Although cloud technology has been around for a few years, it wasn’t fully developed and commercialized until recently. Three major competitors have emerged in the cloud market; Apple, Google, and Amazon. These three companies seem to be taking the cloud world by storm and are attracting new customers left and right. Cloud services allow users to upload files to the “cloud” to be stored instead of on their devices.

They can then access the files from their mobile devices or computers. Apple provides users with their “iCloud” service while Google provides users with “Google Play” and Amazon has their “Cloud Drive”.

Google Play Review:

My personal favorite player in the Cloud industry has to be Google’s new Google Play. It has worked flawlessly for me thus far and has great deals every day. Popular albums and books are extremely cheap when on sale.

So what are the most useful aspects of clouds? They for one save users large amounts of space on their devices, especially mobile devices where space can be scarce. Clouds can also provide wireless syncing of contacts, email, and multimedia which is very convenient and eliminates the need for clumsy sync cables. Clouds allow access to your content from anywhere.

This especially comes in handy when you are away or need a document for business. You can simply log on to the nearest computer and download whatever you need, instantly. Another question users may ask is regarding the cost of these cloud services. Apple doesn’t charge extra for their iCloud service but they do require that you have updated Apple devices in order to use the service.

Google Play is a completely free service and can be accessed from any device or computer. It even lets users let their friends listen to their music for free! Amazon’s Cloud Drive service is free for the first 5gb of storage used and can also be accessed from any computer. There are many questions associated with this new cloud technology but the biggest question is how high will you go with the innovative cloud services.

Interestingly, the bottom line decline in growth was even more pronounced than initially predicted, with a drop of 7% being reported as total revenues increased by just 1% to $399.2 billion. GfK reported that 1.3 billion smartphones were sold around the world in 2015, and while this generated a sizable turnover it below even conservative expectations for the market as a whole. GfK had predicted that growth would fall by a minimal amount of 14%, but this was more than double the final rate recorded.

So despite a record financial quarter in terms of sales volumes and revenues, the smartphone market has clearly hit a wall in terms of growth and innovation. This is no surprise, even when you account for the huge range of handsets and branded smartphones that are available in the current marketplace. Many of the mobile upgrades that we see during the course of the year are nominal at best, while the range of available features has scarcely improved or diversified over the course of the last year or so.

Even the rise of online gaming has not been able drive higher levels of growth in the smartphone market. While casino outlets offer innovative gaming platforms and informative resources such as this ‘how to play roulette’ feature, the handsets themselves do not offer unique selling points or value propositions.

This is in contrast with the tablet market, which has far greater novelty appeal (particularly for gamers) while these devices feature a wide array of more specific features. This market has yet to peak or reach its zenith, meaning that it may well make up ground on smartphones over the course of the next five years.

One such feature is RIM’s BlackBerry financial wallet, which is now available to the public on any BlackBerry device that is compatible with the latest BlackBerry OS 7. The wallet app is designed to speed up the checkout process for mobile purchases by keeping track of financial and banking information.

For example, the app can remember card numbers, billing information and delivery addresses, in addition to login information and reward schemes for retail websites. Since the invention of Internet commerce, companies have worked to develop and improve the process of electronic payment to be as seamless as possible: no cash, no coins, no filling out checks, no typing, and no storing credit card numbers.

“Mobile commerce is beyond the mobile wallet and there is a tremendous opportunity for brands to go beyond the buyer/supplier relationship,” O’Neill said. “Brands can now have a holistic view of the customer and serve them in an entirely new way, offering rich context based experiences.”

And RIM is not the first company to pick up on mobile commerce. Google also has a wallet app similar to the BlackBerry Wallet and other big name companies such as eBay, Apple, Visa and MasterCard are advancing their digital wallets in hopes of nabbing a share of the soon-to-be lucrative market. With these advancements, smartphone users—no matter what service provider—will be better able to handle spontaneous purchases and frequent online shopping.

O2 has branched out further into the provision of free advertising funded wi-fi by signing a five year deal with McDonalds to provide the free internet access in tehir 1,200 UK restaurants, users will have to sign up initially via a straight forward procedure and will then be able to access the service from the participating restaurants UK wide and any other O2 Wi-Fi hotspot.

The fact that users will primarily be signing up with their mobile devices means that their will be some advertising funded occasional promotional messages and texts to fund this offer.

“O2 announced its Wi-Fi rollout in January of 2011, along with an advertising-supported model that requires users to sign up with their mobile phone numbers to receive “relevant, timely content”.

Wi-Fi on the go:

McDonald’s had introduced free Wi-Fi back in 2007 working with The Cloud and BT Openzone, but teh fast fodo chain wants to promote a nationwide network of free and high speed wi-fi access poinst at their restairants.

Gavin Franks, managing director of O2 Wi-Fi.

“This announcement builds on the significant partnerships already secured by O2 Wi-fi in the past 12 months, enabling millions of people the length and breadth of the UK to access the internet for free whilst on the move,”

This new partnership builds on existing relationships that O2 have fostered with large UK businesses and councils such as House of Fraser, Mitchells and Butler (pub chain) and The Borough of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.

McDonald’s hopes that the O2 deal will raise network quality above what they currently expect, and with some 750,000 patrons regularly logging on, there does need to be some consideration to the future capacity as these figures are growing.

McDonald’s UK IT director Mark Fabes states:

“Recent figures showed that a staggering 750,000 McDonald’s customers are logging on in our restaurants each month and we are always looking for ways to improve our customer experience,”.

Source: TechWeekEurope

Apple’s new iPad is out and in circulation among the public, but many question whether it’s any different from its predecessor, the iPad 2.

When comparing the two models side by side, there are in fact subtle differences, the main difference between the two models is the new retina display on the new iPad and the increased battery life.

The new retina screen on the new iPad is revolutionary.

When comparing the two screens, a user can differentiate between the two. The new iPad has 4 times the amount of pixels than the iPad 2.

Retina Display:

If a user looks closely they can see the difference in the sharpness and clarity around icons and text. The retina display has more pixels than most HD tv’s.

The battery in the new iPad is the other biggest difference between the new iPad and the iPad 2, The new battery can power the device for 10 hours and with the LTE turned on, 9 hours.

The new iPad is barely larger than the iPad 2 so the increase in battery life is quite an achievement. There are speculations surrounding possible new battery technology in the new iPad battery.

Although the new battery and screen are achievements, the complaints towards the excessive heat of the device have overshadowed the positives.

The device has been known to get up to 116 degrees and has caused consumers to become very uncomfortable. According to rumors, the cause of the excessive heat happens to be coming from the new AX5 processor in the new iPad.

So considering the lack of major differences between the iPad 2 and new iPad and the overheating issue, I would say that it is not worth it to invest in the new iPad. I would much rather spend less money on the iPad 2 and not have my hands burned then enjoy a new screen. Please leave thoughts and comments below.

The Wi-Fi contract for the London Underground that has been the target for a number of companies has been awarded to Virgin Media, giving them permission to install their services at 120 stations.
The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is committing to providing the Wi-Fi service to 80 of the stations as a minimum by the time July comes around for the 2012 Olympic Games. The service will be free to use for all passengers whilst on the platforms but not on carriages.

How long will the Free access last?

Despite the fact that the Wi-Fi access will be free to all customers during the period of the 2012 Olympic games the ISP have no intentions of letting that remain. Once the games have come to an end the service will only be accessible through two methods currently on the table, one of which is as you would expect if you are a Virgin Media customer you get access free of charge and the second option is a pay-as-you-go “contract”.

A spokesperson from the ISP has mention it is also looking into other options to grant access to people through renting out the equipment it is due to install to other providers.

Boris Barks:

“It’s vital that we harness the massive opportunities stemming from the digital revolution, by creating a vibrant, world class industry to attract investment and create jobs for Londoners,”

said Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

“Millions of passengers will now be able to connect to their work, friends or access the latest news and travel information whilst on the move. This is a fabulous new and free resource which will be in place from this summer when London is being showcased on a global stage and playing host to millions.”

The CEO of Virgin Media Meil Berkit said that the company’s fibre optic infrastructure will be the key component to the service.

“We’ll help people make the most of the city and will continue to evolve the service, ensuring everyone can benefit from a service London will be proud of,”

Berkett added.

There had been a lot of competition for the contract, of which claims had been made that it was dropped in 2011. Huawei was the initial front runner with an offer of £50 million to setup the Wi-Fi. It would seem though that they have been beaten by Virgin Media.

GFI Software commissioned a survey on how 200 small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) feel the volume of spam received has changed. The overall response that they got was that the volume of spam is still increasing or at least remaining the same.

The more concerning fact of this is that 40 percent of UK Businesses have gone through data breaches due to spam and the files and links they contain.

From the 200 businesses that took part in the survey 86 percent of IT decision makers said that the level of spam they have been receiving over the past year has only gone up or remained around the same level. The survey revealed the 46 percent of SMBs rely upon anti-spam features of their antivirus to stop the spam from getting through to their inboxes but 70 percent of the total number of business that took the survey said the protection is minimal at best. Over 20 percent use anti-spam gateway devices in conjunction with their mail servers, a fifth use specialist software, and a small 7.5 percent use cloud solutions to combat spam.
92 percent of people in the North West of region of the UK complain about spam more than any other, the South West and Wales are on the lower end of the scale with just 66 percent. The area that has been most affected by Spam and breaches relating to it is London with 56 percent who took the survey having under gone a compromise due to spam.

Phil Bousfield, general manager of GFI Software’s Infrastructure Business Unit said:

“This research shows that the spam problem is not going away, and in fact, the delivery of malicious links and files makes it more dangerous than ever before…Businesses need to respond by taking advantage of all the latest spam-fighting technologies available to them.”

Multi-layered approach to spam defence:

A multi-layered approach to spam defence is the strongest way to combat it with Antivirus components play an effective part of it despite not being the best when running on its own.

“The increasing volume of email-borne threats – coupled with an organisation’s need to balance security and infrastructure costs – is a growing burden on IT administrators looking to find the optimum and most cost-effective approach to email security,” added Bousfield. “Cloud-based anti-spam solutions are increasingly being deployed by businesses to bolster their existing email defence and stop spam from even entering the network.”

