Tesco to use face-scan technology to target ads

Face scanning advertisement screens are to be installed at Tesco petrol stations in a bid to targets ads at customers.

The technology, made by Lord Sugar’s Amscreen company, will use a camera to identify a customer’s gender and approximate age.

It will then screen an advert tailored to that demographic.

"It’s like something out of Minority Report," said Amscreen’s chief executive Simon Sugar, Lord Sugar’s eldest son.

"But this could change the face of British retail, and our plans are to expand the screens into as many supermarkets as possible."

A Tesco spokeswoman said: "This is not new technology."

"No data or images are collected or stored and the system does not use eyeball scanners or facial-recognition technology", she added

Eric Schmidt: NSA spying on our data centres ‘outrageous’

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says that his company has lodged complaints with the NSA, White House and Congress as criticism piles up in Silicon Valley.

The complaints are aimed at US government for apparently breaking into the connections that link the company’s data centres around the world, described as "outrageous" and "possibly illegal".

Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Schmidt stepped up the company’s response to revelations in the Washington Post that the National Security Agency, working with GCHQ, had broken into fibre optic cables that carry the transfer of data around the world for Google and Yahoo.

"It’s really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if that’s true," Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

"The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy, it’s not OK."

Twitter claims $13.6bn market valuation

The social media website has raised its IPO asking share price by 25% and has revealed that IBM has accused it of violating three patents.

The company said it would value its IPO at between $23 and $25 a share, up from the $17 to $20 range, indicating that it was a popular potential investment.

Twitter also stopped selling its shares a day early, according to a news report by Reuters. It’s common for companies to keep order books open for investors until the day before the IPO, but Twitter plans to close the books on Tuesday at noon, Reuters said. In the traditional signals of Wall Street, that move could be interpreted in two ways: it could indicate either high demand for the shares or that investors are tapped out.

Twitter, which plans to list its shares for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, can now claim a market value of $13.6bn before its shares have even started trading. The company could raise as much as $1.4bn in the offering.