Gizmodo’s Brian Lam went live from Virgin America’s promotional Wi-Fi junket over San Francisco. The carrier’s first Wi-Fi enabled plane will circle the skies above San Francisco during the event and a segment of the YouTube Live show will be streamed from 35,000 feet to an audience on the ground and on-line. Lam posted 10 Things You Need To Know About In Flight Wi-Fi from 30,000 feet.

1. Your last bastion of Internet Free peace is gone. Forever. You’ll be forced to work on flights instead of valium napping or reading comic books, and your boss will expect you to be checking email.
2. Total bandwidth is not as fast as Cable Modem, but it seems faster than slow DSL. (We were sharing 3.1Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, which isn’t bad at all, on this Virgin America test flight, and it felt this fast when benching.)
3. But bandwidth is shared between customers. Aircell’s GoGo a 3GHz EVDO-Rev A related tech modded for ground to air, started crawling as soon as other passengers signed on. (I got a test result measuring 66kbps down at one point.)
4. You have to pay. Virgin America charges, for example $9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95 on flights over 3 hours.
5. You will still need to close your laptops and shut off your devices until you reach cruising altitude.
6. Most airlines, even those that are not blocking ports, are blocking known VOIP ports. For our sanity. Although I WAS able to initiate a really solid iChat video session. (See Below, courtesy of Nick Bilton from the NYTimes.)
7. Although plenty of airlines will have Wi-Fi by the end of next year, I prefer Virgin America because they’ve got 110v AC power plugs in coach.
8. WiFi porn won’t be blocked by Virgin America or American Airlines (according to a test earlier this week.)
9. Flights using Go Go service will be able to connect to a VPN.
10. You can file share with other computers on the Wi-Fi network. That’s good for gaming, but also, make sure your firewall is up.

WiFi service starts on a single Virgin aircraft on November 24th, then expands to their entire fleet by second quarter 2009.

Transit Connectivity, Wi-Fi Deployments, Wi-Fi News | No Comments »

Raven Zachary, the Open Source Research Director for The 451 Group, has a cold splash of reality for anyone who thinks they have a great idea for an iPhone application. At O’Reilly Digital Media’s Inside iPhone he posted the following tough love message about Turning Ideas Into iPhone Applications:

“I have an idea for an iPhone application.”

The most common conversation I have with people these days concerns the process of turning ideas into iPhone applications. Someone reaches out to me from across the Internet, hoping I will be able to build an iPhone application or make connections to people who will.

I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with the ideas and those who are actually capable of turning the ideas into iPhone applications.

This gap is almost entirely financial in nature. The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs - project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.

I am someone who is highly motivated by ideas. So, it pains me to say that the value of an iPhone application idea right now is pretty much zero. A great idea isn’t worth anything under these conditions.

There is no shortage of great iPhone ideas, just a shortage of talent to bring these ideas to market…

[Via Silicon Florist]

Raven Zachary, Jason Grigsby, Lyza Gardner and others created the Obama iPhone application on short notice. The all-volunteer (free) effort took about 45 days to develop, from start to finish.

Obama ‘08 was a free application, developed for election campaign workers, and ran on the iPhone 3G, the original iPhone, and iPod touch.

It features a Call Friends and Call Stats and could find your local Obama for America HQ, look up local campaign events, or get instant access to Barack’s positions, as well as local and national campaign news as it happened. Photos and videos from the campaign trail, too.

Apple now holds 17% of the consumer smartphone market with nearly half of its new customers coming from Verizon Wireless.

Android, Applications, Commentary, Conferences, Grass Roots Wireless, Location Services, Society & Telecom, WiMAX News, iPhone | No Comments »

TechCrunch notes that Stanford professor Larry Lessig revealed profound views on copyright, remix culture, and the new hybrid economy on Charlie Rose last night.

Lessig concludes the interview with his ‘big idea’. It is an inspiring, and elegant reminder that we are in the midst of an unprecedented social change. Just as the Gutenberg press facilitated the spread of the Protestant Reformation, fundamentally altering the course of Western civilization, so too is the internet beginning to spark tectonic changes, the breadth of which we don’t yet have the historical perspective to grasp.