The Company Extreme Networks have a new initiative to address the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend and the security threats it brings with it. The initiative includes new Ethernet Switches; a access point and identity management features that are both for wired and wireless technologies.

The Intelligent Mobile Edge Strategy is designed to help IT administrators who are on one-hand trying to protect the network and the data stored on it but also grant access to employees who are using their own mobile devices.

The issue BYOD posses:

David Ginsburg, Extreme’s chief management officer, says that the key issues faced by companies is the continuously growing trend of BYOD is Security and management.
“Organisations are allowing their employees to access the enterprise via personal devices at a rapidly increasing rate,” Ginsburg said in a statement. “This trend has put enterprise mobility on the fast track, yet IT departments are still grappling with how to cope.”

The Intelligent Mobile Edge initiative is designed to provide IT administrators and professionals alike the assistance they need.

As the BYOD trend gains more momentum the number of businesses that are adapting their IT systems to accommodate this is up to 60 percent, according to a report from Avande. Nearly 90 percent of business leaders understand that employees use personal devices for work, 65 percent of C-level executives have acknowledged that BYOD is a high priority for their companies.

“Despite the notion that business leaders are resisting the shift, we found that companies are investing in staff and resources to enable the consumerisation of IT and have many of the resources that are needed today,”

Said Tyson Hartman (Avanade CTO) when they released the report.

Extreme have joined the competition between networking vendor that are looking to offer methods of making the use of employee owned devices on corporate networks. The competition ranges from Juniper Networks all the way through to Cisco systems.

The Intelligent Mobile Edge product range is offering Summit X440 Gigabit fixed switches running ExtremeXOS. These switches include 10 models offering from 8 to 48 ports in a 1U configuration and mix and match stacking to give a more controlled approach to managing switches and identify awareness.

The Wing 5 Architecture

Along with the switches mentioned above, Extreme are also producing a WLAN portfolio know as the WM3000 series of which is based upon the WiNG 5 architecture produced by Motarola.

Extreme, through its Ridgeline management platform, is giving businesses increased identity-aware controls and policy enforcement capability on top of the feature to identify the devices currently connected to the network. The software can apply security and adept resources to new devices and manage key capabilities when influxes of devices are connecting.

Extreme say that the smart identity management capabilities can be applied across LAN, WLAN, 3G and the new 4G network environments providing the ability to actively manage employee devices. Access to the network is based on Active Directory, Radius and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

Almost everyone has access to a cell phone, and the majority of those people have unlimited or very cheap text messaging. While SMS is a great platform for communication with friends, family, and coworkers, there are some other really fun uses that you may not know about. Playing games, updating your personal productivity system, and sending emails are all very real possibilities using nothing but text messaging or BlackBerry.com instant messaging.

There are a variety of games available for use via texting. There are the obvious ones, like playing simple word games. Chess wizards the world over use text messaging to show their moves remotely. There are even some gaming services available that allow you to compete against friends by comparing knowledge of trivia.

Thumb Flurry:

Another fun and innovative game for text messaging is called Thumb Flurry. One person sends out a text with a long message to 2 or more other people – often a quote, a funny phrase, or other passage. The goal is for the recipients to re-type the message back as fast as possible, without any mistakes. A mistake may result in time being added to the score, or even disqualification from the round depending on the rules.

If productivity is more your style, it can be very rewarding to set up text message entries and alerts to your favorite app. This way, you can add to your shopping or to-do list while on the go, or even receive alerts at certain times of the day via text message. These services are common to most online productivity suites, including Remember the Milk, Google Apps, and Evernote.

Sending an email using your phone's text messaging features can be another fun way to keep in touch with others. People from the older generation who may be just entering the world of email may not have a phone with text messaging abilities yet. This is a great way to send texts to them.

Many phone providers have this capability built-in, but if you're not sure how to use it, you may need to contact the company your service is through. Usually there is a default phone number that emails can be sent to, with the email address and subject line separated by the '#' symbol.

There are a lot of unexpected little uses for SMS and text messaging. Games, email, and productivity reminders can all bring a little bit of extra fun and usefulness to a BlackBerry or other mobile phone.

Thanks to their new integrated security platform: Security Intelligence and Risk Management (SIRM) HP are looking to give enterprises a better view of what is happening across their more traditional mobile and cloud environments. They claim that through the use of this new SIRM service, businesses will be able to apply more flexible and adaptive security defences that are based around organisational risk that are unique to the business sector they work in.

Getting into the Security Race:

As HP aim to play a bigger role in the security market, they have come to realise that many organisations are under more and more pressure to ensure that their security systems can keep up with the ever increasing pace that is coming and many are struggling.

The rapid increase in popularity of Smart Phones, Tablet PC’s, Cloud based applications and storage is making organisations extend their infrastructure outside of their boundaries of security to protect the new areas that employees are working in, as the term bring your own device (BYOD) is becoming more well known.

Believing that its Security Intelligence and Risk Management can bridge the gap between the IT operations and security HP say that it is “helping organisations to move beyond a bolted-on, single-purpose product strategy.” The key significance of SIRM is that due to HP’s acquisition of ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint, to form the HP Security Products group last year, the system integrates the products that came with the purchases.

As an example, HP says that the HP EnterpriseView tool provides a dashboard to C-level Executives with a ‘heat-map’ the shows a prioritised view of risks across the enterprise. The view provides security executives with the ability to actively address high risks and deploy adaptive defences as rapidly as possible.

Along with EnterpriseView, HP Application Security Monitor (AppSM) is able to provide visibility into application security and increases the rate at which monitoring can be setup by reducing the requirement and cost of producing custom programming required.

HP Mobile Application Security protects the mobile applications through the use of line-of-code precision which identifies any potential security vulnerabilities on both the Android and Apple iOS.

The Risk of Cloud:

The risks that are associated with the use of cloud technology have also been taken into account by HP with their offering of HP Cloud Connections Partner Programme; this gives the management the ability to track user activity in Software-as-a-Service environments
To top it all off the HP compliance stack helps ensure physical, virtual and cloud systems meet compliance requirements of its customers.

The enterprise-class systems from HP don’t come with a cheap price tag given the nature of them.

HP EnterpriseView (Starting at): £157,569

HP AppSM (Per Applications Server): £3,151

If anyone were to ask me for my prediction as to which technology market will have the largest growth in the next year, I would answer Internet TV.

Internet TV is a relatively new concept in the technological world and it is growing fast.

People are getting tired of paying for TV services when they can get most of their shows and movies through sources online or Internet TV Devices, these sources are cheaper and more convenient to users who can access whatever content they’d like at whatever time they’d like for little or no money at all.

My favorite way to enjoy Internet TV is through my Roku. Roku is an Internet TV device similar to Apple TV that allows for streaming of multiple services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, Crackle, and the new Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Options for Internet TV:

Roku is cheap and certainly gets the job done, it is small, portable, and provides flawless streaming. Although my Roku is my favorite choice of Internet TV Devices, there are many more including Apple TV and the developing Google TV.

No matter which device you use, Internet TV provides many unique features that will propel it above and beyond traditional TV providers. It allows you to have any media you want at your command. Most Internet TV Devices allow users to access not only TV shows and movies, but music, games, and photos.

These devices can turn any average living room into a multimedia center. My favorite times to use my Internet TV Device is for when I’m hosting parties, having a movie night with friends, or to catch up on my favorite shows. TV is one of the last remaining areas of technology that hasn’t fully adapted to the internet, now is its time. Please leave your thoughts below.

Apple recently announced that it’s newest OSX, Mountain Lion, will be released this summer. There will be many new additions to its predecessor, OSX Lion, which include:

[arrowlist]

• iCloud Improvements
• Messages Feature
• Reminders
• Notes
• Notification Center
• Share Sheets
• Game Center
• Gatekeeper Security

[/arrowlist]

Many of the new features come directly from the iPad.

Apple has actually publicly stated that Mountain Lion is based on the iPad, just as OSX Lion was. This time Apple has merged more of the features of the iPad over to the new OSX, bringing the merging between iOS and OSX closer than ever.

When reviewing all of the new features available in Mountain Lion, I have come to the question of, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”.

I’m not entirely sure whether Mountain Lion is based upon iOS or OSX, as the OS appears almost more like iOS than OSX itself.

Deeper convergence of features between mobile and desktop O/S:

The messages feature allows you to send a message to any Apple mobile device, something that has never been done on a computer operating system before. Reminders and the Notification Center give you constant updates throughout your day and closely resemble a mobile device, and the Game Center allows Mac users to game with other Apple mobile devices.

Apple is slowly merging iOS and OSX together, and Mountain Lion is a big step towards that apparent goal. I am very intrigued by this push for a merge.

This has never been done fully in the technology world. Mobile operating systems have always been separate and inferior to their computer counterparts, but now it is almost as if the tables have been turned.

Mobile operating systems are creeping their way into the computer world, this can also be seen in Microsoft’s Windows 8 which I have had the privilege of testing.

Windows 8 looks exactly like a Windows Phone with additional features. Just as Mountain Lion appears to be modeled after the iPad, Windows 8 appears to be modeled after the Windows Phone.

Will this mobile to computer merge ever be complete?

Feel free leave your own thoughts below.

An intern who found a place working at Apple has shown how the Cupertino based corporation are potentially seeking to make a shift with OSX based devices to an ARM chipset, kicking the relatively recent move to Intel in 2005/6 into touch.

The interns name is Tristan Schaap who was seemingly involved in a 12 week internship with Apple at their “platforms technology group” in 2010, and while doing this internship at Apple, managed to put down enough information based in the work to create a thesis, this was loosely based on making the “lower half” of Mac OSX work on an ARM processor.

Submitted in 2010 but only just release due to its content, the report seems to suggest that Apple could be looking to shift their desktop/laptop processors to the power saving ARM option, however Tim Cook would lead us to believe otherwise by saying that if you want an ARM based macbook go get an iPad.

But who knows where Apple will go with their processors, in some ways a unified processor option makes sense and in other areas it looks less significant.

