* Increase in intensity and duration of hurricanes and tropical storms since the 1970’s, according to a 2005 MIT study.

* Estimate of damage caused by hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast in 2005 alone, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

* Year by which Glacier National Park will have no glaciers left, according to the U.S. Geological Survey predictions.

* Square miles of Arctic sea ice have melted in the last 30 years, threatening polar bear habitats and further accelerating global warming worldwide (Courtesy: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment).

* of plant and animal species on earth could be wiped out by global warming by 2050!

Every such disaster is an ominous sign of the impending doom that awaits the world. Every tragedy, a silent warning. And yet, it’s somehow easier for us to just shake our heads with false empathy when we see news of lives lost in calamities while poring over the morning newspapers and quickly move on with our day, wrapped in a false sense of security that such things only happens to other people.

Stop, open your eyes and look around, and the alarming truth about how closer to home danger is might finally sink in.

Roman Group is a rapidly growing business conglomerate with extensive strengths in Construction, Electronic, Chemical and Engineering Technologies. Over the years, the organisation has diversified into various verticals offering a broad spectrum of services.

When a group company has such a diverse spread of business areas under its umbrella, its best to showcase what makes the company what it is, rather than focusing on what it does.

Here, we have taken a very unconventional approach to do this. We have totally done away with images and made the space interesting through a strong mix of typography treatment and vibrant colours to bring out the USPs of Roman Group. What makes this website even more interesting is the unique blend of style and simplicity that it manages to effortlessly portray. Giving Roman Group a very distinct online identity, quite unlike conventional corporate websites.

The result is both refreshing and eye capturing.

For a preview of the website, please click here http://www.romangroup.in.

The Mohile Parikh Center (MPC) is one of the leading centers devoted to the Arts in India today. MPC has strived to connect art, architecture, and related fields in new and creative ways. Through fostering cross-cultural exchanges internationally as well as addressing issues specific to the city of Mumbai, the MPC has consistently explored ideas, processes and materials central to contemporary art, and culture.

Since MPC is a hub of activities for artists and connoisseurs of arts alike, constant updating of content and managing of data becomes core to this website. The solution we developed for this challenge was to build the website on a customized Drupal based technology. This enabled us to offer client the flexibility to manage content easily from their end and turn the website into a very people-friendly platform.

Subtlety in design rather than a visual oriented approach is what works best for MPC. Being a pure art & events related forum, offering navigation through an event calendar hence makes the browsing experience easy and convenient for the website’s diverse target audience. And this is exactly what MPC’s online identity achieves.

Have a look at the website @ http://www.mohileparikhcenter.org/

You’re walking down the street, looking for a good place to eat. You hold up your cellphone and use it like the viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what’s in front of you. However, it also shows things you couldn’t see before: Brightly colored markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars.

Turn a corner, and the markers reflect the new scene. Click a marker for a restaurant, and you can see customer Boost customer satisfaction + retention with Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2. Click to learn more. reviews and price information. Decide you’d rather be sightseeing? The indicators are easily changed to give information about the buildings you’re passing.

This computer-enhanced view of the world is not just available to cyborgs in science-fiction movies. Increasingly it can be found on cellphones, for free or on the cheap, through programs that provide “augmented reality.”

Smarter Phones

These applications take advantage of the phones’ GPS and compass features and access to high-speed wireless networks to mash up super-local Web content with the world that surrounds you.

That means you can see available apartments on the block you’re moseying down. You can view photos other people have taken at the park you’re passing, or find the nearest bus stop or hotel room — all by just holding your phone up and peering at its screen.

The possibilities for melding the virtual and actual worlds have just started to become apparent. The first phones with Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google Android operating system, which enables augmented reality, have come out in the past year. The iPhone became augmented-reality-friendly with the compass that debuted in June on the iPhone 3GS. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) More about Apple also recently joined Google in making it possible for software Manage and grow your business with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition developers to overlay images on the phone’s camera view.

As cellphones get even smarter and GPS and wireless networks improve, we may soon be spending more time in a virtually enhanced world, using information gathered from the Internet to inform everything from eating to playing video games.

