 pct this year

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Revenue at the world's semiconductor companies will climb 28.4 percent to $290.5 billion this year, an industry trade group projected Thursday.

That growth will taper off to an increase of 6.3 percent in 2011 and 2.9 percent in 2012, the Semiconductor Industry Association said.

Chip sales have been rising steadily for months after the recession sapped demand and forced companies that buy semiconductors to slash their inventories.

SIA reported a 58 percent jump in chip sales for the first quarter of 2010 compared with the year-earlier quarter, and a 50.4 percent rise in April.

The recovery comes after a 9 percent drop in chip revenue last year to $226.3 billion.

"Healthy demand in all major product sectors and in all geographic markets drove sales of semiconductors to record levels in the first four months of 2010," SIA President George Scalise said in a statement Thursday.. iSkin Vibes FX for Curve 8900 Light Blue

He said SIA's forecast for the year is based on projected worldwide economic growth of 4.6 percent this year and 4.4 percent in 2011.

Emerging economies such as China and India will help lead the way as demand for information technology in those markets helps boost demand for chips, Scalise said.

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Finally Google has unveiled the next generation architecture for web search. The new infrastructure Caffeine would speed up indexing while preserving accuracy and comprehensiveness. Although it might be difficult for general users to find difference in search result, Web developers would easily identify a few differences with the Caffeine Web indexing system.

Before rolling out, Caffeine underwent extensive testing phase. Google along with its several data centers tested Caffeine for almost 10 months. The strenuous task was carried out in order to yield a fresh new indexing system that hugely differs from the previous one.

Caffeine is undoubtedly a menacing news for rivals of Google since it's capable of faster search than Bing of Yahoo and many others. But Google has denied any other intention behind bringing Caffeine than helping its users.

Google software engineer Carrie Grimes said,

Content on the Web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Grimes also mentioned that 100 million gigabytes of storage is required to accommodate Caffeine in one database. Perhaps you need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of fresh content that Caffeine adds each day.

Lets delve into how Caffeine works. Well, you would be glad to know that Caffeine processes millions of pages in parallel. If you consider piles of papers, it would grow three miles taller every second.

Caffeine is built to meet ever rising expectations of the users. It's been several times that Google received complaint for its old indexing system that very often fails to refresh a page in time. Motorola Milestone. While some of the layers were refreshed faster, others took couple of weeks for update. With Caffeine, Google would be able to update their search index continuously. New pages, or new information on existing pages would be added to the index as soon as they are made available on the web. That means, you would get fresher information than ever before.

Caffeine is coming only one month after Google launched its fresh search user interface that brings new options to the users for slice and dice results. Now with this new search service Google is expecting to increase its search share which is currently sticking at 65 percent.

Extra Time: World Cup coverage expands greatly on the Web and mobile phones

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World Cup coverage expands on the Web, cell phones

NEW YORK — With games airing live on cell phones and computers, the World Cup will get more online coverage than any major sporting event yet. Watching highlights the next day on TV or YouTube will suddenly seem a downright ancient way to keep up with the action.

When the soccer tournament begins Friday, footy fans can follow the action from an array of mobile and Web applications and share in triumph and heartbreak across social media.

Walt Disney Co. networks ESPN and ABC, which are broadcasting the games in the U.S., will stream 54 games live on the newly launched ESPN3.com, formerly ESPN360. The games are free to those in the U.S. who get their Internet from a service provider affiliated with ESPN, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and many others. The 10 games that will air live on ABC won't be available on ESPN3.com, but all 64 matches in the Cup will be available live on mobile devices to customers whose plans include TV on their phones.

Univision Communications has the Spanish-language broadcasting rights in the U.S., and it, too, will have games available on Univision.com and Univision Movil.

The digital coverage will be an especially important component for the World Cup because U.S. audiences will be watching many of the games - all being played in South Africa - during the day, possibly on their computers at work.

Comparing the digital experiences of the 2010 World Cup to the 2006 World Cup, Josh Kosner, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN Digital Media, said, "Things have changed utterly."

"This is going to be the biggest and most powerful demonstration of this, and it's just the start," Kosner said. "It's the play book, it's the blueprint for what's coming."

NBC's online coverage of the last Winter Olympics - also an international, daytime event - was extensive, drawing 45 million video streams. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com more than tripled from the 2006 Winter Games, with 45.7 million total visits compared to 13.3 million in 2006. That happened even though NBC held a lot of the footage for its prime-time broadcasts. ESPN expects worldwide online traffic for the World Cup to double or triple that of 2006.

The World Cup, a mixture of global and niche audiences - where some games mean much more to citizens of Honduras, for example - is particularly suited to the Internet. ESPN3.com, for example, will have the option to watch some games in either Portuguese, Arabic, German, Japanese or Korean.

The actual games are only part of the experience. Many media outlets have launched mobile applications, most of which feature live scores, news updates and some integration with Facebook or Twitter. Among them are apps from Fox Soccer Channel, The Associated Press, Goal.com, Mundial and many others.

ESPN has several, including an ESPN Radio app that gives live play-by-play audio. Turner Sports' SportsNow app promises direct linking to Facebook and Twitter to facilitate "trash-talk directly from the app."

Online interest in the World Cup has been building. The elaborate Nike World Cup commercial directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has been watched by more than 13 million on YouTube since debuting on May 17.

For the past year, Akamai Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world's Internet traffic, has been building its capability in anticipation of the World Cup. It expects traffic to be two or three times as heavy as what was measured during President Barack Obama's inauguration - thus far, the high point for traffic volume at about 1 terabit, or 1 trillion bits of data, per second. (Higher-quality video is also a major factor in boosting volume.)

"It could well be another watershed event in terms of people understanding what is now possible to do with video online," Akamai Chief Scientist Tom Leighton said. "This will draw a lot of people at once and that will cause people to be aware en masse that, hey, you can do some very cool things with video online that you can't even do with broadcast right now."

The World Cup is also shaping up to be a benchmark in the evolution of mobile TV, which is common in South Korea, growing in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America, but nascent in the U.S. and Europe. ESPN has partnered with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, FLO TV and MobiTV to bring games to cell phones.

Any surge in bandwidth for live video could test those networks, which are already clogged. Just last week, AT&T announced that to ease congestion on its network, it would no longer offer unlimited Internet data plans for new smart-phone customers.

ESPN's Kosner acknowledged that those with live TV on their mobile phones are still a "relatively small audience," but predicted that the World Cup will be "a galvanizing event" for the capability.

Of course, technology is also being used for more quirky ends.

If you hurry, you can catch the final ticks to the World Cup Countdown app, which has simply been counting down to kickoff in South Africa since last year.

The Drinksin Footy Pubs 2010 app lets U.K. fans know the nearest pubs carrying the games. LiveSoccerTV.com, similarly, offers "soccer friendly" bars in the U.S.

Technology truly meets soccer enthusiasm in South Korea, where a World Cup iPhone app from KT Corp. includes a "glow stick mode" that lights up the screen with fluorescent colors when the phone is shaken - perfect for exuberant waving in South Africa or anywhere near a screen playing the games.

That still leaves one, essential question: Where's Becks?

Fear not. David Beckham, the dashing British wingman, has signed on with Yahoo Inc. as its "global football ambassador." Along with its extensive Cup coverage (which includes a toolbar just for updates and scores), Yahoo will offer a Beckham channel to share the midfielder's thoughts on the Cup.

Associated Press Writer Sangwon Yoon in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

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