Cities race for wireless status
The words reached across the globe and read like a taunt: “Bangalore is going to be the second city in the world to be fully WiMax enabled, something even Silicon Valley can’t boast of.”
The Unwire Bangalore project has already run a one-square-kilometer pilot program, and has plans for a bigger test for 5,000 users over 25 square kilometers (about 10 square miles) before the end of March. The full project will roll out over 600 square kilometers (232 square miles) by the end of 2007.
Source: Sarah Jane Tribble, Mercury News, November 25, 2006
Forgot your credit card? Don’t have cash on you? No worries–just use your cell phone to pay the bill.
That’s what some folks in Boulder, Colo., can do if they sign up for an account with a Boulder-based start-up called Feed Tribes. The company’s setup lets customers pay a check using a text message. This week, the company launched its service in three Boulder locations of a restaurant chain called Noodles & Co.
Source: Marguerite Reardon, CNET News.com, November 29, 2006
Emerging technology sees through clothing
Security in airports and other sensitive areas may get a huge boost, thanks to a technology under development that is straight out of science fiction, said to be capable of looking through clothing to detect weapons and other dangerous items. But privacy advocates–and shy people–may have cause for alarm.
Millimeter-wave technology researchers at Northrop-Grumman Space Technology are developing a technology said to enable small cameras to look through clothing and other inert materials to detect weapons or other contraband.
Source: Dylan McGrath, EE Times, November 27, 2006
Screens turn taxis into new ad vehicles
What do you get when you cross a Boston taxicab with a 32-inch liquid crystal television set?
A rolling billboard that can fetch up to $1,750 a month from advertisers — and by tuning in to navigation satellites, beam a different ad based on what neighborhood or even what street a cab’s driving down.
Source: Peter J. Howe, The Boston Globe, November 29, 2006
Smart Spaces: If These Walls Could Talk
Technopundits have predicted the arrival of ’smart spaces’ for years. Your car sends a message to a robot in your kitchen, so it can have your martini ready when you arrive home in the evening. A software agent on your LAN knows not to interrupt you with a phone call — unless it’s from your boss — because you’re working on a presentation for a meeting later that day.
It’s fun to think about these scenarios, but we rarely encounter them in the real world. Who besides Bill Gates lives in an environment in which IT senses and responds to the behavior of the people in it? Your PC knows you haven’t touched it for 30 minutes, so it turns on the screensaver. That’s about it.
Source: Gary Anthes, Computerworld, November 27, 2006
Finland’s ’sexiest man’ ends romance with txt msg
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, dubbed Finland’s sexiest man, broke up by text message with the girlfriend he had met on the Internet, she said in a magazine interview.
“Matti dumped me in a text message, where he said ‘that’s it’,” Susan Kuronen told the magazine Me Naiset (Us Women) in an interview published on Friday.
Source: Reuters, via CNET News.com, December 1, 2006
FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.
Source: Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com, December 1, 2006
