Mobilog

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Hand-Held Monitor Compiles Heart Data

In these demanding digital times, what is more constant than 24/7/365? How about 72 beats a minute.

The Active Corporation, a two- year-old company in Castine, Me., has introduced a portable heart monitor planned for use with Palm hand- held devices. Called the Active ECG, the unit includes electrodes that attach to the patient, plus a cable that attaches to a Palm. The unit's case, designed by Fitch, a unit of the Cordiant Communications Group (news/quote), makes the Active ECG look more like an MP3 player than a it does a medical device.

6:06:53 PM

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Motorola Offers Push-to-Talk over Cell Data, Wi-Fi. Push-to-talk has become the must-have technology for cell phones; new Motorola equipment offers support over GPRS, 1xRTT, and WLAN: PTT provides an intercom-like service immediately, without dialing, for members of a group. Nextel owned the market until recently. Motorola's technology is in testing, and they expect to offer support over a large variety of other cell data standards, too, such as EDGE.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
5:56:32 PM

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Airespace Offers MIMO. Airespace will offer multiple-in, multiple-out antennas for its access points later this year: The Intelligent RF Access Point (IRAP) will ship third quarter, and uses the MIMO technology to extend range. MIMO was pioneered by Airgo, which has not supplied the technology for IRAP; Airgo expects to have manufacturers incorporating their MIMO reference design in the next few months. MIMO uses multiple input and output antennas to better sort out actual signal from noise, which can effectively extend range. It works best in combination with both client adapter and access point incorporating MIMO, but there are benefits for an access point by itself. Airespace is effectively either reducing the number of access points an enterprise needs (although raising its per unit price tag), or offering better overlapping coverage in the same areas increasing throughput for a network.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
5:55:40 PM

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Educational Institutions May Lose Some Spectrum. Wall Street Journal says instructional television spectrum may be resold: This interesting article looks into the FCC's exploration of reselling parts of the licensed band that's used in a very limited fashion for instructional television. While originally assigned for that purpose, only a few institutions actually use it. Institutions are allowed to sublicense 95 percent of their spectrum as long as they're broadcasting, and apparently, some groups broadcast meaningless content in order to bring in the revenue from the other licenses. The FCC is licking its lips at the sweet spot in the 2.5-2.7 GHz range that comprises ITFS/MMDS (instructional television fixed service and multichannel multipoint distribution service). Nextel, Craig McCaw, and other companies have purchased sublicenses across the band. The FCC proposal would reassign some spectrum for its own auctions, and allow educational entities to resell spectrum for new uses which could produce billions in revenue for the institutions. One scenario spun by an opponent is that California's governor could sell ITFS spectrum to help balance the state budget.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
5:54:53 PM

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Deutsche Telekom to Buy Some of Cingular's Networks in U.S.. Seeking to expand its presence in the U.S., Europe's largest phone company said today that it planned to buy wireless networks in California and Nevada for $2.5 billion. By Kenneth N. Gilpin. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
5:54:10 PM

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Siebel banks on hosted, vertical apps. NEW YORK - Under fire from large competitors, Siebel Systems Inc. is looking to offer increasingly robust hosted CRM (customer relationship management) applications as well as hybrid implementations of on-premise and on-demand software to win market share in the business applications market, according to David Schmaier, the company's executive vice president. [InfoWorld: Top News]
5:52:36 PM

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BEA Advances Liquid Computing Plan. New products, services and products are in line with the company's strategy to drive greater business integration, productivity and cost savings. [eWEEK Technology News]
5:51:52 PM

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Mobile & Wireless World: Combo Wi-FI cell phone due out by fall. Avaya, Proxim and Motorola have teamed up and plan to introduce a dual-mode Wi-FI and cellular phone this year that will require the use of an 802.11a WLAN. [Computerworld News]
5:46:57 PM

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Cingular lags rivals in high-speed wireless data. Cingular Wireless is falling behind rivals in offering high-speed mobile services that let customers view the Internet and e-mail on phones and other wireless devices. [Computerworld News]
5:44:40 PM