Apps drive convergence:

All this talk of unifying Apple processors does have some reasoning behind it though when you see just how similar Mountain Lion is to iOS compared to earlier versions of the desktop operating system.

In a very recent interview in the WSJ Tim Cook talks about how OSX and iOS are morphing in ways that seem natural:

“We see that people are in love with a lot of the apps and functionality here,…so, anywhere where it makes sense, we are going to move that over to Mac.”

And with the release of Mountain Lion, OSX makes no bones about wanting to be more iOS like in its functionality and overall look and feel, and will extend the iPad like functionality that saw gesture control features and integrated apps ported into OSX Lion more than in previous incarnations of the wonderfully slick operating system.

I look forward to giving it a try!

As much as I dislike BT in many ways, I can not help but sense that they are the only ones looking to invest some real time and money into the roll out of 4G across the UK, this includes first of all giving UK customers a decent Wi-Fi experience, and with this in mind it seems that they have now hit a milestone of 3.5 million public Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK and Republic Of Ireland….mainly donated by you of course!

Those hotspots by location:

[arrowlist]

• 380,000 in London
• 25,000 in Leeds
• 25,000 in Birmingham
• 20,000 in Manchester
• 20,000 in Edinburgh
• 20,000 in Sheffield
• 11,000 in Liverpool
• 11,000 in Brighton
• 11,000 in Bristol
• 11,000 in Cardiff
• 320,000 in Scotland
• 170,000 in Wales

[/arrowlist]

BT’s consumer managing director John Petter said:

“Millions of BT broadband customers are enjoying free access to one of the biggest Wi-Fi networks in the world,”

With over 900,000 downloads for the BT hotspot app that finds the nearest connection suitable for your mobile device (to paying BT customers) it woudl seem to be a success in terms of numbers, but is the experience any good?

Well reports are mixed but I have to say fair play to the company, at least they are trying to push technology where others are more cautious in a share and share a like kind of manner….who cares so long as it works.

The hotspots are currently free to BT’s six million home and business broadband subscribers and the new BlackBerry App will provide users with easier hotspot login. BT has released apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices which locate and connect customers to their nearest BT hotspot.

You can now ever get Wi-Fi underground at Charing Cross as a subterranean trial gets under way as well as 100 pubs in the London area after a deal with Heineken.

Are you happy to let your own BT wireless connection be used as part of the growing network in order to get your free access?

Windows phone 8 will be an operating system that brings a whole host of technologies the mobile sector has been looking forward to seeing, one step closer.

According to Paul Thurrotts’s excellent blog over at WinSuperSite the news of the leak has meant that he can now talk more openly about what we can expect from the Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8 operating system.

In term so of applications it has been noted that at the expected time of launch the Windows phone 7.5 operating system will have some 100,000 apps available and these will all be backward compatible for the new Windows Phone 8 operating system meaning that new devices will be able to tap into this existing application market with no problems (in theory of course)

Talking of Windows Phone 8, he also states that this new O/S will be based on the new Windows 8 kernel and not on the previous version called Windows CE, all this falls into the realms of “Windows Reimagined” and by god did it need some reimagining after various attempts to create a solid, sleek and useful operating system has essentially failed on so many occasions.

So onto the key new features of Windows Phone 8:

[arrowlist]

• Wallet: Apollo will support removable microSD card storage and NFC radios, with Microsoft pushing contactless payments also referred to as the “Wallet experience.”
• App-to-App communication. Because Windows Phone 8 apps, like Windows 8 apps, are sandboxed from each other, this new system will provide a Windows 8 contracts-like app-to-app communications capabilities.
• Data Smart. Will switch you to cheaper Wi-Fi networks that you may have joined automatically thus in theory saving you MB’s and also money if your data provider charges a lot and you run out of your quota monthly.
• Internet Explorer 10 Mobile. Windows Phone 8 will use to use a version of IE which utilizes the latest web technologies.
• Shared components with Windows 8. The kernel, multi-core processor support, sensor fusion, security model, network, and video and graphics technologies are all coming to Phone from Windows 8.
• Companion experiences with Windows 8. Microsoft is offering a very similar user experience across phone (Windows Phone 8), PC (Windows 8), and TV (Xbox vNext). Pocketnow says there will be a new sync client, and not Zune PC software, though I can’t confirm that part, and a set of common cloud services that will work across all three. This includes the ability to sync content (photos, music, movies) between the three screens, phone management from PC or web, shared content between each device, and Xbox LIVE games, entertainment, and more.
• Skype app. Still a separate but better app and not integrated into OS. Still optional.
• Camera improvements. New “lens apps” and a far more powerful camera experience.
• SkyDrive integration. SkyDrive will allow access to all content on your Microsoft platforms.
• NFC and Wallet. Windows Phone 8 will allow users to securely pay and share via NFC and manage an integrated Wallet experience.
• Business features. A new angle that Windows wish to push more and more, Windows Phone 8 will include full-device, hardware-accelerated encryption with BitLocker and always-on Secure Boot capabilities, just like Windows 8. Also, it will support additional Exchange ActiveSync policies and System Center configuration settings and inventory capabilities. Businesses will be able to distribute phone apps privately as they can with Windows 8 apps.
• Local Scout. Now with personal recommendations.

[/arrowlist]

What do you think of this feature list?

Some of it appears pretty much as you would expect from a modern cross platform operating system that will compete with iOS/Android, though perhaps some areas are starting to look quite juicy such as the NFC capability which I will return to at a later date.

Your thoughts? What appeals most with Windows Phone 8 so far?

According to a report in techweekeurope IBM now targeting the mobile enterprise market with more fervor, perhaps awakened by the BYOD (bring your own device) trend, we take a look at what the technology giant will be doing in this niche in years to come.

Security issues and more:

With more and more people accessing data via their mobile devices for the companies they work for, IBM have seen that there is a gap in the market for a service that will ensure that all mobile devices accessing company data will have a management system wrapped around them that will ensure that sensitive data remains safe when needed.

All but Research In Motions Blackberry O/S is supported in terms of mobile operating systems, perhaps leading some to think that this is a cunning move from IBM who are looking to team up with HTC to enter the mobile enterprise device market as direct competitors to RIM who have already captured this market more than most in terms of devices sold and presence of mind.

Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Mobile Platform said:

“The new offering from IBM will help organisations manage personal and enterprise-owned mobile phones and tablets across IT networks in order to minimise risk, increase productivity and enhance innovation,”

The endpoints in question are as expected: tablets, smartphones, laptops, desktop PCs and servers.

Talking of the Big fix software acquisition back in 2010 IBM stated:

“BigFix will really help us fulfill what is really a critical need for many of our clients, and that is dealing with the endpoints that make up the core point of access for many of their IT systems and services,”

Adding mobile onto their acquisition of the Big Fix software in 2010, which was designed to remotely manage desktops, secure servers, laptops and POS devices, the addition of a mobile centric endpoint manager brings the circle of demand to a close for most organisations who need to consider these kind of issues internally with the growth of mobile device use.

So what can you do with this mobile endpoint manager:

[arrowlist]

• Identifying potential data compromises
• Selectively wipe data from compromised devices
• Enforce passcode policies and encryption on devices
• Configured to require employees to use a VPN when accessing the enterprise network
• IT staff will be able to identify devices that are not complying with corporate policies and take appropriate action
• This could be in the form of denying email access or by issuing notifications to the user device as a reminder on what remedial steps need to be performed

[/arrowlist]

With young professionals and college students preferring to lose their wallet than their mobile devices, according to a Cisco funded poll, it is clear to see that the world of business needs to wake up to the importance we bestow our mobile devices, and the sheer amount of private data they contain.

IBM are also reported to have purchased an Israeli mobile technology firm called Worklight who specialise in smartphone and tablet software, which is hoped will help speed up the entrance IBM are making into a solution that will provide their clients with a platform that will allow control over multiple devices mobile and fixed.

According to a semi-recent blog post by Photobucket who are now independent again after leaving the internet innovation killing clutches of News Corp and detailed in an article on The Next Web.

Photobucket’s most recent report, based on the earlier method of data collection above was compiled in December of 2011 and has shown that the rise in mobile video uploads as well as mobile photography has been consistent as expected.

*Kodak should perhaps be taking note if they are to ever think about releasing any more digital cameras, dont.

Using thier 100 million subscribers, Photobucket also delivered data shared via an infographic below that highlights how people are using their mobile device and photobucket in general, this makes for interesting reading and in particular shows that we not only use our mobile more as a capturing device but we are also getting more content uploaded in general as us humans seemingly must find the choice of device much easier than whipping out a camera to use, this make a lot of sense.

Why mobile phones are so good for taking pictures:

As a semi professional photographer who gets roped into doing good friends wedding pictures quite happily, I know that this heading is against ‘purist’ photographer mentality.

But it is true that mobile devices are great for picture taking and the infographic highlights this…why?

A number of reasons:

One, mobile devices are pretty much always with us and can be ready to take pictures in a few seconds maximum.

And also because there are cool applications that make your pictures look trendy, encouraging people to take shots and apply some effects from the likes of apps like instagram etc and then upload to facebook, photobucket, whatever they wish.

Though it is also intriguing to note that consolidation seems to be taking place and I can only imagine this is as people are getting tired of spreading their content around thinly and now only focus (ha ha ha) on a few photo sharing sites.

Android and Apple rule mobile uploads:

According to “internal data” not verified here at Mobile Inquirer Photobucket sees 25% of mobile content being uploaded from Apple devices and the remaining from Android devices, yes the full 75%.

I wonder if Windows users just have no inherent creative talent or a lack of friends in general…oh I forgot they are always busy fixing stuff.

CEO of Photobucket Tom Munro states:

“We saw explosive growth in mobile in 2011; in fact, we topped 10 million mobile downloads to end the year,”

Sharing very popular:

We know that sites such as Facebook have become great big repositories of crappy photos from drunken nights out and such like, but photobucket is also in on the game here with their applications such as Snapbucket being used more and more by snap happy users, thus allowing the sharing of content to a wider audience via this technology.

With Google photos looking to get in on the game we wait to see what will happen in this dynamic field of technology.

