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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

Pictures of the year: Technology

A look at the year's best science and technology photos.   Slideshow 

    MySpace delivers video to mobile phones

    Robert MacMillan
    NEW YORK
    Wed Dec 3, 2008 3:02pm EST
    The MySpace homepage in an undated image courtesy of the company. MySpace users with mobile phones are about to find out if they can walk and watch TV at the same time. REUTERS/Handout

    NEW YORK (Reuters) - MySpace users with mobile phones are about to find out if they can walk and watch TV at the same time.

    Entertainment  |  Technology  |  Television  |  Media

    On Wednesday, News Corp's online social network will make video clips from its members' pages available for viewing on mobile devices including the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct.

    Members will be able to look at video on their own homepages as well as friends' pages. They also will be able to view professionally produced video from TMZ, the celebrity news and gossip website owned by Time Warner Inc; the National Hockey League; National Geographic magazine; satirical newspaper The Onion and others.

    The free service will be supported by advertising. MySpace and many other companies are trying to exploit the small but growing mobile advertising market.

    MySpace declined to comment on the cost of the project or how much money it would make them.

    "These are the big guys doing it, and they're going to make some noise about it," said David Card, a media analyst at Forrester Research who called it a medium-sized deal in terms of significance. "Mobile is one of those things where people keep saying, 'Is next year going to be the year of mobile'?"

    MySpace video will be sent, or "streamed," from the social network's pages rather than downloaded onto mobile phones. For this reason, the clips will not be available on Apple Inc's iPhone, which runs downloaded video.

    MySpace, one of the world's largest online social networks, plans to support mobile video downloads in the future, a spokeswoman said.

    MySpace's growth strategy includes developing mobile phone applications, as well as international markets and building up its music service. Acquisitions are central to this strategy, Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe told the Reuters Media Summit on Monday.

    The company will work with technology from a company called RipCode to make video available on mobile handsets that have different technical specifications for how they handle video.

    RipCode also will allow MySpace users to stop having to save their video clips in different formats, something that it said would save hardware, energy and storage resources.

    (Reporting by Robert MacMillan)
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