Tokyo is world’s most expensive city while Karachi is the least

A survey released from the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that Karachi, Pakistan’s economic hub is world’s least expensive city while Tokyo, Japan is world’s most expensive.

India’s Mumbai and New Delhi are also among the bottom 5 cities.

Worldwide Cost of Living 2011

European cities covers almost half of the top 50 having 4 of them in the top 10 including Paris, Zurich, Frankfurt and Geneva.

As Australian dollar is getting stronger, the cost of living in Australian cities is raising day by day. Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane are among the top 15 most expensive cities.

American cities rankings are generally on the drop with New York at 49th position among world’s most expensive cities.

Top 10 cities

1. Tokyo
2. Oslo
3. Osaka
4. Paris
5. Zurich
6. Sydney
7. Melbourne
8. Frankfurt
9. Geneva
10. Singapore

Bottom 5 cities

129. New Delhi
130. Tehran
131. Mumbai
132. Tunis
133. Karachi

Facebook launches video chat with Skype

The world’s number 1 social networking giant Facebook has introduced video chatting feature in partnership with Skype (an internet calling service) on Wednesday. The feature is introduced a week after Google introduced a video chatting tool called ‘Hangouts’ with its social networking service Google+ . Google has limited the number of users at the moment.

The agreement, announced by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company's Palo Alto, California, headquarters on Wednesday which also unveils the company's relationship with Microsoft Corporation as Microsoft in the process of buying Skype.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive said, “The new feature allows users a way to connect with friends other than just posting messages”. Zuckerberg said, “Facebook has hit a record 750 million users. The new service, rolling out from Wednesday, could be a huge boost for Skype, which currently has about 145 million regular users”.

The feature will display a "call" button at the top of users' profile pages. By clicking that, Facebook users can talk to each other as long as they have webcams. The company began turning that service on for millions of users on Wednesday and will add it to more accounts over time, a Facebook spokesperson said.

Facebook also added a group messaging function to its existing one-to-one text chat but Google+ has an edge over Facebook’s video chatting facility as ‘Hangouts’ let users video chat with several friends at a time. Zuckerberg hinted that video chat for multiple people could eventually be available on Facebook. But he said that most video chats today occur between two people.

Google introduces Google+, enters social networking battle

Google launched its social networking service called Google+ which is available at plus.google.com but is currently available to limited users. Google has promised to make this product available to everyone soon.

"Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it," Google's senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post. Gundotra further explained, "We'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software," he said. "We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships and your interests".

"Not all relationships are created equal," Gundotra said. "The problem is that today's online services turn friendship into fast food -- wrapping everyone in 'friend' paper -- and sharing really suffers," he continued. 

Features available in Google+ includes Hangouts, Circles, Sparks and Huddle. ‘Hangout’ is a tool for video chatting among friends while ‘Spark’ is a sharing engine to share content from the web. 

‘Circles’ is another key tool and considered as Google’s enhanced form of Facebook’s ‘Friends’. it gives users to separate online friends and family into different "circles," or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle. Google+ describes the feature on the member’s homepage as “The easiest way to share some things with college buddies, others with your parents and almost nothing with your boss.”  

Google+ is considered as a rival of social networking giant ‘Facebook’ which nearly has 700 million users worldwide.

Port Grand - Karachi

Port Grand is a food, shopping and entertainment complex which has been built with over Rs. 1 billion investment by Grand Leisure Corporation. Port Grand project is a 13-acre world-class facility that has been designed and built in collaboration with top international architects / designers who employed the latest technology and building techniques to deliver a state of the art facility. About 40 outlets are being made operational at this stage while more outlets would be opened soon. 

The place is not just linked with food, it has several entertainment concepts that includes free WiFi, shopping, bookstore, florist, Art Lane, gifts and antiques etc.

Facebook Changes Privacy Settings to Enable Facial Recognition

Facebook will soon be able to recognize familiar faces. Facebook will automatically enable this feature for Facebook users but it can be disabled in the privacy settings on the Web site. Facebook initially introduced this feature for its North American users, but now it is rolling out to most countries.

This feature uses facial recognition technology and will suggest labeling friends that appear in photos posted on Facebook. Facebook doesn’t give users the option to avoid being tagged in a photo, people who don’t want to be tagged may untag themselves afterwards. Manual tagging system will still be available.

The company's rollout strategy has raised concerns over users’ privacy. Many Facebook users are reporting that the site has enabled the facial recognition option without giving users any notice. In response to an inquiry, Facebook replied, “We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them. We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that’s currently done more than 100 million times a day. Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested. If for any reason someone doesn’t want their name to be suggested, they can disable the feature in their Privacy Settings.”

Other photo software and online services such as Google Inc's Picasa and Apple Inc's iPhoto use facial recognition technology but they have not enabled this feature on the online versions.

Facebook is the largest photo sharing service scanning millions of pictures daily. More than 100 million photos per day are uploaded to Facebook.