Enjoy the infographic:

You may or many not have heard of Davos, it is a small municipality in the region of Prättigau/Davos in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland, and is home to the World Economic Congress which is a kind of forum/think tank of the powerful and mighty of global politics and business.

And what was the talk of this years Davos?

Ever so slightly in the face of the usual mobile technology articles that appear on mobile inquirer, this piece still relates to mobile technology, but has more to do with health…read on.

The world’s first mobile semiconductor-based gene sequencer:

Showcasing at Davos, this machine will offer mobile DNA sequencing and is based on its already very popular and larger older brother.

DNA sequencing is often termed the Code Of life and this machine will compute this with so much speed that Doctors will be able to assess a patients “issues” within minutes by accessing the devices data which after analysing a patients DNA, then suggests exactly what the problem is and allows the doctor to quickly deliver a suggested course of action to prevent issues such as disease progression, giving precious time to patients and health officials in general.

The new machine on show at Davos is a smaller version of an already available desktop semiconductor-based gene sequencer machine.

Superbugs quickly discovered:

There are many cases that would benefit form a very quick identification as to the strain of disease, for instance super bugs that plague health officials in hospitals or areas in general will be able to use the technology to discover the strain much sooner than currently allows meaning that treatment and an effective remedy to remove these would be in place quicker, potentially saving lives and money in the process.

Mobile DNA sequence testers:

In an even more amazing sounding development to the technology, it is suggested that the DNA sequencer will be able to be brought “in the field” using a mobile version which will be able to identify new viruses or test water quality in the open and in areas that are perhaps more difficult to get to.

Crime DNA tester:

Police officials will also benefit from the technology which will be able to quickly develop a potential suspects DNA profile saving potential time and allowing a team to focus on areas that would have perhaps taken a lot longer to assimilate.

Who is the DNA master then?

The man behind this technology is a German called Jonathan Rothberg, he is the master biotechnician and CEO of Ion Torrent, a company that is owned by US based Life Technologies who also produce the Ion Proton, the worlds first semiconductor-based gene sequencer.

Talking of the technology Rothberg says:

“It’s the first machine that can do an entire human genome for less than 1,000 dollars. It’s the first machine than can read the genome in two hours,”

With this new technology DNA samples are simply dropped onto a microchip of only an inch across, and then placed into the Proton which is similar to placing a SIM card into your phone, two hours later when the computational genius has worked its magic the 6 billion letter code of life is delivered.

Indeed the technology is so damn cool that the folks at Davos 2012 appear to have treated Jonathon Rothberg as a rock star of science such was the general gloomy topics covered by most of the attendees there.

Talking to AFP in Davos of the technology Rothberg continues…

“…previously machines would cost more than half a million dollars and it would take weeks to get information on your genome, the Proton instrument is designed to do discovery — find new genes that are involved in cancer, find new genes that are involved in autism, find new genes that are involved in diabetes, but it’s also designed to be used in a clinical practice to make sure that you give the person the right medicine or the right medicine to the right person. And to help diagnose new born children with ailments.”.

Technology based on larger model prior to desktop version:

As is usual in technology the predecessor was a more expensive and larger model that pretty much did the same thing, already the worlds best selling DNA sequencer, this earlier device was responsible for helping Germans figure out what strain of Ecoli broke out last year from food contaminated with the disease, the ability of the original printer sized device to track and work out what superbug they were dealing with is thought to have saved many lives.

“It was the precursor to this machine and one of the first chips we made that decoded that E.coli outbreak and allowed us to understand that superbug, track that superbug and have a diagnostic for that superbug.”

It is unique in being the only machine that uses a semiconductor to sequence genes, where previously any one looking to do research on DNA strands would have had to look through very powerful microscopes and work in this manner.

With many many areas of use for this technology, the main one that people are so excited about is health, and just how much this kind of technology can aid areas where outbreaks of disease are common.

I may start a site all to do with smartphone battery problems such is the current trend to moan about how long our poor mini laptops last.

*I am wholeheartedly one of those people.

2nd update to solve problem:

So now it seems Nokia have again released an update aimed at solving the Nokia Lumia 800 battery problems that have plagued so many new Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 7 device owners.

One of the main issues that Nokia acknowledged at the back end of 2011 was that the device was not reporting the full capacity of the battery.

Some other improvements are mentioned and they include performance improvements such as “Wi-Fi connectivity enhancements” though it is unclear if there will be an update to Windows phone 7.5 as many hope. This update will however bring with it another solution to the disappearing virtual keyboard bug that has also been a cause for concern for Nokia Lumia owners.

The roll out has already started with owners getting a notification on their device o show they can indeed go ahead and do the update, this will require access to a PC or Mac and will be delivered via Microsoft’s Zune software to finish off the installation and all being well result in an improved overall experience for Lumia 800 owners.

With Samsung not particularly acknowledging reported battery issues on their various devices affected until a recent statement saying that all 2012 Samsung smartphones will last a full day on one charge it is quite nice to see Nokia actually have a go and stand up to the reports and actually look like they care while taking some action…fingers crossed it all works.

Have you had issues with your Nokia Lumia 800, if so please do let us know any ways you have manged to rectify or avoid problems moving forward.

And here is the video to show you how to do that:

Source: Nokia_UK Twitter,

Google has utilised its Maps technology and teamed up with thetrainline.com to bring a new service aimed at letting us Brits know how late our trains will be.

A very useful service in a country with a notoriously sh***e train network that rips us off daily.

But I have to say that this all looks pretty good, and makes booking and planning journeys a little easier, I use thetrainline.com application all the time for checking times of trains but have to say I never book from it, I simply use it as a timetable and for that it works very well, integrating with google maps makes sense but not sure quite how much use it will get from that route, pun intended.

Olympics is the big picture:

Not one to miss out on a possible method of gaining more customers via helping them out, it seems that Google and thetrainline.com will all benefit from this sharing of data coming in just in time for the Summer Olympics in London and elsewhere around the UK.

The plan being that visitors can better schedule their days activities if they can see an actual map of where they are going and get access to train times while they are at home on a PC.

No mobile device feature just yet:

Though I suspect this move would like to be very much aimed at mobile device owners, there is no news if it will work on mobile devices just yet, but if it does beware of battery life!

Speaking about the map integration with thetrainline.com Google’s Ed Parsons, said:

“Google Maps seeks to provide a wide range of relevant local information, and public transport station and schedule information is definitely a part of that,”

Now using it is as simple as getting your ass over to the UK version of google maps and clicking on “Get Directions”.

Once clicked you set your starting location and end destination and then look for the train icon to get the information you will need to get to that place and how easy it will be by train.

The new collaboration will bring data from 8,000 bus stops and more than 250 tube stations as well as 2,500 railway stations across 170,000 routes nationwide.

A massive Solar Flare eruption from the Earths huge radiator and light giver, the Sun, has produced so much radiation that it could cause danger to people traveling in planes and also to communication devices reliant on radio frequencies such as your mobile phone.

The Solar Blast was recorded on video below and happened on January the 22nd, 2012, the actual blast which resulted in energized solar proton particles was sent hurtling to Earth at some 93 million miles an hour…though I also read 4….!..Either way pretty fast.

As a precaution for people on planes, it seems that flights flying in and around the polar region could well be re-routed as these are the only paths thought to be at serious risk, according to scientists there appears to be no risk for people on the actual Earth.

SpaceWeather.com ranks the geomagnetic storm as an S3, meaning “strong”, there are noticeably tow other more extreme levels than this on the scale.

NASA claims that the six astronauts on board the international space station will not be affected by the blast of radiation.

With radiation storms such as this one an aesthetic legacy of the blast comes in the form of some lovely shots of the Earths “Aurora” as the light particles shift through different wavelengths causing some interesting light effects to be seen, so stay peeled for setting and rising suns with your camera phone or digital SLR if your old school like me!

Experts say the blast will continue to bathe our planet with lovely gene warping radiation until Wednesday, now excuse me while I scratch my third leg.

This issue of smartphone battery life is one of major concern for both device owners and smartphone and tablet manufacturers, and though there are some exciting technological advancements coming out that aims to help us all enjoy longer battery life from our smartphones but until all these actually come to fruition there could be another rather nifty way of helping us get a little #MoreJuice out of our phones….and the answer lies in waste energy.

In an article in IEEE we see that wasted light could be the key to extra smartphone battery life.

Our batteries are finding it tough to make our shiny Super AMOLED screens stay bright all day and play all those games/apps and process that video as we now use our smartphones more and more and expect more from the devices. So could the answer lie in the light energy that is pretty much wasted from our screens on a day to day basis?

Cambridge university researchers could hold the answer:

You have obviously all heard of Solar Power, so without going into too much technicalities imagine this concept being taken and used in your smartphone for light that has escaped from your OLED screen.

Professor Arokia Nathan and researcher Arman Ahnood, point out that around 36% of the light produced on a mobile device screen is actually projected forward to the display to be seen by your eyes with the remaining light escaping at the display edges, and it is this wasted light that could hold the key to making that battery last a little longer.

Science part:

With the prototype developed, a number of key areas are explained that make this technology work as intended.

One of the main issues is voltage spikes which would potentially cause damage to the battery while charging and would be caused by the differing light intensities, this would be managed by using a number of solar cells within the smartphone display which are made up from thin-film hydrogenated amorphous silicon, this technology would be able to harness both the wasted light and the ambient light around you. Couple this with a thin film super-capacitor and you should be able to even out the voltage to stop damage to the battery.

On top of this another set of solar cells would be arranged around the device display to capture any light that escapes from the screens main display and it is said that an average smartphone can produce up to 5 milliwatts of power using this method and technology.

Does this sound like technology that will work or a bit of pie in the sky?

Ok, we are perhaps a few weeks early on this news but it has come to our attention that Skype will indeed be available on Windows Phone devices in the not too distant future.

And why not?

Microsoft after all own the damn VOIP company anyway, so it does seem slightly odd that they have even taken this long to bring their own technology to their devices.

I wonder if this is Microsoft steadying the networks who must be shi***ng themselves that once the penny drops that all we need is a data connection to connect to VOIP services, we can do away with our phone packages once and for all!

