The Gungle » Connectivity

Wireless ad-hoc mesh in development

Ben Green — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:41:01 +0000

Researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information including high quality video.

The mesh network will make use of Bluetooth or Wifi and could be used at a large sporting event, conference, or even a crowded city centre during an emergency, to swap information between handsets – even if the mobile phone network was offline.

“If you think of this as a totally unstructured mesh. It is not pre-planned or pre-organised, there is no authentication of nodes, technically speaking. Even though you have wireless connections between nodes, there is nothing pre-planned and the network just forms. It would work very well in very crowded events,” she said.

via itNews

Nearness: a non-contact sport

Ben Green — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:02:25 +0000

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

Getting liked all over the internet:

*Just cut to the chase and give them the Nobel, that’s what I say.

Bruce Sterling

Aaaaaand … we’re back.

Ben Green — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:09:33 +0000

Sequence of events:

Something broke and caused a 500
I tried to fix it and broke more things
I decided to upgrade to WP 2.7.1 (booosh!)
I didn’t really read all the instructions
I did an import of the sql db I backed up through phpMyAdmin (gnarly)
Something magickally fixed

What an epic. This was undoubtedly due to neglect. Like cars, you have to turn blogs over every now and then to keep them running.

Lesson learnt.

3 Australia To Launch Facebook Phone next week

Ben Green — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:33:08 +0000

From the Washington Post:

The ultimate goal for these cheaper 3G smartphones is to drive more consumers to use mobile data, or a INQ Mobile CEO Frank Meehan told Unstrung, “You need to drive data usage higher right across all the handset segments. You want the majority of customers, not the top-end of the community that rules strategy at the moment.”

Three already try to drive more data usage through promotion of Facebook Mobile on their website.

INQ’s client-based Facebook app will always be on in the background, which means owners of the phone will get instant notice when friends update their profile, or as Meehan says, Facebook becomes like SMS.

This is what it looks like (nice wallpaper, dudes):

Gmail mobile client gets offline support

Ben Green — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:31:19 +0000

A 2.0 release that includes offline support for J2ME and Blackberry.

Includes email account switching between Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

Introducing Gmail for mobile 2.0

BigPond’s first tweets not music to all ears

Ben Green — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:21:25 +0000

After becoming the first Australian telco to launch a customer service site last Thursday, Telstra has come under fire from countless bloggers who have dismissed its attempts to engage customers and create a community of technical support as a blatant marketing ploy.

Bigpond bitten by blogosphere

You just can’t please some people.

Googleâ€™s New Patent

Ben Green — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:22:58 +0000

Googleâ€™s New Patent. Its called Flexible Communication Systems And Methods and would ultimately create an auction type marketplace for all of your wireless services. The concept is that consumers should have a right to easily choose who their provider is in different locations. One at home, one at work, one in your car, one here, there and everywhere. An Adwords/Adsense bid system would turn wireless signals into a commodity whereby Google helps broker a deal between carriers and customers.

From the handy “News We Missed, You Shouldn’t” from Phandroid.

Visual Interfaces to the Social and the Semantic Web (VISSW 2009)

Ben Green — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:42:44 +0000

This looks interesting – a workshop exploring interface developments that respond to the shift of the web from a predominantly read-only medium to a read/write.

…the need for intelligent and visual human interfaces to this evolving Web is not limited simply to the modalities of searching and browsing (important as these are). As the Web continues to evolve from a read-mainly to a read-write medium, and the level of social interaction supported on the Web increases, there is also a pressing need to support end-users who engage in a wide range of online tasks, such as publishing and sharing their own data on the Web.

Topics:

Visual interfaces supporting exploration and/or navigation of unstructured or structured data on the Web
Visualizing and interacting with semi-structured/linked data on the Semantic Web or the Social Semantic Desktop
Ontology-based visualization of & interaction with collections of data
Novel paradigms to interact with textual data, photos, music, videos on mobile devices
Lightweight components for casual users to publish/share their own contents on the Web
Real-world use cases
Lessons learned from intelligent interfaces built to interact with Web-based contents

Look forward to seeing what comes out of this.

Link: http://www.smart-ui.org/events/vissw2009/index.html

@God – tweet me back

Ben Green — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:43:03 +0000

I don’t think God is on Gospelr, but there seem to be some devoted Gospelrs.

I notice that @gatesofhell has disappeared though. Hope they’re ok.

via @mpesce.

Own Your Failure

Ben Green — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:51:55 +0000

Own Your Failure is a response to Obama’s call:

“It’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.”

However:

Barack Obama is right: the Republicans should own the failure of the last 8 years… but we all know the chances of that happening are slim! That leaves a lot of failure left to be claimed. Who wants it?

Quite a few people, apparently.