When your company handles facilities security and surveillance as its livelihood, the last thing you can tolerate is lost or stolen equipment. So when managers at Paladin Private Security of Sacramento, Calif., started reported missing equipment — including Taser guns and gasoline fuel credit cards — it realized it needed a more sophisticated approach for keeping tabs on its inventory.

Consider that the average Paladin patrol car can be home to at least 20 to 30 sets of keys for different client accounts, and you can imagine the magnitude of the challenge. Each Paladin control car includes a laptop, a Taser stun gun, a video camera and the keys for the properties being patrolled by the security officer.

In this case, Marvin Potter, aged 60, is accused of murdering Billie Payne Jr. and his girlfriend, Billie Jean Hayworth.

What might link the couple to Potter? Well, according to the Associated Press, the Tennessee couple had defriended his daughter on Facebook.

The idea behind Mobilyze--under development by researchers at Northwestern University--is to create a virtual therapist to monitor a person's activity over several days and then make a mood assessment.

"We're trying to develop individual algorithms for each user that can determine specific states," lead researcher and psychologist David Mohr said in an interview on WBBM radio in Chicago.

These algorithms would include people's location, activity, social context, what they're doing, and their mood, in order to determine whether they are behaving normally or if they seem depressed.

If the smartphone concludes that the person is depressed, it will help the individual alert family and friends. "It can provide them an automated text message, or an automated phone call to make a suggestion to give somebody a call or get out of the house," Mohr said.

In the long running battle over patents between Apple and Samsung, the latest twist comes from a German court which ruled that the redesigned Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N will not be banned from German stores.

Apple submitted a motion for a preliminary hearing against the modified tablet, but was denied. It was found that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1N was reasonably distinct from Apple’s products, and therefore should be allowed to go on sale.

It should come as no surprise, according to FOSS Patents author Florian Mueller, because a Dusseldorf regional appeals court said last week that, “even the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 does not fall within the valid scope of the asserted [patent].”

Apple last week lost a similar attempt, where the company invoked a European design right, in a Munich court.

Should Samsung have failed today, it may have had to redesign the product all over again. But though at this stage this is only the denial of a preliminary injunction, it could be that later down the line Samsung products are banned nevertheless.

Apple continues to assert four different design-related patents are being infringed by ten Samsung smartphones and five Samsung tablets. It’s clear that Apple will not let these go without a fight.