STOBA, Xbox 360, Mobile DTV, Infonetics Research, E911

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STOBA, Xbox 360, Mobile DTV, Infonetics Research, E911

A laptop computer battery maker and a couple dozen other battery manufacturers in Taiwan will start developing products using a new safety material intended to keep lithium-ion cells from overheating when damaged.

IDG News Service is reporting that The Industrial Technology Research Institute "has developed the polymer STOBA (self-terminated oligomers with hyper-branched architecture) after a high-profile laptop battery recall in 2006 in which 9.6 million Sony batteries were recalled due to an overheating hazard that had caused some laptops to catch fire."

STOBA keeps damaged batteries from overheating, "thereby avoiding meltdowns or fires," IDG says.

Read more here.
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Here's industry observer Matt Peckham's strategy: "Figure out how to live at or under 32GB with a pair of cheap 16GB memory sticks. I'm through paying boutique prices for average, ordinary merchandise."

He's talking about Microsoft adding USB storage support to the Xbox 360, which is live now: "All you need to do is log into Xbox LIVE, pull down the latest update, and presto, you can dump data from your 360 to any external drive or memory key. Well, almost any. "

Because, as Peckham found out, it's not what it seems to be at first blush. "Your storage device has to exceed 1GB to be recognized, for starters. That's a shame, since the best reason to pair an external storage device with the 360 is probably to manage game saves and miscellaneous dashboard bling, which aggregate well under 1GB."

Read more here.
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Mobile Digital Television, which lets you watch TV on mobile device, is the latest putative craze. Right now it's just keeping its head down until this iPad thing blows over and people are looking for The Next Big Thing.

Industry observer John R. Quain, took several Mobile DTV gizmos drive recently, and pronounced himself "impressed by the technology's video quality, plus its versatility in integrating with a wide array of devices."

Brief background: As Quain says, "Industry observers expect a slew of Mobile DTV-compliant products, from cell phones to laptops, to emerge this year." It's free, and by late spring "some 30 stations will be broadcasting in the new format," mainly in the large metropolitan areas. The hardware isn't expensive to add to a cell phone or other portable device.

Read more here.
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Market research firm Infonetics Research has published three Voice over IP and unified communications reports, finding that while "the enterprise telephony market was hit hard in 2009 due to the recession," things are looking better.

Based on the latest quarterly shipment figures and results from their March 2010 survey of North American enterprises about IP-PBX spending, "it appears that the bleeding has stopped and 2010 promises to be a better year, good news for vendors and service providers alike," notes Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research:

"From our IP-PBX survey, it appears that businesses are increasingly embracing a hosted services model, as their capacity needs will depend on how robust the economic recovery is, and hosted services allow them to more easily ramp their capacity needs up and down without a huge cash layout for equipment."

Read more here.
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E911 is an essential public safety service, of course. However, providing softphone users with simple, reliable E911 support has been a challenge. Frequently it requires the manual provisioning of locations by users or telephony administrators.

As an alternative to these cumbersome processes, 911 Enable introduces the E911 Softphone Locator, an application which helps automatically track the locations of on-campus Avaya IP Softphones for E911 purposes.

The increased deployment of softphones - a good thing - has been complicated by the ever-growing body of E911 legislation. Currently, 16 states have passed legislation making E911 support obligatory for organizations operating IP phone systems such as Avaya Communication Manager and IP Office.

Read more here.


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