Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Motorola in Mexico earlier this week announced the upcoming release of the MOTOROKR W6 handset, which hopes to combine music with a set of fitness-tracking apps. I think it sounds very cool, honestly. I am sure you can get apps like that for other gadgets, but to have it all come in one piece that's set and ready sounds like a great idea.Users can enter their name, age, sex, weight and height into a fitness app that will then create a training plan based on that information. There is also a timer that keeps track of the duration of workout and the theoretical number of calories burned. The handset can export this information into a Microsoft Excel document for tracking progress over time.
Internal memory can be expanded with a card of up to 2GB.
*~*~*
Oh Lordy.
AT&T is offering a new service that allows parents to track loved ones using their phones.
AT&T's service called FamilyMaps allows people to track the location of any cell phone on AT&T's network from a mobile phone or PC. The person being tracked receives a text message informing him or her that he or she is being watched. The service periodically informs the tracked individual that he or she is being watched.
I can hear the tweeny boppers sighing now.
The service uses satellite GPS technology and cell tower triangulation to pin-point the location of the phone. The service is not supported on prepaid or AT&T Go Phones. And the service costs $9.99 for two phones and $14.99 for up to five phones.
Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and Alltel have each been offering "tracking" services for more than a year. Sprint Nextel has even lowered the price of its service from about $10 a month to $5 a month.
What's different about these social-networking location services from the service AT&T is offering is that these other services often require those being "tracked" to also run the application on their phones.
*~*~*
Microsoft's Office team has officially announced a Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, which adds some speed, reliability, and printing improvements across the board. The major new new thing? Native support for OpenDocument files (ODF), the major format of OpenOffice.org, without a plug-in, and printing to PDF. SP2 should arrive on April 28.
*~*~*
Delegations from across the Western Hemisphere will descend upon the twin island Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago this week for the fifth Summit of the Americas. A hemispheric agenda on energy figures prominently among the issues they will be addressing.
A key component to such an approach would be the reduction and eventual elimination of the United States' 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports, as well as revision of current agricultural subsidies in the United States.
Enhanced regional collaboration on alternative fuels is a logical next step to the efforts begun by Brazil and the U.S. two years ago. However, overcoming U.S. domestic politics that have allowed debate on ethanol to be influenced by the corn lobby remains a robust hurdle for follow-through on such an initiative.
For more developments on the Summit click here >>
Labels: ATT, cell phone, Microsoft, motorola
Friday, March 27, 2009
For our young bloggers out there...
The Youth Bloggers Network is officially joining the Teens in Tech network. They have been communicating with CEO Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech over the past month or so, discussing the best course of actions for both of their endeavors to take. They decided that by joining forces, their projects could help each other vastly. They figured that YBN and TinT complement each other very nicely. TinT offers a place where teens can get set up with a free blog, while YBN offers a community for young bloggers to collaborate, communicate, and grow their blogs and projects.
*~*~*
What is WiMax?
WiMAX, is the cutting-edge network technology is the successor to Wi-Fi and is presently only open through Sprint to residents of Baltimore. However, that strictly limited availability should expand notably during 2009 and 2010 as communications giant Sprint extends its WiMAX reach to a number of major cities across the country.
"Sprint continues to lead the wireless industry by harnessing the power of WiMAX," enthused Spring 4G vice president Todd Rowley in an official statement.
"The availability of Sprint 4G in more places this year and our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G service demonstrates our commitment to provide 4G capabilities and devices nationwide for our business, consumer and government customers," he added. "These capabilities enable significantly enhanced performance and productivity for our customers."
Specifically, 2009 will see the technology rolled out in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle, while 2010 will introduce Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington D. C. into the 4G mix.
*~*~*
Looking for a BlackBerry Bold but don't want to pay the full price for one? Well, if you're willing to accept a refurbished unit, then AT&T certainly has a deal for you. The carrier is currently offering refurbished BlackBerry Bolds for free, as long as you're willing to commit yourself to a new 2-year contract. Considering that the price of a normal refurbished BlackBerry Bold is $199.99, it's quite a good deal. It seems that this promotion is only valid for a very limited time, so check it out as soon as you can.
*~*~*
Intel engineers are detailing the inner-workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.
During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.
This is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said.
The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," he said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set," he added.
He described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."
