Christopher Herot's Weblog

Google Mobile

David Pogue's column yesterday described a number of innovative services for your mobile phone.  One of the most useful is Google Mobile.  By sending a text message to 46645 (GOOGL) you can have the results of a Google search sent back to your phone.

Search Feature	Example Query
Local Listings	sushi 94040
Weather	weather NYC
Sports	Boston Red Sox
Movies	Borat 02122
Stock Quotes	MSFT
Glossary	define zenith
Zip Code	02421
Translation	translate hello in french
Driving Directions	Lexington MA to 94043
Web Snippets	g hubble telescope
Q&A	abraham lincoln birthday
Area Code	617
Froogle price	ipod player 40gb
Calculator	1 US pint in liters
Currency Conversion	8 usd in yen
Help	local

You can have Google send you a text message with a link to a help page by opening www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/index.html on your PC's browser.  Or you can just go to mobile.google.com on your phone's browser.

In addition to text messages, that page has links to a Google search page formatted for the phone and access to Google Maps, Gmail, and Blogger.

Sending an SMS Under the Table

According to a recent poll conducted by Ipsos for T-Mobile, 35% of young adults say they’ve read or sent an e-mail or text message under the dinner table during a holiday family gathering.  The T-Mobile site offers a number of useful tips for the holiday season, such as:

1. Don't isolate yourself at a holiday gathering to make private calls or text message under the table. Do include other people at the gathering by putting your cell phone on speaker to call your favorite faraway relatives or friends so everyone can share in the moment.

   2. Don't give in to the pressure to answer your cell phone every time it rings. Do allow your voicemail to be your "personal secretary" and take the message for you.

   3. Don't assume parents or grandparents aren't interested in staying connected with people by wireless phone or text messaging. Do take the time to show others how to use the latest innovations on wireless phones and devices.

   4. Don't be a "conversation paratrooper" and suddenly bail out of a holiday chat just because a text message or mobile call has come in. Do make a positive impression by alerting your conversation partner in advance that you are expecting an important call or message and will need to excuse yourself when it happens.

   5. Don't assume kids are wasting time by chatting or texting via their mobile device. Do show an active interest in the friends your kids are connecting with. Better still, encourage your kids to invite these friends over in person for the next holiday gathering.

Wireless Energy Transfer

When my laptop battery ran out of juice on a long plane flight or equally long meeting, I would often often joke that as long as we have wireless data we should also have wireless power.   Now three scientists at MIT have described just how that could be done.

In Wireless Non-Radiative Energy Transfer, Marin Soljačić , Aristeidis Karalis, and John Joannopoulos explain that most wireless energy transfer schemes send energy in all directions so that, following the Inverse Square Law, the transmitter and receiver must be close together in order to prevent most of the energy from being lost.  One way around this problem is to focus the energy in a beam, e.g. a laser, but that requires an unobstructed line-of-site patch between them.  The scheme described in the paper uses resonance to ensure that most of the energy is transmitted to the intended receiver and little is lost to extraneous objects (such as people) in the vicinity.  According to their calculations, the power source may have to be somewhat larger than the receiver, but since the power source can be stationary this restriction would not present a problem in most cases, such as having a transmitter in a factory ceiling send energy to machines on the factory floor.

So far, the authors have only done a mathematical simulation, but if they can make this idea work in practice it could be used in applications from nano-robots to electric vehicles.

The image at right is from the slides.

If Net Neutrality Dies, So Will Online Gaming

Tony Greenberg and  Alex Veytsel make a good case in Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf that Video and, to an extent VoIP will survive even if Network Neutrality dies, but that the gaming industry may not.  Because massively multiplayer games require low latency they will be the first to suffer.  The authors argue that while the Telcos might think they can offer games of their own, they have no technology, partnerships, or  experience doing so.  On the other hand, if they get with the program and offer a truly open pipe, they could make a lot selling the bandwidth.

Conclusion

   

Out of all the victims of the loss of net neutrality, online gaming is likely to be the most fragile and irreplaceable. However, the immediacy of the harm and the lack of any tangible alternatives by ISPs may serve as sufficient cause to block actual widespread packet prioritization policies with regards to online games, whether by overburdening support resources (bottom-up action) or by tying up the matter in courts under the principle of irreparable harm (top-down action).

Cheap, hackable Linux smartphone due soon

LinuxDevices.com reports that First International Computing will ship a completely open, Linux-based, GPS-equipped, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone direct, worldwide, for $350 or less, in Q1, 2007.

 

The phone will run both the OpenMoKo open-source software or Windows Mobile.

Disk Drive with a View

Not only is the Western Digital WD Raptor X fast, it has a window so you can see it in operation.

Make sure to order the first WD Raptor X Certified Case for your computer to go with it.

Burgers over the Internet

The Boston Globe reported today on yet another example of how the Internet is changing how business is done.  This time it was how fast food restaurants were handling drive-through orders at a remote call center.  In the example cited in the article, a customer pulls up to the drive-through window at a Wendy's in Burbank, California and is connected via VoIP to a call center operated by 256 Operating Associates Inc. in Nashua, NH.   The reps in the call center talk transmit the order to a screen back at the restaurant, including an image of the vehicle.

Since the reps don't need to actually make the food, they can concentrate on communicating with the customer including selling them extras ("Would you like fries with that?").  The net result is that orders get processed faster (90 seconds down from 135), and the average check gets larger.  An added benefit is by separating the order takers from the food handlers, the opportunity for employee theft is reduced.  Apparently the system works so well that managers at the stores that use the call centers refuse to get transfered to restaurants without them.

The only problem is that as William & Mary economics professor Martin B. Schmidt argues, making food this easy to procure will make people fatter.

FCC rules for CO in Massport WiFi Case

In ET Docket No. 05-247, the FCC ruled that Massport can not prohibit Continental Airlines (CO) from offering its own WiFi service at Boston's Logan Airport.

Massport, which was selling it's own service, had tried to prevent it's tenants, such as CO, from offering competing services.  Massport claimed this policy was to prevent interference with it's own system, but may felt it was just a means of stifling competition.

From Memorandum Opinion and Order issued today:

I. Introduction

1.  In this Memorandum Opinion and Order, we address a Petition for Declaratory Ruling filed by Continental Airlines, Inc. (Continental) pertaining to its installation and use of a Wi-Fi antenna within its lounge at Boston-Logan International Airport (Logan Airport).   Continental claims that the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), the owner of Logan Airport, has demanded that Continental remove its Wi-Fi antenna, and that such restrictions are prohibited by the Commission’s Over-the-Air Reception Devices (OTARD) rules.   For the reasons stated below, we find that Massport’s restrictions on Continental’s use of its Wi-Fi antenna are pre-empted by the OTARD rules and we therefore grant Continental’s petition.