Mayor of London and Top Gear slowpoke Boris Johnson is trying to make London one of the most wired cities, just in time for the Olympics. During a recent conference, Johnson announced a plan to install wifi hotspots in “every lampost and bus stop.” → Read More
Live in New York? Live in New York? Pop over here and register for your free Wi-Fi! If you have a RoadRunner cable account, you can connect to free WiFi in “several” locations around New York including Bryant and Madison Square Parks and some parks in Queens. If you’re thinking to yourself “Hey, a few parks in Manhattan, some DMZ out in the boonies, and some spots in Port Washington (probably where the uncles of Time Warner executives live) do not make overarching WiFi access for the masses,” then you’re probably right. But when’s the last time Time Warner Cable did anything nice for you? Maybe you could be appreciative?
Thankfully you also have access to “thousands” of Optimum Wi-Fi hotspots, so it’s not THAT bad. But then Optimum’s coverage isn’t exactly in Manhattan. → Read More
Check out the latest from Adesso, it’s a combination of a regular keyboard and a laptop touch-pad, making it almost ideal for home theater or limited space applications. Now we’ve seen this before, the idea is nothing new, but this particular product has one little feature we haven’t seen before. → Read More
There is nothing more satisfying than claiming to be the first at anything, and so far this week, Samsung must be pretty happy with itself. After announcing its plans to mass produce AMOLED touchscreens, the first to include built-in touch functions, Samsung’s S8500 will be the first consumer handset to feature Bluetooth 3.0. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or SIG, has approved version 3.0 for the handset and also slipped out a few details on the phone. → Read More
Everyone is familiar with the traditional EKG – you lie in the hospital bed, the leads connected to your body, and recording your heart rate and other vital statistics. But what if it was all wireless? What if you didn’t need to be in the hospital stuck in bed to be monitored? → Read More
Before I begin, let me just state that TSA has yet to confirm any of this on its website, so the details aren’t entirely clear at the moment. That said, there are several indications that orders have been issued to cease the use of electronics during international flights. Yes, that means no laptops, no iPods, no Kindles, no CD players, no portable DVD players, no Nintendo DSes — nothing that requires any sort of power on these flights. If this is true, it’s absolutely awful news.
Obviously, this is all in reaction to the Nigerian man who attempted to bring down a plane coming into the U.S. And the TSA is going to do whatever it thinks is necessary to prevent further attacks of a similar nature. But the simple fact is that if the TSA was really this seriously worried about electronic devices, they could have banned them anytime since the attacks on September 11, 2001. Instead, they’re doing it more than 8 years later after a man apparently lit some sort of mixture of powder and liquid in his lap. How that relates to electronics, I’m not sure. This just reeks of a “well, we have to do something” move. → Read More
It’s a good time to be an airport Wi-Fi advertiser. According to a study just released by JiWire, the folks behind a lot of airport Wi-Fi, most people that use airport W-iFi are loaded and spend a good amount of time online while waiting for their flight. This means, of course, that Mr. Money Bags has plenty of time to click on the flashing banner ads that airport Wi-Fi generally sports. But check out these stats, I’m in the wrong game. I should be selling airport Wi-Fi ads. → Read More
Designed to work without a dedicated PC, the new Astak Mole was announced today. The Mole is a wireless webcam that can upload video directly to such sites as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. It can also record directly to an SD card in the camera. → Read More
I just came back from the CNET Japan Innovation Conference 2009 [JP] in Tokyo, where Cerevo, currently one of the most ambitious tech start-ups in Japan, showed its self-developed digital camera aimed at heavy social media users for the first time.
The company has just seven employees (two of them are part-timers) but big plans: Cerevo intends to dramatically simplify the process of uploading and sharing pictures online by providing both an extra-easy to use camera (the “CerevoCam”) and a photo sharing site (“CerevoLife”) specifically geared towards owners of that camera. And the company wants to bring its idea in front of a global audience. → Read More
The terribly named “White-Fi” is a research effort to bring WiFi transmission to the unlicensed TV spectrum — the so-called “whitespace” (get it? White-Fi!) of TV channels in the UHF band . Big whoop, right? Well, with transmission ranges up to 1 kilometer, that actually is a pretty big deal. Mesh networking is also in the works. But most interesting of all are the requirements that the FCC has imposed on White-Fi devices to make sure they don’t interfere with any television broadcasts or wireless microphones. Basically, any White-Fi device needs to immediately switch frequencies the instant it detects a signal from a television or microphone. → Read More
Researchers in Japan have developed an attack against WiFi Protected Access when using the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) that can successfully break the encryption in less than a minute. If you’re using WPA with TKIP, switch to AES, or step up to WPA2. → Read More
In the Old West a man was defined by his hat. Stetson, Ten-Gallon, and Bowler were only three of the myriad hats available to a real man and these hats often stank of pomade and sweat and were frequently infested with lice and caked in a fine crust of dandruff. The Old West totally sucked.
Thank God we live in the New West because now, for $14, you can wear a WiFi detecting cap that shows current WiFi levels in your general vicinity. It comes in two styles – circular and, apparently, Engadget- and comes in black, red, or white. → Read More
Today Sanyo Japan announced a new high-end projector, the LP-WXU700 [JP], which is the world’s first WiFi-enabled projector supporting the IEEE802.11n standard (and thus the fastest). Sized at 334.2×78.4×257.5mm (weight: 3.6kg), the device is marketed by Sanyo as a mobile projector. → Read More
It’s now a tad easier to share a 3G connection thanks to the LevelOne MobilSpot Portable Wireless HotSpot. All the router requires is either a USB or Card Bus datacard and off it goes, sharing the EV-DO or HSDPA stream over Wi-Fi or out through Ethernet. It’s that easy, folks. LevelOne has also configured the router to work as a standard home router that’s compatible with broadband access, but when the data stream drops from the wired connection, the 3G will kick in as backup. → Read More
IOGEAR announced a wireless USB audio/video adapter today. Seems like it could be interesting. → Read More
Glastonbury, England, renowned for its hippy culture and often thought to be the last resting place of King Arthur and/or The Holy Grail, is reportedly seeing an increase in minor health problems, like headaches, dizziness, rashes and even pneumonia. The cause of these illnesses? Nasty, filthy WiFi networking. No one ever got sick until the city rolled out a £34,000 WiFi network. → Read More
Shinkansen by Bistrosavage When I was in Sweden last year, I enjoyed the fact that the rail service taking me from Malmö to Linköping offered WiFi on the trains, utilizing a combination of satellite, 3G and GSM for the uplink. I didn’t end up using it, choosing instead to sleep, but it was a reassuring feeling to know that I could Twitter my heart out should the feeling strike me in the Swedish countryside. Soon Japan will be taking things to the next level when NTT Communications offers WiFi service on the N700 high-speed bullet trains! → Read More
CNet is reporting that Delta will add WiFi service to some of its flights in 2009. Initially available on shuttle flights, long-term plans are to make WiFi available on all 330 planes in Delta’s domestic fleet. Expect to pay $10 on flights up to 3 hours, and $13 on flights over 3 hours. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