*~*~*
It looks like Blizzard is stirring the pot again for some juicy developments behind the scenes. As some of us probably know, they're currently working on (or at least maybe still in the planning stages) five games. They are, in no particular order:
* StarCraft II
* Diablo III
* a new World of Warcraft expansion
* a next-gen MMO
* and a yet to be revealed game
This last item was first hinted in a statement from Blizzard's COO, Paul Sams, back in 2006. At that time he said, "I wouldn't be surprised to see a new franchise from us at some time in the future; there's certainly a desire to do so."
Now it seems that we're getting some developments on that new game that they've yet to be revealed. Two new job postings from Blizzard indicate that they're looking for software engineers (one for gameplay, another for client) to work on "an unannounced title."
rumor has it they are talking with Microsoft about being part of the next-gen Xbox 360, which they want to be more RTS-friendly.
The Youth Bloggers Network is officially joining the Teens in Tech network. They have been communicating with CEO Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech over the past month or so, discussing the best course of actions for both of their endeavors to take. They decided that by joining forces, their projects could help each other vastly. They figured that YBN and TinT complement each other very nicely. TinT offers a place where teens can get set up with a free blog, while YBN offers a community for young bloggers to collaborate, communicate, and grow their blogs and projects.
*~*~*
What is WiMax?
WiMAX, is the cutting-edge network technology is the successor to Wi-Fi and is presently only open through Sprint to residents of Baltimore. However, that strictly limited availability should expand notably during 2009 and 2010 as communications giant Sprint extends its WiMAX reach to a number of major cities across the country.
"Sprint continues to lead the wireless industry by harnessing the power of WiMAX," enthused Spring 4G vice president Todd Rowley in an official statement.
"The availability of Sprint 4G in more places this year and our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G service demonstrates our commitment to provide 4G capabilities and devices nationwide for our business, consumer and government customers," he added. "These capabilities enable significantly enhanced performance and productivity for our customers."
Specifically, 2009 will see the technology rolled out in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle, while 2010 will introduce Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington D. C. into the 4G mix.
*~*~*
Looking for a BlackBerry Bold but don't want to pay the full price for one? Well, if you're willing to accept a refurbished unit, then AT&T certainly has a deal for you. The carrier is currently offering refurbished BlackBerry Bolds for free, as long as you're willing to commit yourself to a new 2-year contract. Considering that the price of a normal refurbished BlackBerry Bold is $199.99, it's quite a good deal. It seems that this promotion is only valid for a very limited time, so check it out as soon as you can.*~*~*
Intel engineers are detailing the inner-workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.
During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.
This is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said.
The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," he said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set," he added.
He described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."
*~*~*
It looks like Blizzard is stirring the pot again for some juicy developments behind the scenes. As some of us probably know, they're currently working on (or at least maybe still in the planning stages) five games. They are, in no particular order:
* StarCraft II
* Diablo III
* a new World of Warcraft expansion
* a next-gen MMO
* and a yet to be revealed game
This last item was first hinted in a statement from Blizzard's COO, Paul Sams, back in 2006. At that time he said, "I wouldn't be surprised to see a new franchise from us at some time in the future; there's certainly a desire to do so."
Now it seems that we're getting some developments on that new game that they've yet to be revealed. Two new job postings from Blizzard indicate that they're looking for software engineers (one for gameplay, another for client) to work on "an unannounced title."
rumor has it they are talking with Microsoft about being part of the next-gen Xbox 360, which they want to be more RTS-friendly.
Labels: ATT, blackberry, blizzard, blogging, graphic, intel, sprint, wimax, WoW
Friday, May 2, 2008
May 5 is a very crucial date for AT&T, as the company will begin offering their mobile TV service to 58 markets in the US, which include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, DC and more. Acronyms galore!
AT&T will be offering TV programs produced by leading US news and entertainment brands including CBS Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Fox Mobile, NBC 2Go among others.
A $15 per month Basic package will give customers unlimited access to Mobile TV and AT&T’s exclusive special concert channel, CNCRT. In addition, there is a limited basic package which costs $13 a month, this package will give you access to only four channels though - CBS Mobile, FOX Mobile, NBC 2Go and NBC News 2Go.
If they're all about expanding and have the money to do so, then I suggest they have better training programs for their customer service reps.
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