As Lessig explains:

I think the big idea, as every big idea is, is just one amazing step beyond where we are right now. And I think you think about the Obama campaign, something like Wikipedia, something like the stuff that’s going on on the Internet, the kind that I think of as read write culture.

What it really is doing is reviving the sense that people can do something. Not the passive couch potato politics or couch potato culture, but that they can do something. We’re close to making it really effective. I think the next cycle, what you’re going to see in the way politics functions, will be unrecognizable, even from today. But when we’re there, it will be a revival of ideals, aspirations about democracy that will surprise us.

The cynicism that we had in the 20th century will look very 20th century.

Broadcasting & Cable, Open Source, Society & Telecom | No Comments »

Venture Beat reviews some envisioneering projects from Nokia Research Labs in Palo Alto, California. They include a bunch of next-generation technologies that are genuinely innovative, including phones that can tell us what we’re looking at and devices that morph their forms from watch to tablet to phone as needed.

Henry Tirri, senior vice president and head of Nokia Research, said, “We’re talking about going way beyond just replicating a computer on a phone,” he said. “We want to provide the user with the right context that they need at the time when they need it. This is the evolution of computing.”

Nokia’s Point and Find project (above) will let you point your camera phone at a building, and it will fetch you information about it. The technology comes from Pixto, a company that Nokia bought in 2007.

Nokia’s most futuristic project is Morph (above), which envisions a day when nanomaterials will be able to refashion themselves. With materials like that, you can build a watch that could change itself into a phone or a tablet computer at a user’s whim.

Applications, Cellular News, GPS, Gadgets, Innovations, Location Services, Society & Telecom | No Comments »

Wireless Week says technology companies such as TeleNav and WebTech Wireless have seen a jump in revenue because of enterprise interest in using location-based services (LBS) and telematics services.

WebTech, which has headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, reported a 36% increase in year-over-year revenue through July.

Home Depot is using TeleNav Track to monitor its home inspection line of business and has seen a 300% increase in productivity by using wireless forms on BlackBerry devices, said Sal Dhanani, co-founder and senior marketing director of TeleNav (right).

WebTech Wireless recently partnered with Canada’s Rogers Communications, NetTech Logistics and Foster Park Baskett Insurance to offer LBS/fleet telematics services called NelTrak. The offering includes an oilfield services package for fleet management in the oil and gas industry.

Motorola’s Mobile Computing unit, the former Symbol computing company, has had great success with its GPS and wireless wide-area networking (WWAN) computers for vehicles. Motorola recently announced a new VC6096, a fixed-mount mobile computer, aimed at improving driver productivity, reducing costs and improving customer service for transportation and logistics companies.

Motorola recently surveyed more than 255 IT and telecom executives from transportation and trucking companies and found that enterprises using GPS for the field workers saw a labor savings of about 54 minutes a day. That time savings amounted to a dollar savings of $5,484 per employee annually.

Other benefits of using GPS, according to the study, included a 53% reduction in travel downtime, 26% increase in employee accountability, and a 7% reduction in overtime. But the main benefit of using LBS was a reduction in fuel consumption because of an average reduction in weekly travel of 231.2 miles, accounting for $51,582 annual fuel savings per employee.

Machine-to-machine technology is gaining traction among businesses across all industries, reports RCR Wireless News. According to a recent survey conducted by Beecham Research, 82% of businesses responding consider M2M as “imperative” and “very important” for their future. KORE Telematics sponsored the survey along with Anywhere Technologies, Maingate, M2M Alliance, ORBCOMM, Sierra Wireless, Telefonica O2, Tridium, Wavecom and Wyless. RCR News has more on M2M telemetry.

The future of automotive telematics is on display this week at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems which features 10,000 transportation and technology experts.

Ford will build telematics systems into vehicles at the factory next year. The telematics system called Crew Chief supplied by Microlise, allows fleet controllers to get information about the vehicle’s location and aspects of the vehicle and driver’s performance. Ford will ramp up production to 20,000 the following year and up to 45,000 in 2011.

Collision-mitigation systems and “greenwave” traffic-monitoring technology are still being tested, but there are other cutting-edge technologies and conveniences available today. Forbes Magazine reviews some of the “smartest” cars on the road today.

