March 2008 Archives

Uploading digital photos from a camera to a computer is a task that lots of people (myself included) tend to put off since it takes time and requires digging for the USB cable. (Which drawer did I put it in again?) Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easier way to get photos from camera to computer hard drive—or better yet, directly to a bogging or social networking site?

 

A startup called Eye-Fi thought so, too. And they did something about it: developed the Eye-Fi wireless SD card. This is a 2B SD card that pops into a digital camera just a like a regular card.

I’ve long held the belief that driving while talking on a cell phone is dangerous, even if one is using a headset or switching on the speakerphone function. (Although I’m as guilty as the next person of talking while driving anyway.) Now some recent research adds more backing to that argument.

 

Marcel Just, director at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, decided to find out the extend to which non-driving activities distract drivers from their primary task of steering a vehicle down the road.

 

In a March 9 report that’s been making the rounds online, USA Today explained what happened when 29 volunteer subjects were hooked up to an MRI brain scanner while engaging in a simulated driving exercise.

WiMAX is hot and getting hotter. That’s essentially the conclusion reached by Infonetics in its recent WiMAX and Mesh Network Equipment and Devices report.

 

Just how hot? During 2007, the WiMAX market grew sequentially 46 percent (for the year), with worldwide sales (fixed and mobile) just shy of $800 million. That number was reached thanks to deployments in more than 80 countries around the world.

 

Infonetics predicted that commercial WiMAX network deployments will continue growing during 2008 and beyond—with market value projected at $7 billion by 2011.

 

What’s driving the WiMAX market? Here is Infonetics analyst Richard Webb: “Among the most significant developments: Cisco's acquisition of mobile WiMAX vendor Navini Networks, the market entrance of specialist ASN gateway vendor WiChorus, the launch of WiMAX phones and Ultra Mobile PCs, and the new Open WiMAX initiative, which promotes disruptive, all-IP open WiMAX architecture, and should lead to best-of-breed solutions with inter-vendor interoperability.”

 

Attaching vendor names to WiMAX market growth, Infonetics reported that, for 2007, Alvarion led the worldwide fixed WiMAX equipment market in terms of revenue, followed by Airspan.