Gadgetory

it's tuesday november 29 2011 I'm Bridget Carey on cnet com and it's time to get loaded the AT&T and t-mobile merger may have many hurdles to keep it from succeeding but 18t isn't throwing in the towel in fact the New York Times reports ATT has been trying to cut a deal with the prepaid provider leap wireless which sells his phones under the name Cricket Wireless it can sell a big chunk of t-mobile to leap like customer accounts and wireless spectrum making leap wireless the fourth largest carrier and by strengthening another competitor it could appease the Department of Justice to drop its fight against the acquisition pretty much every photo in a magazine these days is retouched or Photoshop but what if there was a software that could tell you how much a photo was edited computer science students at Dartmouth are proposing a software tool that can measure how much a model photo has been changed with photo editing software and it would use a scale from one to five the goal of the creator's is to bring more honesty and transparency to advertising the research is being published this week and the National Academy of Sciences journal and in other innovation news students at the University of Tokyo can turn an everyday object into a computer interface using projectors and human gestures turn a pizza box into a laptop turn a banana into a banana phone it's called invoked computing and it's the concept that computers should learn our behaviors and gestures and respond to us but I don't think anyone will be trading in their smartphone for a banana phone anytime soon the groupon stock continues to fall since them in public earlier this month at twenty dollars a share there was a brief price boost but it's now at about fifteen dollars and overall has dropped forty-one percent analysts say the immediate future doesn't look so bright for Groupon stock when you look at the current economy and its business model some small businesses aren't seeing the benefits of working with Groupon customers don't always want to come back after redeeming their discount Facebook is getting closer to joining Groupon as a public stock The Wall Street Journal reports facebook could have an initial public offering that would value it at a hundred billion dollars and it could come between april and june of next year if book is valued at a hundred billion that would trump tech giants like Cisco worth 96 billion or hewlett-packard worth fifty two billion those are your headlines for today I'm Bridget Carey for cnet.com and you've just been loaded