15th July 2009
Tagging technology to track trash
The ebb and flow of thousands of pieces of household rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags. It is hoped that making people confront the final journey of their waste will make them reduce what they throw away. Initially, 3,000 pieces of rubbish, donated by volunteers, will be tagged in New York, Seattle and London. “Trash is almost an invisible system today,” Assaf Biderman, one of the project leaders at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BBC News. “You throw something into the garbage and a lot of us forget about it. It gets buried, it gets burned, it gets shipped overseas.” The Trash Track aims to make that process – termed the “removal chain” – more transparent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8149183.stm
Google Voice coming to Android, BlackBerry
Google is ready to bring Google Voice to a place where it really makes the most sense: the smartphone. Android and BlackBerry owners who are also Google Voice users will be able to use the service directly on their handsets starting today, said Vincent Paquet, senior product manager for Google Voice and a co-founder of GrandCentral, the product currently known as Google Voice. Google Voice, which is expected to be available at some point today, lets users assign a single number to ring their home, work, and cell phones, and also get voice mail messages as text transcriptions.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10286763-2.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/google-voice-apps-for-android-and-blackberry-are-here/
T-Mobile believed to be in talks with Apple to snatch iPhone from 02
The new UK managing director of T-Mobile is preparing to announce his plans to resuscitate the mobile phone company’s flagging fortunes, amid speculation that the country’s fourth-placed network is trying to wrest the iPhone from Apple’s exclusive British partner O2. Richard Moat, who joined T-Mobile UK last month, has had a rough ride after it emerged that bankers at JP Morgan have approached Vodafone to discuss the possibility of a bid for the company. Orange has had overtures to T-Mobile’s German parent Deutsche Telekom rebuffed, while market leader O2 is also interested in looking at the firm’s books. Moat, however, is preparing to reveal his plans to turn around T-Mobile’s fortunes in the UK market, where it has fallen far behind O2, Vodafone and Orange.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/14/tmobile-apple-iphone-02
Iranian consumers boycott Nokia for ‘collaboration’
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime. Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran. There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are
shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/14/nokia-boycott-iran-election-protests
Dell Says Tech Spending Is Likely to Remain Weak
Dell Inc. executives said world-wide technology spending is weak and likely will remain so for the near future as companies delay computer purchases and consumers gravitate to low-cost devices. “We’re going to run the business assuming relatively weak demand continues,” said Dell Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden, speaking at the Round Rock, Texas, company’s annual conference for Wall Street analysts. Chief Executive Michael Dell added that big customers are delaying new technology purchases during the recession and are “elongating the life cycle” of personal computers. He said spending should pick up next year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124760529668341211.html#mod=rss_whats_news_technology
Teenagers losing interest in illegal file-sharing as streaming starts to flow
Illegal file-sharing in the UK has fallen dramatically, according to media and technology researchers at Music Ally. The analyst firm published a study on Monday that showed the numbers of those who regularly file-shared had dropped by a quarter between December 2007 and January 2009. The trend was particularly pronounced among 14-18-year-olds – at the earlier date, 42 per cent were file-sharing at least once per month but at the latter date only 26 per cent were doing so. At the same time, streaming music services
appear to be taking off.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39451677,00.htm
