Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

Computerworld presents ten tips and tricks for making use of text messaging, which can be used for brief messages of up to 160 characters, on your cell phone. They suggest the following tasks to get you up and running with SMS (short message service) technology:

1. Remember your appointments and schedule new ones
2. Track packages, calories and cash
3. Compose text messages with your voice
4. Get driving directions
5. Search Google From the Road
6. Keep tabs on flights …
7. … and keep tabs on friends
8. Transfer files to your phone
9. Send text messages from your PC
10. Archive your messages

Anyone doing the conference circuit this spring will want to check out the C|Net News story How to survive the next-gen confab, which discusses the new interactive audience which has been given a voice at these events through such tools as Twitter, IM, and blogs.

“If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, consider this: Today, there are so many ways to communicate that even in a conference ballroom where there’s no Wi-Fi, many audience members likely have smartphones they can use to Twitter their impressions of whoever is speaking. Add working Wi-Fi and you’ve got a full-throated echo chamber of people who aren’t at all shy about making every last thought public.”

The New York Times discusses the widening generation gap with regard to mobile technologies and activities such as text messaging in their article Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK).

“Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation’s version of pig Latin. For dumbfounded parents, AT&T now offers a tutorial that decodes acronyms meant to keep parents at bay. “Teens may use text language to keep parents in the dark about their conversations by making their comments indecipherable,” the tutorial states. Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS (“parent over shoulder”), PRW (“parents are watching”) and KPC (“keeping parents clueless”).”

The OEDb has created a mega-list of the best educational podcasts from across the globe in their Skip the Tuition: 100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World. Take a course in Quantum Mechanics from Stanford, explore the Brain Structure and its Origins through an MIT class, or learn about 50 Years in Media: Changes in Journalism at Harvard. The list highlights education on-the-go from these fine colleges and universities:

• Stanford
• UC Berkeley
• MIT
• Duke
• Harvard
• Queen’s University
• UCLA
• University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine
• University of Glasgow
• Yale
• and more…

Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily has come up with two noteworthy lists of mini applications that you can run on your USB thumb drive. These to-go applications are free and take up little space - perfect for a keychain drive. The first list, 10 Free Mini Apps–Perfect for a USB Thumb Drive, includes programs which can be run on Windows:

• Qm - an email client
• Miranda -an IM client
• SpeakFreely - a VOIP app
• IrfanView - a graphics program
• FxFoto - a photo editor
• SG TCP Optimizer - a Web connection optimizer
• RemotePad - a text editor with FTP client
• ASFRecorder - a Windows Media streaming client
• Text2HTML - a text to HTML converter
• TinyResMeter - a system resources meter

The second list, Eleven Go-Anywhere Mini Applications for the Mac, is a listing for Mac users:

• iStumbler - a tool to find wireless signals
• Bean - a rich text editor
• Tofu - a text display customizer
• Adium - an IM client
• ViewIt - an image viewer
• ImageWell - an image editor
• Inquisitor - Spotlight for the Web
• iBackup - a tool for automatic backups
• Paintbrush - an image editor
• Maintenance - maintenence utility
• DoBeDo - a to-do list widget

Be sure and check out the full articles for Dean’s summaries of each application.

The Sunday New York Times story What Did the Professor Say? Check Your iPod covers new software programs which are enabling colleges and universities to record classroom lectures and automatically sync them up with the PowerPoint slides and other digital images used during the lecture.

Students can download these files to play on their iPods on the commute home and they can search these digitized lectures by keywords to jump into the lecture at a point of interest. The University of Central Florida uses one of these programs from the Tegrity company to capture all the sessions of 300 of their classes per year. Fees for these programs range in cost from $10,000 up to $100,000.

via Social Media

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, half of Japan’s Top 10 bestselling fiction books were composed via mobile phones. Each sold an average of 400,000 copies. This new cultural phenomenon sweeping Japan is called keitai shousetsu or mobile phone novels and it is transforming minor publishing houses into forces to be reckoned with.

These works are oftentimes written by first-time authors using a single-name pseudonym and are delivered to their young female-dominated audience via cell phone, the same medium which was used to create them. One of the most popular of these next generation books, Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold over 1.2 million copies since last October.

via TechCrunch

Wired Magazine describes the formidable competition at the National Texting Championship held earlier this year in New York City. Over 300 competitors from across the country joined together in the Roseland Ballroom to put their texting skills to the test in a series of single-elimination rounds in which participants were given increasingly difficult phrases to type into their cell phones for a chance at $25,000.

In his article, In the World of Competitive Texting, Over 20 Is Over the Hill, Neil Janowitz tells us of the de-throning of a West Coast champ, and the rise of a thirteen year old texter, who according to the event website, sends over 4,000 text messages a month.

Amazon’s Kindle - Photo from Engadget

This fall, Amazon is to offer The Kindle - an ebook device based on E Ink technology at a price point of $400-$500 which will work with their new ebook service. The Internet-ready device will have the added feature of Web-surfing, and the ability to read both newspapers and magazines.

Rather than a device, Google will offer a service this fall which will allow members to read full-text books which it has indexed. Book publishers will decide on pricing for their own titles and share revenues with Google.

Incidentally, Sony’s e-book reader is still on the market at a cost of $300 and is also based on the E Ink technology.

For more coverage, check out these stories:

Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books - The New York Times

Amazon & Google To Enter eBook Business - TechCrunch

Amazon’s Kindle and Google’s Book Thing: More eBook Readers - CrunchGear

Kathryn Greenhill of Librarians Matter blogs about Why libraries should care about mobile phones, reporting on a recent study conducted by the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association and the Australian National University. According to the study, over 88% of respondents owned at least one mobile phone. she also points to an interesting video clip presentation - Why You Should Build Mobile Specific Websites for Mobile Devices. Be sure and check out her post for all the details.

For a US perspective, check out yesterday’s GigaOM post All Americans To Have Mobile Phones by 2013. Om Malik reports on research by SNL Kagan that shows that nearly 84% of the US population will have cell phones by the end of 2007.