Wireless / Mobile
Commercializing the White Spaces – This Thursday in Washington
I've written quite a bit about the White Spaces, but most of that has been about the technology and the regulatory environment. Read more
Three Android Apps for Savvy Shoppers
For some shoppers, Black Friday is a holiday, and there are plenty of Android apps to help them celebrate it. Here are three apps to add to your shopping arsenal if you plan to brave the crowds this Friday. Read more
Best tech videos of the week: Banana phones, iPads-turned-snowboards & weighing $1M with your mind
University of Tokyo researchers working in the area of "invoked computing" are turning everday objects into communications and computing devices, such as converting bananas into phones and pizza boxes into laptop PCs. One researcher says they are trying to turn the idea that you need to learn yoru device on its head, and enable devices to learn what you want to do. High-speed cameras, parametric speaker arrays and other tools are used to create invoked computing prototypes. Read more
Maybe 802.11ad Will Dominate After All
My last posting on the subject of 60 GHz. WLANs and 802.11ad was a bit cautionary in nature. Following a briefing with the folks at the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), I was surprised that I heard a lot about wireless docking, video streaming, and applications essentially WPAN in nature, but relatively little about the 802.11ad WLAN opportunity. I think all constituencies concerned with 60 GHz. Read more
Lose An Android Phone? It's Good To Have A Plan B
Losing your phone, especially if it is still fairly new can be an expensive and traumatizing event. The first thing on your mind is all of the personal information you have on that phone. Next, what is it going to cost me to replace it? What a pain in the butt. But it doesn't have to be that way if you have Plan B. Read more
Apple Siri gets caught in the middle of husband-wife spat
Apple fanboys and fangirls have had their fun with Apple's Siri voice command technology, but now College Humor pokes fun at the gee-whiz technology that Apple rolled out with its iPhone 4S smartphone (warning, it gets naughty). Read more
Jedi squirrels, Robotic polar bear, Steve Jobs Kid and the week’s other geekiest videos
It's hard to beat the combination of animals and bleeding-edge technology, but that's what some of this week's hottest Internet videos have captured.
One Star Wars freak entertained himself with the squirrels overrunning his backyard by dropping a tiny light sabre on the grass and letting the squirrels do the rest: Read more
Too much social media networking: Paranoia of Big Brother surveillance may destroy ya
If you think 24/7 connectivity is nothing new for you, and you constantly check in on Foursquare, use location-aware apps, update Facebook or other social media statuses with your geo-tagged photos, then you probably have no location-awareness sharing issues and are not overly concerned if you lose locational privacy. In the year 2014, your futuristic automated smart home can update statuses for you; even more personal data will be logged coming from emerging technology; interaction with the power grid, smart meters, IP TVs, smart appliances, movie theaters harvesting emotions, robots, GPS in cars and smartphones, and products that stalk you will create a life-log. By 2014 there will be a plethora of programs, mobile apps and devices to track you that will create and store records of your movements, activities and behaviors; this is the scene that Europe's biggest cybersecurity agency studied "to predict positive and negative effects of online 'life-logging' on citizens and society." Read more
DARPA calls for powerful, secure wireless system to link space satellites
Getting a series of small satellites to communicate and act as one unit in space while taking commands from Earth-bound command centers is a gargantuan wireless task. But the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are looking for technology that does just that. Read more
Gartner: Windows Phone sales plummet while Android sales triple
Microsoft is losing what little ground it had in the smartphone market, according to the latest stats from Gartner. Ever hear of Bada? And yet that smartphone OS from Samsung sold more units and owns more of the overall worldwide market than Windows Phone. This despite massive advertising by Microsoft, the Mango update, and all the other expenditures that Microsoft has invested in its smartphone platform. Read more
IBM: Analytics, mobile, cloud, social applications will drive future IT development
It's clear by the increasing use of analytics software that companies are struggling to get their hands around the huge amounts of data it takes to run a successful business. But developing social, mobile, cloud computing and other applications are also driving the need for new technical skills. Read more
Barnes & Noble Blows The Lid Off Microsoft's Android Patent Squeeze
Just a few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft making more money from Android patent licensing fees than it does from Windows Mobile. A majority of Android manufacturers are paying Microsoft to "license" certain patents that Redmond claims the open source Android system infringes upon. Read more
Microsoft has no plans to fix months old Office 2010/WP7 sync bug
Windows Phone 7 won't sync with the 64-bit version of Office 2010. And Microsoft has no plans to fix that, the company says. Read more
US snapshot of broadband world finds disparity and dial-up
Almost seven of 10 households in the United States subscribe to broadband service while 68% of American households used broadband Internet in 2010, up from 64% in 2009 and only 3% of households still rely on dial-up access to the Internet in 2010, down from 5 percent in 2009.
Those were but a few of the interesting facts found in a snapshot of broadband use in the US released this week by the Department of Commerce and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Read more
Flash Is Dead, Somewhere Steve Jobs Is Smiling
Somewhere today Steve Jobs is smiling about Adobe's announcement that they are going to stop development of Flash for mobile platforms. Along with Steve there are plenty of my friends in the security space smiling about it as well (they are still alive though). Read more
My Nook, Minus the Book
Last month I made an impulse purchase, thanks to one of those daily deals sites. I bought a Barnes & Noble NOOK Color 8GB eReader with WiFi and 7” Touchscreen for only US$ 135. Did I need a Nook? No, but I was curious.
I'm old school when it comes to reading materials. I prefer paper, thank you very much. I like the feeling of a hardback or paperback or glossy magazine in my hands, the act of turning the page to find out what happens next, and the comfort of curling up in bed with a new novel. Read more
UPDATE: Help me name my poor nameless BlackBerry phone
UPDATE: 11/9/11:
Turns out that many of you weren't keen on my the BlackBerry names I listed in the poll below, and had ideas of your own that you entered into the Other category. These include:
Obsolete, SchwettyBerry, iberry, Dead Phone Walking, nofun, BerryScary, Boldly Go, RottenBerry, BerryBerryPhonePhone, RIMROD, Bad Bobby, iphone wannabe, Barnaby Jones (?), siri and zanadu, plus an obligatory few not fit for this family website...
iPad, iPhone and Android users to dominate online holiday shopping season
If you needed any more evidence the mobile world is just exploding look no further than an IBM study out this week that says during this year's holiday season an unprecedented 15% of people in the US logging onto a retailer's Web site are expected to do so through a mobile device. Read more
The Limits to Anytime/Anywhere
While many continue to worry about radiation exposure from handsets (I still believe that only a tiny number of people with a certain genetic proclivity have anything to fear here) and wireless security (the problem that will never be 100% solved, so go for it on that one), there's another challenge to the use of wireless communications that is surfacing with increasing frequency, and it's sociological in nature. I've argued for some time that our first duty in a civilized society is to each other, and not to ourselves. Read more
Globe Lab: The future of mainstream news?
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