4G could be the death knoll for traditional mobile networks:

I have said this before, it is possibly only a matter of time before we simply have a VOIP type client such as Skype running in the background all the time on our mobile devices with no need to ever use our minutes and have the ability to call anywhere in the world for free or pretty damn cheap.

Is this the reason that the 4G network may well go for much less money than the 3G spectrum sold for, because we will not be prepared to pay the amount of cash we do for minutes if all we really want is data, leaving the obvious question of how to subsidize our shiny new devices up for grabs after per month costs are slashed.

I also suspect Skype as a service will become advertiser funded, where it will be free in principle but you will have to go through a short message for calls or video for using video conferencing, obviously this would go away if you paid a subscription or similar to Skype’s coffers.

Skype will kill networks dead in time:

I think that networks in the UK will look to consolidate and possibly muscle out the languishing Three network and if my predictions do hold true, there will likely be some call from the remaining few to push out far reaching WiFi on “health and safety grounds” as one wise commentator on the guardian blog pointed out:

ImperfectRex:

*After the other networks get rid of 3, expect them to start trying to get rid of wide-broadcast wifi. Either through legislation on health & safety or simply buying/bribing cheap or free wifi providers.

There are talks that Skype will not be fully featured until Apollo late this year but a version may well appear at the MWC in Barcelona next month.

If you have not heard of Free yet, you will do, especially if you are French.

When you are hailed as the French equivalent to Steve Jobs you know you have to be doing something that people take note of. And while I can see that Mr Niel is indeed a self starter and a champion of the people and free market economy, I personally put him down as more of a slightly sleazy Richard Branson than Steve Jobs, but hey who worries about splitting hairs between two well respected pillars of the business world.

In a bid to shake the stagnant and over priced French mobile sector and in typical French style Mr Niel talks of “liberation” of the mobile sector using his Free telecommunication company as the focus.

Jail bird set free:

And with a background in adult chat services I am sure he knows his way around liberal quarters already. Mr Xavier actually got fined some 250,000 Euros and spent two years in jail for laundering money via sex shops.

Mr Niel is not one of the well healed from established universities in the country, he is more your grass roots, at the coal face kind of guy.

Indeed in 2002 he started what was called Freeview, a set-top-box which was offering combined Internet, TV and calls, this concept of bundling was brought to the French market with full intention of bringing down prices all round, which it did.

Talking about his new adventure into shaking up a nascent mobile market that is seen to be ripping off the French public, he states:

“We are sick and tired of being ripped off with the highest prices in Europe,”

Speaking of the plans, Jessica Ekholm an analyst from Gartner said:

“This is some much-needed competition coming in to the French market…. They’re obviously trying to shake things up,”

Mobile phones the target now:

So with a pedigree of aggressively entering established markets and bringing in new pricing models and packages, Mr Neil now wants to enter the French mobile sector to help bring prices in line with the rest if Europe.

French mobile users pay high price for services:

French mobile networks currently charge the most for their mobile services and sees pricing set at much higher levels than European neighbours in per capita average costs.

The package that Mr Xavier currently wants to offer consumers in France looks like this:

[arrowlist]

• Unlimited calls, messaging and up to three gigabytes of data for €19.99 euros ($26) per month.
• 60 minutes of calls and 60 text messages for €2 euros per month.

[/arrowlist]

After this announcement, the Free website was said to have crashed with the deluge of interest.

At an Apple inspired launch event Mr Xavier went on to proclaim:

“Free believes that up until now you have been used as cash cows. We will give the [other operators] a lesson.”

But with Free not expected to have full network coverage until 2018, and already aggressively stepping on bottom lines of the very networks they need to rent from to provide the service free is offering, this move may not be without some pain to the rather shrewd businessman who sold his reverse directory service on France’s Minitel back in 2000 for 40 million euros.

Mr Xavier has now also been found to have jointly bought the French newspaper La Monde, despite President Sarkozy putting in his opposition, he has also paid for 50% of the rights to the song “My Way”, which may well point to his own perception of self in this maddening world!

So while this all sounds fantastic for consumers in France, time will tell where the devil in the detail lies and how long Free can sustain such cut price deals when they do not really have the kind of power in the market when still reliant on rental relationships from competitors to ensure service levels are met.

Ric Richardson caught my attention when writing the article on how to improve smartphone battery life.

He is a very interesting guy who runs his own blog and describes himself as so:

After being in the music and film industries, an entrepreneur and in start-up management for decades, the last half decade has proven that concept proving and prototyping is my true calling. Invention, product assessment and initial market test are my sweet spots.

Catch him here: http://ricrichardson.blogspot.com/

Mobile phones and the voice:

As an inventor I have been watching the progress of voice and computers and more specifically smartphones since as long back as I can remember. Ever since captain James T Kirk first recorded his captains log in the first episode of star trek I ever saw, I’ve been waiting for devices to interact the way humans mostly do. By voice.

In summary, I must say the iPhone SIRI is a major step forward. She still spells my name wrong Rick instead of Ric and she sometimes drops in a four letter word at the most inappropriate times but I must say she works.

Social issues v technical issues:

The limitations I have run into are more about the social issue of not speaking to someone on the phone around others and the technical problems that happen when there is loud background noise or other people talking nearby.

But this leads me to another really important need that I think has not been filled yet… And that is the simple idea of recording voice. For over a year I have been trying to get an iPhone app developer to give me a solution that allows me to send and reply emails with voice messages.

I’d like to receive an email from someone, hit a button that starts recording and places a reply or retry button on the screen, record my message and send it with one more button push. From start to finish it would be two buttons and a verbal message. The recipient hears the message in my voice with all the immediacy and integrity of my actual voice and they receive feedback fast. Not hours later when I get to my computer or a spot to type a reply.

I have experimented with this idea for a while. Anyone that sees me in person will often find that I have a voice recorder hanging of a lanyard around my neck. I use the recorder to capture to-dos but mostly to record replies to emails or emails to send which I then send when I get to a computer.

Even further on this idea is an invention I’ve worked on called conversationz. It’s a technology that allows threaded voice messages to be stored with simple hardware. For example, my parents could try calling me and find that I’m not home.. Instead of leaving a voice message they would record a voice snippet with their phone that would be transferred to my phone or computer. When I reply, the reply would be linked to that message NOT my phone number much in the same way that replies in emails are liked to the person AND the subject not just the senders email address.

This way mum could ask for a persons phone number from me and that answer goes to that request on her phone display rather than being seen as just another message from her son.

In fact I’d love for Siri to record my voice messages and send them as audio rather than try to dictate them for me. Now that’s a good idea to explore as soon as Apple opens up the Siri API.

End of captains log star date 31043.45

In a keynote speech delivered on Wednesday, Ebay CEO John Donahoe turned fortune teller, quite literally.

As the prediction he told was that Ebay would be making 2012 a record year for mobile payments on Ebay and that the 2012 GMV (Global mobile gross merchandise volume) would increase dramatically. He then went on to suggest that the actual figure in sales via mobile devices for 2012 may top a staggering $8 billion.

With Ebay and Paypal very much hand in glove, it is interesting to see that Paypal expect to see a global mobile TPV (Total Per Volume) of $7 billion over the same period, which is again growing steadily over 2011.

Ebay more than doubling mobile sales year on year:

“Mobile plays a significant role in how eBay Inc. is enabling commerce and using technology to connect consumers and provide new ways for them to shop when, where and how they want, the success of eBay and PayPal mobile in 2011 surpassed our expectations and we’re confident that this success will carry into 2012 as more shoppers turn to the convenience of shopping and paying via mobile at the moment shopping inspiration hits.”

With Ebay doubling their 2012 GMV with a $5 billion figure in 2011, up from $2 billion in 2012, it seems like the sky is the limit for mobile payments right now.

Have you been using your tablet or smartphone to make payments you might have normally done over an actual phone or on a computer or laptop? I certainly have.

There is no doubt that mobile growth will accelerate all forms of payment systems including NFC which I predict will catch on much more this year as more and more devices and retailers catch on to the simple idea of making it less difficult to part with your cash…wallets say goodbye, the next credit disaster say hello!

What would you think if we told you that a mobile phone could actually repair itself if it were dropped?

We are not talking having a layer of spray giving the device protection here, as we have discussed earlier, or indeed any kind of actual protection.

What we are saying is that your smartphone, or pretty much any device, could actually regenerate cells is it was scratched or dented en-route to a showroom or shop etc?

If humans can repair cells then so can smartphones?

In a report in science daily, we have found out that scientists are looking at ways that could actually repair cell damage in a manufactured device, pretty much in the same way that science can now work out ways of repairing human cell damage.

Delving into the realms of nano technology, manufacturers will tell you that digital devices suffer damage on many levels, which gets factored into overall costings.

In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnolgy on the 10 Jan. It would appear that a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) have brought an idea to life that proposes to fix malfunctions that are caused by minor surface damage during production, these small surface cracks would then be given a “repair-and-go” solution that would make the device work again as it should do prior to the micro damage that stopped it working.

Such is the complexity of detail that our devices work under, it would seem that this issue is a huge concern for manufacturers.

Indeed, reports of LCD screens having a 50% failure rate was enough to make many environmentalists gasp at the wastage in modern production techniques we all assume are pretty waste free, so with that in mind, I can see where this could come in use, though I suspect that extreme example would not be the kind of level this technology would work at.

Inspiration from white blood-cells

In the same way that white blood cells repair damage on site, this was the inspiration behind the ideas that went into the proposals and documentation below.

Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and co-investigator on the project, Anna Balazs, states:

“Anything that’s a machine with a surface is affected by these small-scale cracks, these are surfaces that play a role in almost anything, especially functionality.”

How will this help?

Balzas goes on to say:

A flexible micro capsule filled with a solution of nano particles would be applied to a damaged surface; it would then repair defects by releasing nano particles into them. Using nano particles and droplets of oil stabilized with a polymer surfactant — compounds that lower the surface tension of a liquid.

“The repair-and-go method can extend the lifetime of any system or device, additionally, it could be used as a repair method after a crack has been found.”

