Tuesday, March 12, 2002

One more time 6:37:50 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]

It didn't work! Can we talk? 6:33:23 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]

Computerworld: Wireless LANs gain over cellular. Anderson isn't alone. A growing number of U.S. localities, including the California cities of Glendale and Oakland and counties of Orange and San Diego, have embraced Wi-Fi technology as the high-speed wireless backbone of their networks. [Tomalak's Realm] The drum is slowly beating towards more and more Wi-Fi rollouts, and I think the BigCo mobile phone providers may be in serious trouble because Wi-Fi is very empowering while their offerings are tinted with lock-in. 6:20:07 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]

An overview of Windows outlining programs. 6:04:24 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]

Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco is using Palm handhelds to distribute information to students. As I was reading this article I wondered what it would take to do this with Pocket PCs. The answer is simply price, and the answer to the price problem right now is the Audiovox special that Compusa was running where they were selling 32 MB Pocket PC 2002 devices for $299. The speculation about that deal is that the Audiovox devices are being dumped to make room for the new X-scale devices from Toshiba. I really hope that is not the case because I think there is big market potential for a $299 Pocket PC. ($299 is the right price for a 32 MB device, particularly one that has two storage card slots.) Let's dig into the article a bit more. Basically the school is distributing content to the Palm handhelds using an infrared beam station. There are two issues here. First is using IR to get the content into the device. That is probably a good choice because it is simple for high school students, but it is not efficient. The beaming station can only accommodate a few students at a time, and it requires line of site. A wireless solution using Bluetooth or 802.11b would be incredibly more efficient. In fact, an 802.11b card would enable one to use the devices for much more than just pushing content. Students could use that network connection to retrieve information during lab work in class. Turning this into an 802.11b solution adds $100 more to the cost, but I think that $100 provides a bunch more functionality. (BTW, you can do infrared beam stations for Pocket PCs too. There was one set up at Chicago Comdex, though what was being beamed was an EXE file that contend all of the HTML content.) The other thing about this project that popped into my mind is that a project like this is a perfect candidate for a weblog/content management solution such as Blogger or Radio Userland. Currently one person compiles all the content that is distributed to the handhelds. That could be greatly simplified by providing a tool like Radio to each teacher, who could use the tool to directly publish their own content. Since each "weblog" is template based the teachers wouldn't have to worry about the appearance of the content. 6:04:23 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]