Russell Shaw is a specialist in mobile computing, telephony, networking and covers these fields regularly for numerous print and online publications. Russ writes the popular IP Telephony blog on ZDNet and contributes regularly to The Industry Standard blog as well. Author of seven books, Russ' latest book is Wireless Networking Made Easy.
John Yunker is president of Byte Level Research. He closely tracks emerging wireless technologies and their impact on consumers and carriers alike. Over the years he has written a number of major reports on technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular technologies.
About this blog
Unwired studies emerging wireless technologies and how they complement and conflict with one another. Technologies covered include: Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Ultra-Wideband, Zigbee, EV-DO, UMTS, HSDPA and whatever else comes along.
Nochee is a restaurant and bar in downtown Minneapolis that by all accounts, caters to the unattached and newly unattached business crowd.
You know... Lexus, in-town loft, very comfy and growing portfolio, dressed to the nines, drinking the wines, politically liberal but fiscally conservative.. the finer things in life.
And as many of us would maintain, the finer things in life sometimes come in carbon casings of that other chromosome.
And for those of us who have gotten lu.. I mean, have met some really nice folks in these types of establishments, part of the initial hurdle is getting heard above the din.
But text-messaging requires no sound. Just a handheld communications device and a spare hand (while the other holds your fine Merlot).
To the rescue comes a thus-described Minneapolis restaurant and bar called Nochee. Every Thursday night, they give out a total of 50 BlackBerrys already set up for text messaging. They are only yours for the evening, but during the evening, the massive text-messaging and pingfest goes down.
At closing time, that's when the BlackBerry fest ends. You have to return them. But I wouldn't bet against every once in a while, the introductions facilitated by this promotional text-messaging communication perpetuate after closing time.
A stock price-quote server for mobile devices, QuoTrek has just been upgraded to be a stock trading facilitator for Wi-Fi-enabled laptop BlackBerry, Palm PC and Windows Mobile handhelds.
Given that stockbrokers as well as individual investors are always on the go, I'd say the potential for this technology is golden. As the article mentions, nearly 10% of all trades on Schwab.com are completed wirelessly.
No reason something like QuoTrek cannot help but push this percentage even higher.
Utne magazine (don't call it by its abandoned name of "Utne Reader" has a great piece on "Subversive Gadgets."
Depending on your view of sociopolitical networking as guerilla theater, most of the six spotlighted gadgets have the potential to stir things up or cause disruption.
I'm talking about devices such as the:
Magicbike Wi-Fi Bike, which can act as a mobile hot spot and command post for rally participants who are toting around their own Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices;
Rocket Crowd Counter, which works by means of a model rocket that flies above an assembly of people, shoots a photo of the crowd with a built-in video camera, and then can send pictures back to ground-based laptop devices equipped with head-counting software.
Don't want to give away the store. Here's a link to a page on the Utne site where you can purchase the full article
Those of us who are blessed with the gifts of self-mobility and sight are, the ultimate in mobile devices. We see, analyze, process through time and space. The main serial BUS architecture at play here, youmight say, is the way that signals travel from the eye, to the brain, and then, if the signal calls for it, to the feet.
Sometimes, though, this architecture does not function in the way that we wish it might. So, we need to fix things.
Which brings to mind that at Cal Tech, they've been able to design a chip that replicates the activity in the five cell layers of the retina. Researcher Kareem Zaghloul completed this process in 2001, and as we learn in "Neuromorphic Microchips" (May issue of Scientific American,) calls this a "neuromorphic chip." This 60 milliwatt chip uses 1,000 times less electricity than a PC.
Inspired by this technology, researchers at the University of Southern California are perceiving what University of Pennsylvania neuromorphic engineer Kwabena Boahen calls "a total intraocular prosthesis- with camera, processor and stimulator all implanted in the eye of a person who has retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration - diseases that damage photoreceptors but spare the ganglion cells."
The SoCal whitecoats visualize (pun intended) this prosthesis working with wearable computer that would process images captured by a video camera attached to the patient's glasses.
Boahen views this technology as at least five years away from the higher-fidelity attributes they need to make them practical.
What he doesn't say is for the next few years after that, such prostheses will be expensive as hell. But by 2015, I predict, you'll see more of them in everyday use.
As a sighted person, it is difficult for me to comprehend the sheer terror of what it means to lose one's eyesight in this technomobile world. I can intellectually comprehend it, but can only feel it through observing the struggles of others not so blessed.
I have examples to refer to. Now 89, my former school principal uncle Dave, a proud, well-read man - can see little more than shadows. My long-time buddy Jim, a man with a technological bent, a Master's Degree and several books to his name, can barely make out the shadows. And when I last heard from my now-former girlfriend Mary a little over a year ago, she was worried how long she could continue driving before a chronic visual deterioration made that unwise, if not impossible. Irony... she's an occupational therapist for severely orthopedically impaired schoolchildren.
All three of these people embrace technology, but have great difficulty using it. Because handset screens are smaller and achieve lower-res than enhanced-display PC monitors, visual obstacles can be even more acute with mobile devices.
The posts were a combination of frustration and proposed work-arounds. One poster summed up the issue for so many: "You can send a man to the moon, send a satellite to Mars, build a space center in outer space, but why can't they produce a cell phone or a PDA or even a GPS with audio technology for the visually impaired," asked poster Johncue.
There's something else. It costs $3,000, but just might work. It's a headworn video magnifier named JORDY. Made by a company known as Enhanced Vision, who named the product after Geordi LaForge, a sightless character in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
And if you read through this Associated Press article, you'll see that a visually impaired NASA engineer has an idea to scale down the JORDY so it could work with handsets.
It would be welcome but ironic if a handset usability solution for the JORDY - named after a fictional space exploration scientist - came from a visually impaired real-world space exploration scientist.
Russell Shaw is a specialist in mobile computing, telephony, networking and covers these fields regularly for numerous print and online publications. Russ writes the popular IP Telephony blog on ZDNet and contributes regularly to The Industry Standard blog as well. Author of seven books, Russ' latest book is Wireless Networking Made Easy.
John Yunker is president of 