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Citigroup rolls out streaming media to corporate desktops. Citigroup Inc. is rolling out a system that allows it to stream live or archived digital content to about 300,000 desktop PCs and other devices such as ATMs and televisions in order to deliver market updates, training and corporate announcements to its workers. [Computerworld News]
5:44:05 PM

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Vodafone's performance is lost in translation. Mr Sarin is still a bit of an unknown quantity in the City, but I think it can safely be said he[base ']s not about to surrender shareholder value for the purpose of empire building. Much more concerning is the progressive commoditisation of mobile telephony as it becomes price competitive with fixed line methods of communication. No one[base ']s yet sure what this will do to the mobile phone industry[base ']s profitability and outlook. Full Story & Source: independent.co.uk [3G Analysis]
5:43:32 PM

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CSI's GSM/GPRS Phones. CALGARY-- CSI Wireless Inc., a designer and manufacturer of advanced... [Wireless IQ - News Feeds]
5:42:40 PM

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Electrifying Mobile Java

Motorola made a commotion with that device, getting it onstage with McNealy and others to show developers what they can do with J2ME applications. At its booth, Motorola showed off about 20 applications and services developed with its many partners.

One featured application called the CardioConnect, developed by VTTi, enables a mobile phone to display a user's heart rate in real time and to illustrate the heart beats on an animated image of the human heart. The phone can read the user's heart rate via a wireless connection to a heart monitor.

5:41:08 PM

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EKG Transmission via Mobile Telephone Sends Strong Signal to Medical Community

Vitaphone's world premiere at CeBIT America opens new horizons in tele-medicine, allowing heart patients to instantaneously send EKGs to physicians or EMTs.

5:24:33 PM

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Tearing Down the Walls in Telecom

In a few years, it "will be a sectorless industry," with phone, cable, and even power companies all selling the same communications services.
5:21:35 PM

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UMTS Goes More Universal. Analysts herald the operator interest in UMTS with Cingular's announced late summer trial powered by Lucent Technologies. Now the industry just needs more gear. [Wireless IQ - News Feeds]
5:19:38 PM

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DoCoMo's 3 Stake Dinner. NTT DoCoMo sells back its 20% stake in 3UK to Hutchison Whampoa. Meanwhile, reports fly that DoCoMo is already in talks with 3 Brit wireless players to offer DoCoMo's coveted i-Mode service. [Wireless IQ - News Feeds]
5:16:16 PM

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Wired News: Visual Gadgets of the Future. The gizmo-packed exhibition hall at the Society for Information Display's international symposium offers a tantalizing vision of what's to come. This week's meeting was all about extremes -- monitors that are very big or very small, very thin, very light and very, very high-resolution. [Tomalak's Realm]Wired News: Visual Gadgets of the Future. The gizmo-packed exhibition hall at the Society for Information Display's international symposium offers a tantalizing vision of what's to come. This week's meeting was all about extremes -- monitors that are very big or very small, very thin, very light and very, very high-resolution. [Tomalak's Realm]
5:14:25 PM

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Bells loosen their grip [CNET News.com]
5:13:27 PM

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Nomic World: By the players, for the players. [This is an edited version of the talk I gave last fall at the State of Play conference.] I'm sort of odd-man-out in a Games and Law conference, in that my primary area of inquiry isn't games but social software. Not only am I not a lawyer, I don't even spend most of my time thinking about game problems. I spend my time thinking about software that supports group interaction across a fairly wide range of social patterns. So, instead of working from case law out, which has been a theme here (and here's where I insert the "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer) I'm going to propose a thought experiment looking from the outside in. And I want to pick up on something that Julian [Dibbell] said earlier about game worlds: 'users are the state.' The thought experiment I want to propose is to agree with that sentiment, and to ask "How far can we go in that direction?" Instead of looking for the places where game users are currently suing or fighting one another, forcing the owners of various virtual worlds to deal with these things one crisis at a time, I want to ask the question "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?" I'm going to make that argument in three pieces. First, I'm going to do a little background on group structure and the tension between the individual and the group. Then I want to contrast briefly governance in real and virtual worlds. Finally I want to propose a thought experiment on placing control of online spaces in the hands of the users. - More at http://www.shirky.com/writings/nomic.html [Clay Shirky's Essays]
5:12:38 PM

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