Telecom
Foot Pump Phone Chargers
Festival goers at Glastonbury, in the U.K., can charge their cell-phones through using a standard airbed foot pump, the type normally found all over festival sites. The Orange Gotwind power pump’s turbine is rotated at speeds of up to 2000 rpm from the air flow generated by the foot pump, this turbine [...]
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a series of technology initiatives yesterday, all of them designed to increase transparency and improve access to information about City services. A contest called NYC Big Apps will begin in the fall and return as an annual competition to improve government accountability and transparency, as well as engaging New York’s [...]
While GPS and cellular tracking systems have opened up new ways to navigate our daily environments, the viability of the technology is often less than stellar when we find ourselves indoors or in dense urban areas—which is a lot of the time. Nokia has released a trial technology that allows users to pinpoint their location [...]
Virgin Mobile’s newly-announced Broadband2Go service will give customers a contract-free option for portable broadband. Users will receive a pre-paid 3G broadband USB dongle for $150, which they can then pre-load with a certain amount of data useage; $10 for 100MB, $20 for 250MB, $40 for 600MB and $60 for 1GB. Service will expire after [...]
Ribbit is an open API platform for integrating phone call features into the online world. Calls, texts, and voicemails can be integrated into web banners and sites.
In the demo pictured above, drag and drop features were used to create a pizza banner with features to place an order over the phone. After inputing your number [...]
For the last couple of years, Orange has been giving away tickets to the much-hyped Glastonbury Festival in the UK through their Spot The Bull competition. They have just taken the wraps off this year’s contest. The basic rules of the game stay the same: they have put a real bull named Desmond in a [...]
Virgin is teaming up with Google to promote cloud computing. On June 24th, the Day in the Cloud Challenge, lets players compete versus others either on the ground or while flying in one of Virgin’s flights through WiFi. If you’re flying Virgin that day, you’ll receive free WiFi to join the challenge. But if you [...]
At a time when the worldwide economy could sorely use a boost, we were excited to learn of a recent announcement made by Nokia that they will start freely sharing their unused research and development to companies across Finland. The initiative called The Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill is a three-year joint venture that also involves Technopolis, [...]
“This is this is the second notice that your vehicle’s factory warranty is about to expire,” or so says the automated voice at the other end of the phone, regardless of whether or not you actually own a car in the first place. An annoyance that has hit a nerve with the American public and [...]
Renowned for playing host to the some of the world’s largest artists, Wembley stage will soon host it’s first mobile phone performer, singer/songwriter Gary Go. Instead of using traditional instruments, Gary Go chooses to play music with his iPhone. Using his phone’s virtual recording studio application, Go has already successfully managed to recreate melodies on [...]
At PSFK Conference NYC, Kevin Slavin gave a captivating presentation on “This Platform Called Everyday Life”, in which he discussed the evolving nature of the objects surrounding us. Kevin, Managing Director and co-founder of Area/Code, explained how pervasive technologies are changing the way we relate to our physical environment and everything in it - from [...]
DesignNotes features an interesting interview with Takayuki Fukatsu, the creator of two of the most elegant iPhone apps we’ve seen, QuadCamera and ToyCamera. QuadCamera allows iPhone users to take lomo-esque sequential photos with their phones (we used it to take the top picture). ToyCamera (used to create the ship pic) overlays effects on photos, like [...]
The New York Times notes that Netbooks are making a bit of a comeback with sales rising despite the recession. They say that these web-connected mini-laptops with just-good-enough computing and low prices are now in demand while PC sales are dropping:
A netbook does not need the world’s most powerful microprocessor on board, because the constant [...]
Visa in collaboration with Nokia have launched a new service using NFC (Near Field Communication).
The Visa PayWave service is being tested in Malaysia and allows users to make payments by just waving their phone in front a contact-free reader. The transaction will then appear on the next cell phone bill.
Currently, 1800 shops accept the system [...]
Touch is a research group exploring the way mobile phones communicate with the physical world. One of their latest experiments involves attaching an RFID reader to an iPhone. When the phone is close enough to an RFID tag attached to certain objects, different actions or windows are triggered on the phone. In the demo, the [...]
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