It is proposed that the method is put into practice at the last step of manufacture, as the team at UMass actualized the theory and showed that these microcapsules found the defects and cracks and then delivered the nanoparticle contents into them to essentially heal and make good the potential for problems.

Source: Original research by Balazs and her team was published in ACS Nano and later reported on Nature Nanotechnology’s “News and Views” section in September 2010.

We have already heard about the iPad that got dropped from the plane and survived:

Well now those guys at G-Form had to go one level further and have taken an iPad to space to see if your average punter on his usual days travels will have his device saved from doom should he forget to hold on to it while orbiting earth for the crack.

So here is proof positive that G-Form do indeed make some seriously hardcore protection cases for your iPad and other devices, nothing like an extreme way of making a point to get the message across.

Some have commented on how they got this iPad to land on its side, pointing out that if it landed screen side down it would have almost definitely shattered, but hey let us be honest, the thing got dropped from space and still worked….surely that is enough.

Nice one lads!

In what looks like an attempt to tell the world that Kodak has value somewhere, Kodak has looked on Apple and HTC to get their legal guns out over patents once more.

Kodak fall from grace:

With talk of Kodak filing for bankruptcy protection last week, news that the NYSE was looking to delist the 130 year old company for trading with a value under $1 per share for so long comes as a surprise to many.

The Rochester based imaging giant has taken a fall from grace over recent years, and is looking to take a leaf out of Apples love of litigation.

The base of the claims lie with Kodak believing that both HTC and Apple are infringing some of their patents related to digital imaging, and more specifically image transmission and preview, with specific devices being pinpointed for the infringement, these include the Apple iPad, iPhones and iPods with HTC smartphones and tablets also infringing four of the key patents.

HTC also accused of the same Apple and RIM patent issues:

An ongoing two year old issue related to “image-preview” patents, and technology owned by Kodak, has now seen HTC included in the mix.

The lawsuits which were filed on Tuesday, I feel aim to highlight that the flailing Kodak Corp still has some residual value, in a bid to bump share prices up a little and make the world feel like nothing is wrong at the bad ship Kodak, the truth being far from this.

Kodak share price plummets over 12 years:

Kodak has seen its share price plummet in the last few years, and now currently sells shares at less than $1 each on average for the last month, from a much mightier $66 only 12 years ago, indeed only last week, news of the bankruptcy filing, sent Kodak shares down to a new record low of some $.36 each.

With an overall loss of 99% of market value in 12 years, that is one bad decade for Kodak.

Kodak share hike saves them getting delisted from NYSE:

Indeed only this week Kodak saw a much needed price hike sending shares closer to $1 for the first time in a long while, all on the back of an admission that they need to restructure and cut costs, but also perhaps on the back of threats from the New York Stock Exchange who have warned that Kodak’s shares will be ‘delisted’, or dropped, unless they stop looking so sickly.

If Kodak do indeed go under this year, we have provided a nice graphic for you to take a look at the once mighty company prior to their unfortunate demise.

Click here for History Of Kodak Infographic.

Talks of licensing deals worth over $1 billion are still ongoing with Apple and RIM so we will keep you posted on news related to this area.

What do you think of Kodak going under this year? Likely or unlikely?

How long have you waited for Netflix to finally arrive in the UK?

Well this bandwidth stealing streaming monster has now finally arrived from the US and we are sure that Lovefilm are pretty damn sacred right now.

And if Lovefilm’s utterly annoying, confusing and long winded method of subscribing for “free” on the XBox is anything to go by, I would say that they may have to start working out a plan to stop this huge competitor from stealing clients they have not already hooked up.

*I have just signed up to the genuinely free trial of Netflix in a few seconds. When will companies realise that humans are lazy and stupid, MAKE IT EASY FOR US PLEASE!…usability is so important.

Lovefilm claim to have 2 million account holders paying monthly fees in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Denmark. So are no slouches by any means but Netflix have ten time this customer base.

Netflix massive in the states:

Despite price hikes last year which saw some 800,000 leave as a result, Netflix still has around 20 million subscribers in the US, Canada, Caribbean and Latin America.

Indeed the company is so damn huge that they are blamed for causing slow speeds on the internet with a rumored 1/3 of all data consumed being as a result of Netflix streaming services in the US, this however would appear to be unfounded or more unclear than it perhaps seems.

With Netflix reporting that a loss will be incurred in the first quarter of 2012 due to their expansion into the UK, you can see why some backers of the company are feeling concerned, especially as the film industry quietly wonders if this model will save them, or add another layer of pressure to reduce overall profits after seeing file sharing reduce by around 7-8% last year as a result of streaming services finally becoming popular.

After a couple of bad PR stunts last year, namely the disaster laden Qwikster which was pulled after a few days, and the price hikes which saw Netflix get slammed by consumers in the states, investors appear worried about an aggressive UK entrance which aims to steal Lovefilm customers with costly access to premium flicks as a sweetener for new subscribers.

Netflix in a good position:

Netflix has quite a considerable advantage in being accessible on a huge amount of devices; from the AppleTV right up to smartphones, smart TV’s, PC’s, tablets and many other devices totaling some 700 in number.

Reed Hastings, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Netflix says of the launch:

“We are starting 2012 in the best possible way: by giving consumers in the UK and Ireland an amazing entertainment experience,”

Netflix releases app for UK and Ireland:

After signing up and getting a trial I have downloaded the Netlix app for Android and you can see how it all works below in the video I made.

Netflix Android Application Review:

So as you can see it is a pretty cool application and one that will certainly be used, this is great to see as smartphones and tablets are pretty neat devices to watch a film on, especially if you are next to a power supply!

Questions emerge on market share and TV/Film rights:

As this is pretty new territory for many media organisations, there are questions being raised over just how many competing services can last and be profitable in a market as costly as video streaming, with Amazon offering their own Prime video rental service and also acquiring Lovefilm, there does seem to be some concerns that there is already growing fragmentation in a market that needs a clear shining light, I would not put my money on anyone winning this war right now, but I would be tempted to go with Netflix as a serious contender, to share the market with perhaps one or two more players.

I am unsure Tesco’s 80% share in Blinkbox looks all that sound an investment as their pricing strategy is just way too high in my opinion, and tehir presence of mind is so low, unless they roll out some amazing technology integration and expensive marketing, I see no reason that this will shine above truly established names such as Lovefilm or Netflix.

No room at the inn:

Netflix and Lovefilm are of course already under attack from UK TV networks who currently offer online services such as Sky and Virgin Media and the huge license fee funded BBC iPlayer also taking a fair few eyeballs away from the need to subscribe to yet another paid-for service.

So with this in mind, I can perhaps see why shareholders are concerned about the UK entrance of Netflix wit its associated high costs per acquisition, but It had to be done, didn’t it? Otherwise the company would never have got a foothold in the UK video rental streaming sector if they left it another year, this year and next, I predict will be the year of the Internet enabled TV.

Will streaming save Hollywood:

Now it does not take a genius to see who much money a relatively successful film makes, but it does not stop Hollywood et al telling us about how tough things are in the industry.

So will online video streaming “save” the film industry or force it into an unhappy bondage where it is reliant on aggregation of content in order to make reduced profits per film viewing?

And if this kills off the DVD market and eats into the industries profits even further, will they carry on allowing the likes of Lovefilm and Netflix the rights to be aggregators of their content.

Big decisions ahead on an unknown path:

This is an exciting time for the film and TV industry and I sense a great leveler is about to occur which could see smaller production companies start to earn decent revenues perhaps signalling a rise in independent film making as a genuine option for less well established filmmakers who need to monetize more unique offerings.

So what are your thoughts on the final arrival of Netflix to UK and Irish shores? Are you going to go for a trial and see what you think to the service or are you already happy using other services right now?

Do tell all in the comments below.

Smartphones and other mobile devices would not be as tough as they are without a nice display being furnished with Gorilla Glass, and while there are alternatives to this material, it seems that Gorilla Glass is going to carry on being the daddy in the Smartphone jungle for some time.

Not happy to rest on their Laurels at Corning Specialty materials. It now seems that we will see Gorilla Glass 2 in time for the CES event next week, when lots of new gadgets and materials are released.

Talking about the new Glass, James R. Steiner, senior vice president and general manager, Corning Specialty Materials said:

“Corning Gorilla Glass has been a tremendous success for Corning, enjoying excellent market acceptance across mobile device industries,….handset and tablet device manufacturers are clearly driving toward higher functionality from thinner designs. Corning’s latest innovation in Gorilla Glass technology is very well positioned to meet these challenges and enable broader touch technology penetration.”

Formed in 2007, Corning’s Gorilla Glass is now the most widely used and deployed glass for mobile devices, featuring on some 575 products, and is now on a total of 500 million worldwide devices, with the company behind the glass expecting to see some $700 million in 2011 sales.

The new glass is rumored to be 20% thinner and lighter as a result.

We look forward to hearing more about the product, which is a truly remarkable piece of science as it is almost unbreakable, at least I am yet to see anyone who can scratch it or break it using your common or garden tools that would normally shatter the hell out of such a seemingly normal bit of glass…amazing stuff.

You may have already heard of Anonymous, Lulzsec and other online so called “hacktivists” that seemingly cause havoc on large organisation that they have moral issues with.

With a new mission called Operation AntiSec, all the above Hacktivist groups, and others, are engaged in trying to outdo others by taking down prominent online assets of organisations that they have issues with

Target of the Xmas period for Anonymous: Stratfor.

Strafor is a global intelligence provider based in Austin Texas who came to prominence in the late 90’s after covering the war in .

The lunatics have taken over the asylum:

So you would have thought that being secure online was second nature for such a company, you know, ensuring that credit card details of members was locked under high end encryption, and passwords were not created with such simple terms as the name of the company or other lazy choices?

Well no, it would appear that one of the globe’s most respected authorities on all things security, does not encrypt passwords, and apparently allows the most basic of hacking tools to enter their databases and retrieve information such as credit card details and password to email accounts.

So how is their website currently looking weeks after the attack:

“As you may know, an unauthorized party illegally obtained and disclosed personally identifiable information and related credit card data of some of our subscribers.

