YouTube to offer movie rentals soon

YouTube said it would offer online rentals of nearly 500 Paramount films, including "Hugo" and "The Godfather," rounding out its growing catalog of feature-length movies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and it was not immediately clear why the two companies, whose parent companies have sparred in court for years, decided to put their differences aside for this licensing agreement.

YouTube, the world's most popular online video website, streams 4 billions videos every day and its users upload more than 60 hours of video to the site every minute. Although much of the content on YouTube consists of home videos that are free to watch, YouTube has increasingly added professionally-produced content, some of it available to rent for a fee. The Paramount deal means that YouTube now has movie rental deals with five of the six major film studios, as well as more than ten independent film studios, giving it access to a catalog of nearly 9,000 films.

Consumers can rent the films, generally for 24 hours or 48 hours, for anywhere from $2.99 to $3.99. The Paramount movies, which include recently releases and classics, will be available over the next few weeks. Consumers can rent the movies on the YouTube website, or on Google Play, Google's online storefront for music, games, movies and othertypes of media.-Reuters

Computer Chips in School Uniforms

Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if ther're cutting classes, the city's education secretary told.

Twenty thousand students in 25 of the of Vitoria da Conquista's 213 public schools stated using T-shirts with chips earlier this week, secretary Coriolano Moraes said. By 2013, all of the city's 43,000 public school students - aged 4 to 14 - will be using the chip-embedded T-shirts, he added.

The "intelligent uniforms" tell parents when their children enter the school building by sending a text message to their cell phones. Parents are also alerted if kids don't show up 20 minutes after classes begin with the following message: "Your child has still not arrived at school." "We noticed that many parents would bring their children to school but would not see if they actually entered the building because they always left in a hurry to get to work on time." Moreaes said in a telephone interview. "They would always be surprised when told to the number times their children skipped class.

After a student skips classes three times parents will be asked to explain the absences. If they fail to do so the school may notify authorities, Moares said. The city government invested $670,000 to design, test and make the microchipped T-shirts, he said.

The T-shirts, can be washed and ironed without damaging the chips, Moraes said adding that the chips have a "security system that makes tampering virtually impossible." Moraes said that Vitoria da Conquista is the first city in Brazil "and may be in the world" to use this system.