The ‘Serendipitous Experience’

One company working to make this happen is Amsterdam-based Layar, which recently released an augmented reality browser by the same name for Android phones. Layar lets you search for things on Google, but delivers the results based on your location, which it determines from the GPS readout. So you can search for, say, a bike shop or a pet store close to where you happen to be.

If you don’t feel like actively searching, you can sign up to have certain kinds of information automatically appear on your phone screen. For instance, Layar lets other companies build on its system to overlay information about such places as skateboarding spots and local landmarks. A startup called “Brightkite” uses Layar to let people post virtual tags, with their locations and activities, that other people can see if they use the same app.

Layar’s goal is to create a “serendipitous experience” that lets you can discover new things about your surroundings, says cocreator Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald.

The company is working on a 3-D function, too, that it hopes to release in November. That will allow virtual objects to be placed “on” actual locations. A guy might be able to put a virtual heart in front of his girlfriend’s house for Valentine’s Day — and she would see it if she used the Layar app on her phone.

Yelp for Help

For a year, Yelp, a Web site with business reviews written by customers, had an iPhone app that used the device’s GPS and wireless Internet connectivity to deliver local search results. However, when the iPhone got a compass, bloggers wondered whether Yelp would go further and make its app overlay information onto a real-time view of the world. After noticing the speculation, Yelp quietly created such an app this summer, spokesperson Vince Sollitto said.

The augmented-reality program, known as “Monocle,” was built for Yelp by an industrious intern and originally hidden in Yelp’s app. (It was activated if you shook the iPhone three times.) Monocle is now a formal feature that combines the iPhone’s camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances and user ratings of proximate bars, restaurants and more. Poke a floating tag on the screen with your finger and up pops detailed information about the business.

Among the other augmented reality programs that recently have hit Apple’s App Store is Robotvision, a 99-cent program built by Portland, Ore.-based developer Tim Sears.

If you hold your phone parallel to the ground, Robotvision displays a map of your surroundings. Hold the phone up, however, and it goes into augmented-reality mode, highlighting places like coffee shops and bars. Robotvision also can search for other kinds of businesses with Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) More about Microsoft Bing search engine. You can view pictures that people took nearby and posted to Flickr More about Flickr with a “geotag” of the shot’s physical location. Or you can see Twitter More about Twitter postings composed in the area.

Next, Sears plans to update the application with local content from Wikipedia More about Wikipedia.

“Looking at the world around you is something everyone can get. That, to me, is what makes it so fascinating,” he said.

Reality vs. Expectations

Consumers may feel that way initially, too. But Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor who runs the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, worries that the technological limitations these applications currently face will keep them from living up to what people imagine they can do. Similar disappointments followed early hype for virtual reality, a cousin of augmented reality in which the landscape is entirely computer generated.

Indeed, there are issues hindering augmented reality applications. Cellphones need to be more powerful, with improved cameras and graphics capabilities and more accurate GPS. The technology can generally pinpoint location to within 30 feet if a user is outdoors.

The limitations mean businesses you see on the screen are often not actually in front of you, though they are nearby. And often tags sometimes just kind of dart around on the screen, seemingly untethered to a physical place. Another problem: Using GPS for extended periods quickly sucks up the battery life on most phones.

Developers and industry watchers are optimistic, though, that in the next few years we might see everything from augmented reality video games to museum guide services that recognize paintings and can pull up videos showing the artist at work.

“Things are pretty cool right now,” Sears says, “but they’re definitely going to get better.”

Believe it or not, its a flying car!!! No, not one from those Sci-fi movies! A real one that you could soon be using and seeing all around you!

Transition® is a specially designed, award winning aircraft that works as a dual-purpose vehicle. This two-seat aircraft with foldable wings is designed to take off and land at local airports and drive on any road. What’s more, transforming from plane to car takes the pilot less than 30 seconds! The Transition® will cruise up to 450 miles at over 115 mph, can drive at highway speeds on the road, and fits in a standard household garage! Phew!

By combining the convenience of land and air travel, this innovative vehicle also reduces the cost, hassle, and weather sensitivity of personal aviation. It is expected to be available in the market by 2011. Till then, you can atleast experience what this will look like!