We are currently investigating this unfortunate event and are working diligently to prevent it from ever happening again. As a result, we have delayed restoring our website until we can perform a thorough security review. Stay tuned for our relaunch.

In the meantime, our main concern is the impact on our customers. As a result, we have provided paid subscribers with identity protection coverage from CSID, a leading provider of global identity protection, at our expense for 12 months.”

Robin Hood tactics may cost charities money:

Now I personally like the fact that a group such as Anonymous expose huge organisations as to how crap they actually are in many areas, but reports of taking money off client credit cards and placing this into charities sounds like a funny prank.

If time is money then it would seem that the charities affected will have to cough up, with very little chance of compensation, and this may end up being quite costly for the charities affected, in all honesty, I am unsure this is morally acceptable.

So who was affected in UK and US defence positions after this hacking expose:

It appears that from the US there were some 173 individuals who are serving in Afghanistan who had details published about their affiliations with Stratfor along with information about the vice-president Dan Quayle and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

The UK had some 221 people affected including military officials and 242 NATO staff, as well as advisor’s to Britain’s Joint Intelligence Organisation, who are a group who report on sensitive information directly to the Prime minister David Cameron.

So who was affected in total?

The data that was obtained also contained around 850,000 email addresses and passwords to people who had subscribed to the site, as well as 19,000 email addresses which belonged to US military personnel.

As ell as email and password data, 75,000 subscribers has their credit card numbers and addresses revealed.

All in all quite a bonanza of data easily scraped from an unsecured database run by a high end security agency, are you worried?

Recent work:

Anonymous have also been involved in other politically motivated attacks on companies and states that they feel need exposing as cruel or against their own perceived ideals of right and wrong.

So last Summer, we have had the widespread targeting of companies who have made Wikileaks’ life difficult, so Paypal received a DDoS attack last year in a targeted attack aimed at stopping the processing company from being able to run its website, after the blocked payments for donations from Wikileaks via tehir system.

And in recent times, Syria’s Ministry of Defence has been hit with a defacement of their website after the anonymous hackers took the side of protesters of the bloody crackdown imposed on them by government and military officials in the country

So what do you think of these “hacktivist” group(s)?

Useful highlighters of issues that need addressing?

Or, pesky nuisances that need to think more clearly about the way they do things for fear of causing more problems than they perhaps hope to highlight and solve?

Technology and imaging firm Kodak are facing bankruptcy in the face, and with a company of this status spreading back some 130+ years, we thought it would be a kind gesture to see what they have brought to the world prior to this unfortunate fall from grace for the technology giant.

Kodak Historic Milestones:

[arrowlist]

• 1880 – George Eastman begins commercial production of dry plates for photography in a rented loft of a building in Rochester, N.Y.
• 1888 – The name “Kodak” is born and the Kodak camera is marketed with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.”
• 1889 – The Eastman Company is formed, taking over the assets of the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company.
• 1892 – The company becomes Eastman Kodak Company of New York.
• 1900 – The first Brownie camera is introduced. Selling for $1 and using film that costs 15 cents a roll, it brings hobby photography within financial reach.
• 1929 – The company introduces its first motion picture film.
• 1935 – Kodachrome film is introduced and becomes the first commercially successful amateur color film.
• 1951 – The low-priced Brownie 8mm movie camera is introduced, followed by Brownie movie projector in 1952.
• 1962 – The company’s U.S. consolidated sales exceed $1 billion for the first time. Its work force tops 75,000.
• 1963 – Kodak introduces a line of easy-to-use Instamatic cameras with cartridge-loading film (selling more than 50 million by 1970).
• 1972 – Five pocket-size Instamatic cameras that use smaller cartridges are launched. More than 25 million cameras sell in less than three years.
• 1975 – Kodak invents the world’s first digital camera. The toaster-size prototype captures black-and-white images at a resolution of 10,000 pixels (.01 megapixels).
• 1981 – Company sales surpass the $10 billion revenue mark. The next year, hometown payroll peaks at 60,400.
• 1984 – Kodak enters the video market with the Kodavision Series 2000 8mm video system and introduces Kodak videotape cassettes in 8mm, Beta and VHS formats, along with a line of floppy disks for computers.
• 1988 – Global payroll peaks at 145,300.
• 1992 – Kodak launches a writeable CD that its first customer, MCI, used for producing telephone bills for corporate accounts.
• 2003 – Launch of Kodak Easyshare printer dock 6000, which produces durable, borderless 4-by-6-inch prints.
• 2004 — Kodak begins digital makeover, the same year it gets ejected from the 30-stock Dow Jones industrial average. It cuts tens of thousands of jobs as it closes factories and changes businesses.
• 2008 — Kodak begins mining its patent portfolio, which generates nearly $2 billion in fees over three years.
• 2010 — Kodak sues Apple and Research in Motion before the U.S. International Trade Commission, claiming the smartphone makers are infringing its 2001 patent for technology that lets a camera preview low-resolution versions of a moving image while recording still images at higher resolutions. Global employment falls to 18,800.
• July 2011: Kodak begins shopping around its 1,100 digital-imaging patents.
• September 2011: Kodak hires Jones Day, a law firm that lists bankruptcies and restructuring among its stop specialities.
• December 2011 — Judge extends camera patent dispute into 2012.
• Wall Street Journal publishes rumors of potential Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing.

[/arrowlist]

Source: www.kodak.com

Have Kodak hit hard times and accepted that the show is over as bankruptcy looms:

Did you know that Kodak actually invented the Worlds first digital camera in 1975.

So, with Kodak having a huge list of “firsts” under their belt, it is rather a sad day when an originally innovative company such as Kodak, who had such global weight in the technology and imaging sector, looks like it will decide to file for bankruptcy as it can not compete in any of the territories it currently operates in, and in some cases dominated. Believing that Chapter 11 Bankruptcy is the way forward.

This type of bankruptcy gives a corporation some time to continue trading and hopefully find a rescue package while benefiting from certain bankruptcy rules that normally apply.

Kodak sell off patents:

When you are a 131 year old company with Kodak’s pedigree (albeit somewhat off kilter of recent years) you are likely to have some pretty juicy patents in the cupboard, and Kodak are well and truly in the market for selling some of these off.

With a rumored 1,100 patents Kodak are wanting to claw back some cash in the run up to the expected bankruptcy filing, and are hoping that they can then obtain a $1 billion package that will aid their operational requirements while they are going through the bankruptcy proceedings, with an unknown outcome at the end of this process.

Kodak bankruptcy will mean job losses?

With Kodak currently employing some 19,000 + people globally, many will be worried that this news could signal the death of the company that pays their wages in the coming months.

In a rather sombre note, Mr Eastman the Kodak founder took his own life aged 77 saying:

“To my friends, my work is done. Why wait?”

I wonder if his legacy will see Kodak the company see the same fate, or, if the raising of capital after the sale of patents and a rally for cash, will be enough to look into keeping other areas alive that Kodak operate in, though these look decidedly scary from an investors view.

With Kodak recently deciding to focus on the printer market and only managing to achieve just short of 3% market share in the months up to the end of 2011, what do you think Kodak should do?

Kodak’s Illustrious past:

Here is an infographic list of Kodak Historic Milestones achieved in their 130+ years of trading so far.

Is it likely they will find a buyer for the company while under chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, or will they slowly let the company die, while salvaging as much cash from the sale of patents on the way?

We covered the arrival of the $45 Aakash tablet computer a while ago and were pleasantly surprised at the ingenuity and desire of UK based Datawind to bring computing to the masses in rural India as well as in more populated areas.

Two weeks in and talk of new factories being needed:

Amazingly at only two weeks into selling the tablet online, Datawind have said that demand for the tablet is in the region of 100,000 per day, and they have a pre-order totalling some 400,000, to keep up with demand they are looking to create three new factories, and will also be looking to release a new model in mid January. This will be a slightly more powerful 700Mhz processor and will have a SIM card slot and the ability to access GPRS and 2G connections.

Aakash Ubislate 7:

The new tablet will be named the Aakash Ubislate 7 and cost around 3000 Rupee compared to the Aakash’s price tag of 2500 Rupee, and the new device is quite simply a natural progression in terms of specification on offer from the company who are there to help the Indian population move forward in the mobile technology sector that is so prevalent in many other countries.

And with India being only second to China in terms of population, each person may not have the largest amount of disposable income but the market is so huge that this reduced level of value per person still offers rich gains for those who can go in at a lower price and offer the same kind of services that more developed countries come to expect.

Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind, says:

“We never expected such a high response from both corporate and individual buyers. We plan to supply 70,000-75,000 units per day once the factories are in place by April,”

Emergency on day one of selling online:

Indeed the demand for India’s cut price tablet is that huge that on the first day of selling the tablet online they were informed by India’s computer emergency response team that the site was probably under a cyber attack, such was the high traffic shitting the site due to the demand for the new tablet.

With the iPad costing around 30,000 rupees it is easy to see why many people in India can not afford this high end model, and Datawind have obviously found a decent price level that will satisfy a large proportion of the people in the rural and city areas.

Who owns this tablet and can you please tell us your thoughts if you do, we would love to hear about it from the source so to speak.

In a fascinating article over at mobile industry review, Steve Kennedy explains just how fragile the airwaves we take for granted really are.

As someone who does like to learn about the technology behind mobile communication, though admittedly just likes things to work……I will try to do this article justice in bringing out the salient points.

I must admit that this topic has been covered in a humorous manner in an earlier article related to Alec Baldwin’s in-flight love of games, and I will be honest and say that I was always under the impression that turning off your mobile phone in-flight was an extreme form of health and safety precaution based on very little evidence so it is nice to put a few myths to bed.

Mobile networks are fragile:

When you were last on a flight do you rememberer being told to:

“please ensure your phone is switched off, as it can interfere with the plane electronics.”

Or something similar. And you are also told to keep your mobile off while you are stationary, taking off, and also when you are landing.

So is all this fuss necessary?

If you think of Mobile Networks as quite simply radio systems, that allow people to tap into them and make and receive calls, then you will not be aware of some of the fineries that surround mobile networks.

The truth is that these systems are very fragile and when you are at an Airport such as Heathrow, on the ground, you may well be in the vicinity of a number of cell sites that mobile networks use to make your phone work, taking and receiving signals.

