Tech Lover

At a recent IT symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one area of study discussed was digitally augmented urban environments.

Carlo Ratti, director of the school’s SENSEable City Laboratory, says the lab is examining “the interface between people and mobile technology and cities. Wireless changes the way people live and work.”

Researchers in the group have been using MIT’s urban area in Cambridge., Mass., as a living lab. The campus achieved 100% Wi-Fi coverage in late 2005 and now has 3,000 access points. The staff monitors 104 buildings.

Once the infrastructure was in place Ratti’s group started to log and analyze traffic patterns, generating heat maps and graphics of usage statistics that provided a real-time picture of what the MIT population was up to at any given moment.

Researchers followed up with the release of iFind, downloadable PC client code that, through triangulation, provides information about a user’s location. Users decide when they want to be visible and to whom, and then can find friends and colleagues at a glance. About 1,500 of the 20,000 people on campus have downloaded iFind.

These humble first steps led to grander experiments overseas. The lab, for example, teamed with Google and Telecom Italia in Rome to see how much real-time information they could collect about city activity by monitoring cell-phone traffic patterns and taxi and bus movements.

Information superimposed on aerial photos showed cell activity as a red fog - the deeper the color, the more intense the traffic - while buses and taxis were yellow trails. The cell traffic showed the city waking up; at rush hour the main thoroughfares showed high-density cell traffic - and then just the opposite as those folks dispersed into the city.

You could see where the city was pulsating and people movement and flows, Ratti says. That kind of information can be important in planning everything from how to accommodate major events, such as a soccer match, to planning emergency evacuation routes. It also reveals such useful things as where cell handoffs are happening and where infrastructure might be insufficient.

Next up, the lab is trying to determine how a city can work as a real-time system. “Cities are not easy to change other than control traffic lights or reconfigure road lanes,” Ratti says. “But people change behavior based on what’s going on. You can influence them.”

“Cities of tomorrow will be made of concrete and silicon, and will make that possible, but “we don’t know how to do that yet,” he adds.

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/050307edit.html (hi tech)

Don’t expect to find Googles new Android platform on a Nokia phone soon, if ever. Nokias official stance is that its open to any new innovation in the market, especially one that will drive mobile data usage as Android ostensibly would. But Bill Plummer, vice president of multimedia for Nokia North America, points out Nokias Series 60 platform is already embedded in half the worlds smartphones so its not currently looking for any alternatives.

“We have a developer community that numbers in the millions, and last year we brought 40 million devices to market,” Plummer said. “At this stage the optimal solution for a phone is S60.”

Does that mean Nokia is remaining closed, while Google is the beacon of openness? Hardly, according to Plummer. “The changes that are taking place in the market — dont let anybody tell you its about convergence,” he said. “Its about collision.”

Google and a handful of hardware and software vendors and carriers are promoting their own operating system (OS) solution at the expense of others, Plummer said. The core OS may be based on Linux and it may be opensource, but opensource or no opensource, throwing a new platform into a market that has already coalesced around several other platforms doesnt unify the industry - rather it fragments it further, he said. Plummer doesnt challenge Googles right to launch such a platform - after all, Nokia’s S60Symbian platform is itself one of several competing OSs - but the feelgood vibes Google is attributing to Android are misplaced, he said.

Nokia, too, has been dabbling with open source. Symbian may be a licensed operating system, but Nokia took the S60 browser open source last year, using the same Apple Safari WebKit code that powers Androids browser. Nokia also uses Linux in its Internet tablet series, designed for WiFi and WiMAX networks, but Plummer said that those devices are intended to be mobile computers and the OS won’t be transferring to the handset.

So whats the difference between Google and Nokias flavors of open source? Probably not much, said John Jackson, wireless analyst for Yankee Group. Google and Nokia may have widely divergent approaches to the Java virtual machine and access to the underlying code, but on the browser they appear to be in the same camp. Google has made it clear that its vision for the mobile Internet is very browsercentric. That Webbased service approach tied to the same basic browser likely will mean that many applications designed for Android also will work on S60, Jackson said.

“Its highly likely when Google talks about opensource browsing and Nokia talks about opensource browsing, they’re really talking about the same thing,” Jackson said.

And ultimately that could resolve a very real problem for Google - that the worlds largest handset vendor isn’t getting on board with its plans.

Source:
http://telephonyonline.com/wireless/news/telecom_nokia_google/

Cell phone users in China sent 429 billion text messages last year, while India added more mobile subscribers in that year than Britain had in total, according to a new report.
The report by Ofcom, the British governments media and telecommunications watchdog, said mobile phones area driving most of the communications sectors growth and account for 53 percent of total telecom revenue.

In India, the number of new mobile subscriptions doubled to 150 million in 2006an increase that exceeds Britains total of 70 million mobile connections.

Still, only 14 percent of the Indian population had a mobile connection, showing its remaining growth potential.

In China, mobile users sent an equivalent of 967 text messages per user, more than any other country.

The findings were part of the research included in the Ofcom “International Communications Report,” which looked at the $1.78 trillion global television, radio, and telecommunications sector in 2006 to analyze growing trends.

It found Britain had the highest takeup of digital television of the 12 Westernized countries surveyedBritain, France, Germany, Italy, Republic of Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Canada, and the United States.

It also looked at Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which are at different stages of development.

Broadband takeup increased in Britain with over half of all households connected at the end of 2006, putting Britain slightly ahead of the United States for the first time.

In the television sector, Japanese and U.S. viewers spent the most time watching TV, both averaging 4.5 hours a day in 2006, while the U.S. also led the takeup of high definition TV, with 10 percent of homes capable of showing HDTV in 2006.

Internetbased TV, or IPTV, was most popular in France, with 1.5 million subscribers.

Source: http://news.zdnet.com/21001035_226222503.html