A Solar Powered Tablet for the Children of India

While tablets are certainly the hot technology right now, it seems rural Indian kids are the hottest target demographic right now. It started with the Rs. 1,600 computing device aimed at college students. Now it's an iSlate, a solar powered tablet for younger school kids.

The iSlate is being developed at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in collaboration with Rice University in the United States. It is designed to be an electronic notepad, especially useful in areas where schools don't have electricity. The chips that allow the tablet to be solar powered are in development by two associations. One is the Institute of Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) at NTU and Switzerland's Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology. The chips will be similar to those in solar powered calculators.

There's no word on how much this will cost yet or what the specs will be. And like the Rs. 1,600 computing device, questions of availability, repair and practicality arise.

Facebook to launch e-mail service

Facebook is set to announce a new e-mail feature on Monday that could challenge Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail as the most popular online e-mail services, according to news reports on Friday.

The service by the popular social networking company will for the first time allow the site’s 500 million members to use “@facebook.com” addresses and will also be integrated with Microsoft’s recently introduced Office online services.

The tech news blog TechCrunch, which first reported the development, said the Facebook service would be a full-featured e-mail client.

“Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product,” TechCrunch wrote.

The development comes amid growing rivalry between Facebook and Google, which this week raised salaries across the board to pre-empt defections to the social network site. Google also recently cut off Facebook’s access to its own e-mail product to prevent Facebook from importing Gmail address books until Facebook allows Google to access data on its site.

Top Google Executives Get 30 Percent Raises(Diwali Offer)

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Google executives including Patrick Pichette, chief financial officer; Nikesh Arora, president of global sales and business development; Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research; and Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, saw their salaries go up to US$650,000 from $500,000. The raises are effective on Jan. 1.

They will also get a boost in their potential bonuses from 150 percent of their base salaries to 250 percent.

Top executives Eric Schmidt, CEO; Sergey Brin, president of technology; and Larry Page, president of products, will keep their base salaries of $1 each. Those executives don't receive bonuses. All three are listed among the 400 richest Americans by Forbes magazine.

The top three also won't get equity grants like the others. Pichette and Arora will get $20 million worth of stock and stock options on Dec. 1. Eustace gets $10 million in equity and Rosenberg $5 million.

The executive awards announcement comes the same week that Google reportedly gave a blanket 10 percent raise to all employees. Google didn't confirm the companywide raise, which was first reported by Silicon Alley Insider.

Google has been one of the most desirable technology companies to work for but has lost some notable employees recently. For example, Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob, which Google acquired, recently left Google. Another high-profile departure was Lars Rasmussen, known for his work on Google Maps, who recently joined Facebook.

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