Seven branches of the already-wireless central Seattle library are going WiFi. The announcement focuses on warnings that “no technical help is available” – but further South, in the San Francisco Bay area, the Joint Venture Silicon Valley organisation is planning to cover 1,500 square miles with 802.11 signals. What happens when such projects collide?
According to Glenn Fleishman the Joint Venture group has yet to reveal any details – it hasn’t even officially announced anything on its own web site – but is organising a lobbying effort to local communities.
The group, headed by Intel, seems to be focusing on mobile, according to a local paper report, says Fleishman. That raises the real question of what the technical platform will be, because while Intel has done some work on mobile WiFi, it is spending a lot of effort planning for mobile WiMax – a confusingly similar technology, which has yet to be defined by the IEEE.
Neither report, it seems, is talking of the inevitable spectrum conflict looming as domestic WiFi proliferates, and City WiFi spreads through the same areas.
The issue is discussed by ABI Research’s senior analyst of wireless connectivity research, Philip Solis, who points out that the Qualcomm-Flarion merger has gone through, providing WiMAX with a possible competitor in 802.20.
Solis has contributed to a recent paper from the company on the status of WiMAX, now that the WiMAX Forum has announced that some suppliers have put equipment for WiMAX certification for 802.16-2004, and passed.
“There is a long queue of companies waiting to undergo the same certification process. Then, they can proceed to ‘wave 2’, covering security and quality-of-service, and when they too are certified, we can expect to see larger numbers of products actually reaching the market,” was one comment. But Solis added:
“The picture is complicated, however, by a resurgence of rival wireless broadband access technology 802.20, based on frequency-division duplex technology developed by Flarion. With the closing last week of Qualcomm’s acquisition of Flarion, 802.20 may get a new lease on life. Qualcomm will almost certainly attempt to rally support from other industry participants, but many companies had abandoned 802.20 to support 802.16e.”
–The photos illustrating this article are fantastic shots taken by Timothy Swope at pixelmap – clearly a man with a strong eye, and it’s well worth looking at the rest of the shots. The building? The stunning new Seattle library, designed by Rem Koolhaas.
Guy Kewney write extensively, and quite brilliantly, in lots of places, including NewsWireless.net
Despite being billed as the “Killer-Sound Phone” by makers Pantech & Curitel, we’re happy to report that the PT-L1900 doesn’t emit a murderous noise beam, but is in fact a top notch music phone.
Back to the phone, the mid-size device (102X48X25.7mm) is dominated by a large, two inch, 240X320 pixels (QVGA), 262k colour TFT LCD display screen, with a slide out keyboard for phone functions.
The makers claim up to 190 hours of standby time and up to 3½ hours of talk time.
A great shame to hear that ZipTV has had to enter receivership.
They way it worked was, as the punters were watching ‘normal’ TV and an advert from one of ZipTV’s clients was shown, a press of the Red button on the remote control (the UK standard for interaction), would take the punter away from the ‘normal’ TV show, to a dedicated TV channel. This gave the advertiser the opportunity to show an 8 minute video advert, but just pay for a 30-second spot-ad to get them there.
You see Sky, and it’s very competent employees and owner, Rupert Murdoch don’t muck around. If they see some bright young things coming along with a super wheeze they will drain their income – it will get their attention – and not in a good, cuddly way.
It was with great disappointment and a heavy heart that we heard that Google had compromised their search results in China, excluding results the Chinese government didn’t find acceptable. In effect becoming the government’s censor.
It’s not that we think that people will stop searching on Google, it’s just that they won’t trust Google implicitly any more
For emotionally insecure types needing the reassuring sparkle of ostentatious bling around their neck, the new gold-plated deluxe MP3 player from Jens of Sweden should be a Godsend.
The player can also display pictures and text documents transferred over its USB port.
Perhaps mindful of the torrent of complaints that met Apple’s super scratchy Nano player, Nylander added, “The display is sharp and the player is both smaller and more resistant to scratches or blows than hard disk-based players.”
Sony has announced the Japanese release of two new laptops featuring the Intel Duo Core processor.
The new super-skinny SZ series (0.9″ wide) comes with either a 945GM Express or the GeForce Go 7400 graphics card which offers an unusual SPEED/STAMINA switch.
Sony F TV Series
According to Sony Japan’s website, the laptops will be available in a range of configurations and made available in Japan over the next few weeks.
MobiBlu’s soon-to-be-released DAH-1900 MP3 Player (256mb/512mb/1gb) claims to have the longest battery life of any MP3 player in the entire known universe.
The display can be used to stream song lyrics for pub-like solo singalongs, courtesy of an editable Auto Lyric system.
For nippy transfer of files from a PC, the DAH-1900 offers a High-Speed USB 2.0 interface at up to 40 Mbps transmission speed.
Available colours
Panasonic has unveiled its new ultra-zoom prosumer digital camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7.
Inherited from Panasonic’s high end Lumix LX1 compact is a new ‘joystick’ control affording fast, easy access to settings such as ISO, image size & quality and white balance.
Like the LX1, the camera also offers a vast array of exposure options, including Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and fully manual, backed up by an exhaustive set of ‘scene’ options covering the useful (‘sports’) to the bizarre (‘soft skin’).
Specifications:
Opera Software have announced the worldwide release of 
As a result of the compression technology, users can surf the Web faster – and those paying for their data traffic can dramatically reduce their bandwidth costs.
“With Opera Mini most people can start surfing the Web with the mobile phone they have today,” purred Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. 
Opera Mini can be freely downloaded by pointing your phone’s WAP browser in the direction of