It may not look like much, but that little box could be the answer to long distance Wi-Fi connectivity, possibly from a mile away.  Yesterday, at the SIGCOMM Conference in Barcelona, the Networking Research Group from Microsoft Research presented their WhiteFi project to expand wireless capabilities through unused portions of the TV spectrum.

Image credit: Getty Images, Joshua Caldwell/Flicker
As television stations migrate to digital broadcasts from traditional analog signals, they free up space on the lower and longer traveling frequencies.  The empty fragments of the spectrum can be utilized to broadcast a broadband wireless internet signal, though serious technological and regulatory [...]

A woman in New York recently received the world’s first pacemaker that can be monitored wirelessly and then accessed remotely by her doctor.  Beyond simple tracking, if serious abnormalities develop the device will actually phone the physician for immediate attention.
The new device automates many of the tests for patents with pacemakers, and in doing so, speeds up the health care process.  For the 3 million people with pacemakers around the world, this development would make monitoring their condition incredibly efficient, and could likely save lives.  The technology received FDA approval in June and will hopefully become commonplace in newer pacemaker [...]

Poken is a new toy that attempts to bridge the gap between online and offline play. It’s a plastic creature, in the form of a panda or bumblebee or three-eyed monster, that transfers social networking information via ‘high-fives’ (and RFID). After making new friends face-to-face, kids can bust out their RFID-enabled keychains and instantly exchange their online identity details through a poken-to-poken high five. After the exchange, users then connect their toy to a computer via USB, where they can download the info onto poken’s database, which helps them manage and distribute the new data on the user’s social networking [...]

The world of storing and sharing digital information has vastly expanded and improved in recent years.  Now a new device, dubbed the Leyio, hopes to push the rarely used ultra-wide band technology into a new direction for communication with digital data.  The premise of the device is to allow, “for the first time, the digital generation…to take their online experience offline.”  It’s essentially a tiny storage product that can be paired with other Leyios to share information.
The 16 GB memory can be connected to a regular USB stick, a computer with the included dongle or with other users through a [...]

CES, the largest consumer technology trade show, has served as a showcase for hundreds of new devices, many of which heavily rely on wireless and inter-connectivity.  At thee show’s opening keynote, Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, announced that by 2011 ninty percent of Sony products will be able to connect to the internet and each other.  The trend presented by dozens of manufactures at CES has been to introduce devices that reflect the growing reliance on wireless technologies, social networking and constant network accessibility.
Nokia is making a big push at this year’s show to present technology to collaborate and communicate [...]