Any phone in hand is worth an Iphone in the bush?

Iphone UsersIt took Iain Gillott 47 hours to activate his iPhone after waiting in the Texas heat Friday afternoon to buy one.

He has been an AT&T Inc./Cingular Wireless customer for 12 years, so he never dreamed there would be any trouble setting up service. But after a day of trying, he learned that his family rate plan wouldn’t accommodate an additional line, and once that problem was solved, he learned AT&T sent Apple Inc. a message to activate, but the Apple servers had timed out.

An online poll at Engadget.com started on Sunday morning recorded by midday today more than 5,300 users who said they were “still dead in the water” and upset about activation delays, while another 1,600 said they were indeed activated after facing problems.

Source: Computer World

After waiting in line for hours at an AT&T store in New York City, Allison Alexy became one of the first consumers to purchase an iPhone. But when she tried to activate her cellular account — without which an iPhone cannot be used — she also became one of the first to run into problems with the device: She couldn’t transfer her Sprint Nextel Corp. cellphone number to AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive multi year contract with Apple Inc. to provide cellphone service for the iPhone.

Apple’s activation software for the iPhone indicated that the phone number wasn’t eligible for transferring but didn’t explain why.

Source: Moneyweb

July 3rd, 2007 :: tags: Tech News comments: 1 Comment
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Wireless Electricity?

Last week, an MIT research team announced that it had juiced up a 60W light bulb using ‘WiTricity’, the name it has given a wireless electricity source it is developing.

The team generated the WiTricity using two copper coils, one attached to a power source. The power coil emitted a field of magnetism to the unpowered coil, stimulating it to generate a current that powered the light bulb from seven feet away, said Andre Kurs, a graduate student in MIT’s physics department who worked on the project.

June 13th, 2007 :: tags: Tech News comments: No Comments
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Cat Cam

Cat CamDo you own a cat? Do you ever wonder what it’s up to when you are not around? Well German-American Jürgen Perthold, an inventor, has created the “cat cam.”

“I wanted to find out what he gets up to, where he spends his days. He goes out the whole day, sometimes he returns hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he also stays out all night. It gave me the idea to equip the cat with a camera,” said Perthold.

The camera, which is operated by batteries and weighs 70 grams (including the batteries), is hooked onto the cat’s collar and records their journeys. Operating for a maximum of two days, the camera takes a picture every minute. Perthold used his cat as a test subject and discovered his cat was visiting the neighbor’s female cat on a regular basis. Perthold even wrote his own program to operate and control the camera.
Source: Wikinews

June 13th, 2007 :: tags: Tech News comments: No Comments
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Managing your team just got easier - By Chris Nadeau

Team OnlineYourteamonline.ca is a Saint John, New Brunswick based startup that is building an online sports team social network and creating a lot of buzz within the minor sports community. The website currently focuses on hockey but will be launching soccer in the next few weeks. YourTeam Online, which launched in November 2006, allows coaches and teammates to share game plans, schedules, statistics, photos, videos and information with each other in a central place. There are currently 300 + teams using the website, consisting of coaches, players and parents.

YourTeam Online provides teams with web tools to assist in the following key areas:

* Communication
* Fund raising
* Self Improvement
* And Having Fun!

Anybody who has coached, managed or played on a sports team knows how much work is involved. Managing team rosters, stats, raising money, communication and event schedules is a time consuming chore. YourTeam Online aims to simplify the management of the various aspects of running any sort of team by providing an online destination, a social network tool of sorts for amateur sports.

YourTeam Online is completely free and always will be for coaches, parents and players. Revenue is generated by providing targeted sponsorship space to both local and national organizations and charging an activation fee for teams who want to use the fund raising component for their team website.

The entire YourTeam Online team is extremely excited to improve the daily YourTeam Online experience while preserving the reliability and functionality that its users have grown to know and love. In other words, YourTeam Online will only get better.

The next step ahead for YourTeam Online includes a wide array of improvements. We will be ramping up more enhanced features for customization for each team and working on all the great feedback that was provided by our users.

We’re looking forward to a very bright future here at YourTeam Online, and we couldn’t have made it here without our incredible community.

Chris Nadeau is a Guest Writer at The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Technology - Find out more about YourTeam Online at www.yourteamonline.ca or at www.yourteamonline.ca/blog. More on Chris at www.evolvingsolutions.ca and www.evolvingsolutions.ca/blog

June 6th, 2007 :: tags: Tech News comments: No Comments
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Surgeons who game are more skilled

Surgeons who game more skilled Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique. Apparently, there was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon’s capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery.

Laparoscopy and related surgeries involve manipulating instruments through a small incision or body opening where the surgeon’s movements are guided by watching a television screen.

February 21st, 2007 :: tags: Gaming, Tech News comments: 3 Comments
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Intellipedia - Wikipedia for the intelligence community

IntellipediaThe U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of
Wikipedia which will intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on Intellipedia.

This is currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17.

Intelligence officials hope that Intellipedia might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

November 1st, 2006 :: tags: Tech News comments: 5 Comments
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