A technology company based in Tokyo, announced face-recognition software for cellular phones equipped with cameras. The company says the Okao Vision sensor is meant to safeguard the contents of a phone's memory should the handset be lost or stolen.

A user registers by using the camera to snap a self-portrait. From that point onward, anyone who wants to gain access to the phone's features must pose for such a picture; in about a second, the phone compares the new image with the reference image. The company says it gets the correct answer 99 percent of the time. Versions of software run on four operating systems—Symbian, Brew, embedded Linux, and Itro.

Security technology for mobile phones is becoming more of a necessity as users apply their growing range of capabilities to ever more sensitive jobs, such s remotely accessing home monitoring systems and car alarms and paying for gasoline and groceries.

Meanwhile, to supply the power these more powerful phones require, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) last week announced that it had developed a hydrogen fuel cell for them. NTT , formerly the monopoly operator of Japan's telephone system, says it will commercialize the tiny power plant in three years"enough time to shrink it so it will fit the space currently occupied by batteries. The prototype measures 3.8 by 4.3 by 7.9 cm.

In a presentation at NTT's Yokosaka R&D Center, Kazuya Akiyama, a researcher at the company's Energy & Environment Systems Laboratories, said the new fuel can deliver 200 milliwats from each square centimeter of the device's electrodes, a power density higher than in the direct methanol fuel cells under development by other companies. Unlike those cells, which process hydrogen stripped from methanol, the NTT fuel cell creates electricity by directly combining hydrogen and oxygen. NTT engineers say a fuel cell's power density has to be at least 160 mW/cm2 in order to match the performance of lithium-ion batteries. A direct methanol fuel cell developed by NEC last year was rated at 60 mW/cm2.

Source IEEE Spectrum Magazine.