"emerging telephony" entries
"Privacy is protected because it is essential to liberty" – Senator Dodd blocks Telco Immunity
Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) defeated an attempt to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which provided immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program.
Lazyweb: I want an Upcoming Call Queue in my Phone
Partly as a result of Jaiku smart address book, I've been thinking about more features I'd like to see in my phone, if it were an open platform rather than a walled garden. Here's one that occurred to me yesterday: I'd love to be able to send (or sync via my calendar) a set of phone numbers for upcoming calls….
Google & IBM giving students a distributed systems lab using Hadoop
Google & IBM have partnered to give university students hands-on experience developing software for large-scale distributed systems. This initiative focuses on parallel processing for large data sets using Hadoop, an open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce. (See Tim’s earlier post about Yahoo & Hadoop) “The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel…
You Become what You Disrupt
An idea we've been exploring in advance of the Web2.0 Summit is "You become what you disrupt": What changes occur when you win a platform play, when you go from disruptive technology to a public utility? Where are the opportunities to innovate instead of regulate? What parts of "eTel" are becoming "Tel"? Where else will this happen? For example, the…
WiFi: Record Range Now 382 KM
The record for point-2-point WiFi transmission is now 382 kilometers (pdf). The transmission was made from Platillon to Aguila in Venezuela. This news comes to us via The Foundation Latin American School of Networks website. The researchers behind the project used the WRT54 Linksys router in their experiment. If they are able to make long distance connectivity work in…
SMS Servers Replacing PCs in India
Sean Blagsvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan of Microsoft Research India (blog) presented at ETel last week. They told us about some amazing work they have been doing with mobile phones and SMS servers. The SMS servers are being used to power an MSR project designed to test replacing PCs with SMS servers in the village of Warana (map). Mobile phones…
Best Phone Review. Ever.
Charlie Brooker (creator of the acidly brilliant Nathan Barley and the tart and profane parody of television programming TV Go Home) has a column for the Guardian and his most recent piece savages his Samsung E900, which he describes as "twittering handheld crapstones". An absolute must-read for anyone struggling to voice their dissatisfaction with the incumbent mobile phone industry's insipid…