Technology

SpareOne may be the world's most useful emergency cell phone. It debuted today at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona and runs on a single AA battery, providing up to 10 hours of talk time and 15 years (yes, years) of talk-ready stored power (based on Energizer(R) Ultimate Lithium AA battery, included with the phone.) Because AA batteries are the most widely used batteries in the world, that makes it quite useful, even in the absence of electricity.  Take that, Apple and your 'we don't want you to replace the battery ever' mentality.  SpareOne also has an emergency call button (…

88% see WiFi as a commodity that should be available everywhere but it should be super secure and it should be free.  They don't care who provides it, just like water or electricity.  Is that a business model?    Devicescape, which manages the largest virtual network of hotspots worldwide, thinks so and unveiled the results of its latest WiFi usage survey as supporting evidence. They found that 88% of consumers think of WiFi access as a ubiquitous commodity. The 200 mobile WiFi users who participated in the survey also said maintaining appropriate levels of security over…

For innovative and high-tech startups that need financing, a worldwide drought is in the offing. Coming shortage of equity investmentThe Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports a surge in early-stage entrepreneurial activity worldwide in 2011. Over 12 percent of US adults started a business in that year, compared to less than 8 percent in 2010. Entrepreneurship increased in three fourths of the developed countries GEM studied. Even in China and other countries where entrepreneurship was already high, entrepreneurial participation jumped 25% in 2011 [Klein]. Some reports show US venture…

Could someone be stealing your unpublished data? It is more likely than you might think, especially if you ever travel to other countries. Before you dismiss this as paranoia, read on. When I was a graduate student at UCSD in La Jolla, CA, there were rumors of two highly competitive labs there spying on each other including people sneaking into the room where the other lab had their weekly lab meetings to see if they could copy something off the whiteboard. We were never sure if it was happening, but it rang true. Another story I heard is of a professor who had identified a novel gene and…

Mendeley, the citation sharing tool, and the Columbia University Libraries have agreed to jointly develop a graphical and user-friendly Citation Style Language editor, which will enable academic researchers to develop their own citation styles, significantly simplifying the creation of manuscripts for publication in journals. The objective is to make the open-source tool as flexible as possible so that users can freely develop their own bibliographic styles for annotated bibliographies, personal resumes or cases where citation conventions are unnecessarily complex. The final code will be…

Rightly or wrongly, the marketing campaign for organic food has worked.  People have demonstrated that they will overpay for organic food despite their being no difference in nutritional value, the same way they will pay for homeopathy or magic crystals. But the billions that the organic food industry now generates means there is ample opportunity for fraud - and that's just wrong. If you go into Whole Foods to spend your Whole Paycheck, you should at least be assured the country of origin is what they say it is. A European research project is developing methods capable of determining…

A latest report on the Internet shows that the number of internet subscriptions in Kenya reached 4.7 million in the quarter from October to December 2010, as compared to 3.2 million at the end of the previous quarter (mostly attributed to the rolling out of 3G services). The data might be surprising, but not as surprising as the fact that GPRS/EDGE and 3G accounted for 99% of the total internet/data subscriptions during that period. Satellite and wired internet connections are as good as finished in Kenya. Smartphones are no longer just gadgets for the wealthy…

MANY TIMES I THOUGHT THAT WHAT IS THE MOST FASTEST MODE OF DATA COMMUNICATION.IS IT THE ONLY WAY TO COMMUNICATE IN BINARY UNIT. NO. FASTEST MODE OF COMMUNICATION IS TIME INTERVAL SO I AM  DOING WORK ON TIME GAP DATA COMMUNICATION WHERE WAY TO COMMUNICATE IS NOT A BINARY SYSTEM BUT A TIME GAP. BENEFIT OF USING TIME GAP INSTEAD OF BINARY SYSTEM IS THAT IT IS MORE COMPACT IT IS LESS NOISY IN COMPARISION TO THE BINARY SYSTEM. IT IS FASTER THEN THE BINARY SYSTEM. ALSO DETECTION OF BROKEN LINK IS VERY EASY.

If someone talks about WikiLeaks and admires transparency and accountability but talks about ClimateGate and talks about how the emails were illegally obtained and stresses the researchers were absolved of science misconduct, you know how they vote. And one other catchphrase claims to be a sign for the political leaning of the latest ClimateGate email provider: “Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes," a note stated when it released more emails related to ClimateGate. That means denier, says Greenpeace.  Bonus: If true, then in defiance of spin by…

As I sit here with a Cesária Évora CD on in the house, I have an update to the car AV system issue, wherein it couldn’t stop playing Bob Dylan. That is, I found out why it’s playing a disproportionate amount of Dylan. I noticed, as it played more songs, that it was not just playing a lot of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but that it wasn’t playing anything beyond “C” in the alphabet. I have the files on the microSD organized in folders (directories) based on the artists and albums, so at the root level there’s a “Bob Dylan” folder, and that has sub-folders called “Blonde On Blonde”, “Blood On the…