Now when you turn off your mobile phone, it appears that your device is not actually fully asleep but in more of a soft sleep, and only removing the battery will turn the device off properly.

But mobile phones transmit at very low power:

Mobile phones do transmit at low power, this is a way of saving battery life, they also look for the nearest GSM or 3G cell site, and the reason your phone may lack battery in rural areas when compared to city use is that your device will likely be looking for a cell site much further away which will affect your overall mobile battery life.

Heathrow will have a number of cell sites:

So with Heathrow being such an important area geographically and population wise, the likelihood that it will have a number of cell sites from which networks are transmitting radio waves is obvious. These will be at much greater magnitudes than your humble smartphone will ever deliver so why do plane operators make such a fuss when their planes are already getting bombarded by an onslaught of many, many radio waves from close proximity?

Cell handover is the issue in the UK:

Yes it seems that it has less to do with safety and more to do with money!

Cell handover in the UK is explained by taking an example of a stationary plane at Heathrow and having this plane head south.

While it is rising in the air, it will be hit by a high number of neighbouring cell sites from the general London area around Heathrow, so how do the cell sites know when to switch as you move between so many options?

By using technology known as handover the algorithms work out which cells to hand-off to and thus optimise the network efficiency, otherwise it would be constantly trying to look for your signal and this would cost the mobile operators and networks lots of money, and potentially result in dropped calls and general extra work at the cell sites.

Let us take being in the air while ascending again, imagine this as another 3D layer that is much more difficult to predict, so there could be an argument that this is the reason that plane operators do not allow you to use your phones while taking off and landing, as it could end up costing a lot of cash and cause users below to lose calls due to dropped signals and general degradation in call quality, as so many phones fight for signals that are constantly altering due to flying above so many cell sites.

With no actual tests ever been done on the issues of using your mobile while flying, and the FCC in the US only warning that the above issues could present problems, (and then apparently withdrawing this advice for some unknown reason), it would still appear that the real dangers of flying with your mobile turned on is still not known. And may as many suspect may actually be more of a myth.

So the above reasons would appear to be quite a valid argument for not affecting those below on descent and take off, as in some cases your mobile connection could not only be a paid for service that you expect to work, but also a lifesaver too.

I am personally unsure how all this would interfere with emergency service networks, though I suspect that they have more robust dedicated signals that would not be interfered with in the same manner.

In plane Wi-Fi coming soon:

Strangely this may all start to become a lot more clear as it seems that your average plane could be able to sell mobile minutes to you as well as the usual Wi-Fi which you can now obtain, so it does appear that it is more about money at the bottom line in both cases.

Though they will still not allow you to use your mobile phone during take off and landing so you do not affect the ground based cell sites as we covered above.

I must say a big thank you to mobile industry review and a guest poster called Steve Kennedy who has added a really interesting post about the dangers of having your mobile phone turned on while flying.

Are you feeling guilty after a boozy and fat laced festive period?

If you are one of those people who now feels the need to actually attend that Gym you joined last year, but fear falling by the wayside again. Then why not take a look at an innovative new application called Gympact.

Gympact offers users a way of forfeiting money in exchange for absences from the Gym, essentially if you do not attend the Gym as you agreed in the pact, you will have to pay a penalty.

And you need to check in at least 30 minutes for the agreement to register so no drive by check-ins for you.

Rewards for Gym goers:

This penalty money is then allocated to those motivated individuals who spend at least 30 minutes checked in at their local gym as they intended to in their weekly pact, which is changeable, you can even have a rest if needed!

How was Gympact born?

Gympact is the idea of two ex Harvard university students and co-founders, Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer, who both attended an inspiring behavioural class while they were studying, they then started a 6 month trial of the idea in Boston at local gyms. This proved to be quite a success and other gyms across the states asked if their area could also be covered in the Gympact scheme.

The idea for an application came as they realised that they could not scale as quickly as they would have liked partnering with other gyms, so the concept became a mobile platform app, allowing users to check into their local gyms using GPS on their iPhones.

How do you get rewarded?

If you meet your goals you will be eligible to receive rewards from a collective pot of “naughty” money from those who made a pact but did not keep all or part of it.

Gympact will take a 3% cut of the transactions.

Social proof:

It appears that even the Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has picked Gympact as one of his favourite companies while attending a pitch contest in Santiago.

Negative emotion is the driver:

I have to say that this application does seem to have blended a good deal of issues that could help motivate people to get off their backsides and go to the Gym.

Instead of the old badge points and rewards affair nonsense, this application actually gets right down to the bottom of it all and penalises where it hurts, in the pocket.

Zhang said,

“Right now, getting people to take action — the first step toward fitness is the unfulfilled need.”

It also rewards you in the best possible way and helps line that pocket if you are a good “Gympacter”.

So where is the proof that all this works?

Gympact claim that users are going to the gym around 80-90% of their agreed time in the pact, and only a $5 commitment is enough to make people actually go to that gym a few times a week or fear losing some of that hard earned cash.

With a very small cash payment for being good, it is not really about getting paid to go to the gym, but it is a nice incentive to have rather than nothing, and working with the penalty system, it does nicely bring home the benefits of getting to the gym.

Read more about Gympact here: GYMPACT

Does command line type coding scare the hell out of you?

If so, you may not be as interested in this as those of you who are happy getting knee deep in varying degrees of code wilderness depending on your own desires.

Benefits of using CyanogenMod:

Those of you who hate Apple will no doubt be loving this article, as it shows what can be done with an operating system that is less closed than its Apple iOS counterpart.

Here we see a developer going by the name of, “lithid-cm”, an active member of the XDA Forums, showcasing a new variety of the popular CMC or Cyanogenmod Compiler.

In this exciting development users will be able to install a custom Android ROM version of the operating system of your choice (assuming compatibility with your device).

There are current limitations on this, such as only being able to remove unwanted languages and wallpapers, but in time as more and more options are added and once you have decided what you are looking to compile, you can simply create your new ROM, name it and offer it to the world.

Big plans:

There are bigger plans for this compiler in the future and people are encouraged to get involved and start work on more features to enable even more customisation of your own ROM’s.

I personally feel more options would be useful for this compiler than what is on offer in its current phase, but as with all things acorn like, they have to start somewhere, so well done for the work so far.

Sounds like a pain in the a*** though:

Do not get me wrong, I love smartphones, but would prefer they just do the job they are designed for and let me get on with enjoying their functionality not their innards.

I could not care less about removing languages if it meant losing an hour of my life or more to do it, a good job we are not all the same I suppose.

Maybe I miss the point, and just do not engage a certain part of my brain like the people on the XDA forums appear to do, or perhaps I am lazy and just want things to work well from the start.

Is all this tinkering something you want to do and feel obliged to get involved in as you are a “free” Android user? Or does it stink of messing with something that should just bloody well work properly from the start?

Well in human land it roughly means that you get what you put out, so if your a happy soul, your life should in theory be filled with other happy people. Miserable sod? Yeh you guessed it, your going to be hanging around with depressing bas****s.

In internet land however, it means whatever is free, let me in.

Free Internet at vending machines:

And with such a simple concept in mind a Japanese vending machine now offers people close to the machine free access to its very own free Wi-Fi hotspot, this will cover around 150-200 feet and will be a pretty sure fire way to bring in a crowd, who, by playing a simple numbers game, will be more likely to go and spend a penny on the machine, though we are unsure if it doubles as a real toilet also, but may need to if it ends up getting peed on by dogs and an enraged public if it fails to live up to exceptions, free can come at a price..;)

Asahi soft drinks owned:

The free Wi-Fi on offer has a 30 minute time limit, with a dead simple workaround of simply logging back in again after your allotted free minutes are up. A rumoured roll out of around 1000 vending machines by Asahi is also on the cards throughout 2012, with talk of another 10,000 being pushed out over 5 years. This intriguing wi-fi hotspot could well take on as a concept further a field if it proves successful, colleges and universities would be a great place I imagine.

Would this make you happily hang around a vending machine if it meant you could get a little bit of Wi-Fi access for free? And if so, does this herald the start of a freemium model that we will see taking hold in more intriguing places such as beauty spots, and other areas that an internet connection could prove useful in?

Source: Asahi

With smartphone battery life being of major concern to many mobile phone owners, we examine a new set of data showing how Apple are looking into new territories for their future energy source for mobile devices.

Apple now have two intriguing fuel cell battery patent application proposals, which were initially filed in 2010, gone through the motions.

Both are related to “fuel cell” technology and could help reduce the need for a heavy battery inside mobile devices.

The technology is rumoured to enable a much higher density of volumetric and gravimetric energy densities and this should enable the ongoing operation of mobile devices to carry on for much longer, even into the days or weeks territory without the need for refuelling.

This could certainly help to stop the battery issues which have plagued smartphones from the days when they started to stick dual core processors in them, and expect them to last a full day.

Apple go Eco-friendly?

Probably in a bid to save face, among other reasons, Apple seem to be pushing the renewable energy bandwagon even further up the hill into a workable battery for smartphones.

The patents provide hope that they can utilise hydrogen technology and produce a more eco-riendly energy that is based on renewable energy:

“..potentially achieve high volumetric and gravimetric energy densities, which can potentially enable continued operation of portable electronic devices for days or even weeks without refuelling.”

Internal Structure Of Fuel Cell System:

Hydrogen Fuel Cells:

Could Hydrogen fuel-cell batteries be the answer?

They are lightweight, and it would appear that Apple are focusing their attentions here, perhaps in a manner to show that they are a caring company, after a series of PR gaffs have shown that not everything Apple is all that rosy.

This new type of battery could go some way to making batteries live longer and also allow a move away from the traditional reliance on fossil fuels, they even make a note of this in their patent application.

Taking the cynical side away from this article, it will be great if this technology does prove useful, and we hope that Apple will somehow allow others to also tap into any breakthroughs as this would seriously show just how much Apple care about the environment if they were to then block rivals from also benefiting from any energy milestones that could be found.

Surely there must be a way to license the technology if the patents are upheld and a fuel-cell breakthrough is so unique in its nature.