“As Atlanta Business Chronicle reported in February, the company wanted to open several software development centers in the United States, including one in Georgia…”

Mumbai -- Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Bangalore, India-based Wipro Ltd., lately announced it will open a new global software development center in metro Atlanta and will form a partnership with the University System of Georgia to train and educate close to 500 local employees, the company said.

Wipro said its metro Atlanta center will help it hire skilled workers and domain experts who will be critical to Wipro’s business growth plans in the United States.

The limits of artificial intelligence have prompted information companies to look beyond computers to human brainpower as a competitive edge. The latest effort to tap people power is ChaCha.com, a search engine launching in beta this week that, in addition to the standard algorithmic search box, includes an option to direct queries to human search guides.

Scott Jones knows it is probably not wise to try to out-Google Google. But he is also not ready to concede that the world's leading search engine, or any of its main competitors, has the Web search trick down completely.

In its first foray into the U.S., Japanese portal Rakuten - which operates top-ranked sites for online shopping, travel, golf reservations, community, and greeting cards - is slated to acquire affiliate marketing firm LinkShare for $425 million in cash. The company also provides shopping over cellular phones, auctions, financial services, broadband entertainment and business-to-business services.

It is the Tokyo-based company's largest deal to date. The deal is expected to close in 4-6 weeks. LinkShare will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten, and its senior management team will remain with the company.

San Francisco -- Ever wondered how easy it would be to edit images if your application could actually heed to your voice command? Photo editing is getting easier thanks to the likes of Siri and Google Now, smartphone and tablet users are becoming more and more able to control their devices using only their voice. But Adobe--the makers of popular graphic application Photoshop--are working with the University of Michigan to develop an extremely intelligent photo editing app that simply let you talk to your app and tell it how exactly you want a photo to look like.

Los Angeles - In a fresh move, it appears that users of the hugely populated social network Facebook may have to gear-up for some more design tweaks to their Timeline, as the company is looking for ways to simplify the timeline design. The social media leader is experimenting with some significant changes that are already showing up for a small number of users - and may roll out to the masses very soon.

Los Angeles -- Swiping to unlock your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, could be a thing of the past for next-gen iOS devices as you could one day simply point it at your face. In its attempt to keep pace with its rivals and innovative technology alike, Apple has filed a new patent application that would allow its iPhone and iPad users to access the device via face recognition.

New York -- Micro blogging site Twitter may have geared up to become a major player in the thriving social Q&A space on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Fluther, a small California-based startup, which describes itself as a “free Q&A collective that specializes in getting fast answers from the right people,” for its engineering talent.

San Francisco -- Privacy advocates are grousing about Facebook's recent privacy changes effected since the second week of December has had scores of users of the world's biggest online social network up in arms now calling on the US Federal Trade Commission to make Facebook undo the changes in an official complaint.

The subject of dispute is the default setting of the posts. The network, which has more than 350 million users, has kept the default settings to “visible to all” against keeping them private, thereby encouraging its users to share information with all.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, in association with eight other groups, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week urging the regulator to open an investigation into Facebook's new privacy settings.