Related DailyWireless stories on transit connectivity include; Boingo Gets Ferry-Fi, Feeney Does WES, Cars Talking WiMAX, Motorola Car Computer, Chrysler Offers Internet Access, Portland Commuter Rail Readies Wi-Fi, Chrysler Rolls Out U-connect, Ford Sync, PePWave Mobility: Connectivity for Vehicles, Civic Booster, Broadband Wireless Modems, Kyocera KR2 Mobile Router.

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Informa Telecoms & Media is forecasting one billion HSPA subscribers and 103 million WiMAX subscribers by 2013, world-wide. Of course that’s somewhat comparing apples to oranges. HSPA is a 3G cellular technology. It usually tops out between 500-750kbps, while WiMAX might be considered a “4G” technology, and is expected to deliver 2 Mbps or more.

LTE, cellular’s “4G” technology, will likely deliver similar speeds to Mobile WiMAX, but it will be 2010 before it’s ready. It may be 5 years (around 2013) before LTE is commercially available in big cities.

WiMAX supporters include Sprint Nextel, Comcast, Time-Warner, and Google. Intel will embed WiMAX in notebooks and handhelds.

“In many major emerging markets all the pieces are falling into place for WiMAX, including availability of spectrum, huge pent-up demand for broadband, certification of Mobile WiMAX equipment, and the arrival of new lower-cost devices such as ultra-portable notebooks and netbooks,” says Mike Roberts, Informa Telecoms & Media principal analyst. “For example our forecasts show that WiMAX will account for 24 percent of India’s total broadband subscribers by 2013, up from seven percent in 2008.”

Most observers believe WiMAX has a 2-3 year lead over LTE.

NTT DoCoMo says it can do 250 Mbit/s on an LTE downlink. NTT has been testing LTE, which it calls Super 3G, since February 2008, in a field trial using a real wireless environment outside its research and development labs in Yokosuka, Japan. Unstrung says DoCoMo has set the most aggressive timeline for commercial deployment, which is planned for 2010.

Unstrung offers this analysis:

One of the few near certainties is that over the next five years, Verizon Wireless is going to spend, spend, spend on LTE – much the same way Sprint Nextel has been spending to get WiMax off the ground. Within 18 months, Sprint will have pretty decent WiMax coverage in a lot of U.S. cities through Clearwire, together with handover to CDMA 1X EVDO. For its part, AT&T has a software-based HSPA roadmap to 14.4-Mbit/s downlink speeds and an HSPA Evolution roadmap that goes way beyond that. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is stuck at 3.1-Mbit/s downlink speeds with EVDO Rev. A, with nowhere else to go except LTE. Verizon Wireless has to throw the kitchen sink at LTE to remain competitive in this arms race – and soon. There is no alternative.

Light Reading thinks the big LTE vendors will be Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei.

The mobile phone market will be worth $200 billion in 2013, says Informa, with emerging markets representing a 60% share. There were 3.4 billion GSM/HSPA wireless subscriptions globally at the end of third quarter 2008, capturing an 88.5% share of market, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. In 2010, over 200 million mobile phones will ship with WiFi, out of the 1.4 billion total.

How’s that for a femtocell infrastructure.

Related DailyWireless articles include: Bare Knuckles in Barcelona: LTE Vrs WiMAX, AT&T: It’s LTE, Verizon: It’s LTE, Sprint: It’s WiMAX, Ericsson: Wi-Fi is Dead, Dead, Dead, Mobile World Conference Announcements, WiMAX Uncloaks FDD, NTT “Super 3G”, Xohm “Partners”?, T-Mobile: $10B in 3 Years, Nokia Siemens: LTE Works, and XOHM Live?.

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At the LA Auto Show, Mercedes showed off their Web-Connected myComand, which takes on BMW’s iDrive.

One big difference is that myCOMAND is connected to the web, grabbing information wirelessly and presenting it through their own on-screen apps, explains Gizmodo.

It features:

• Off-board navigation: The GPS is constantly updated, from the maps to the points of interests. It also has a satellite overview and the search language is open: you can write directions without having to follow a format. It looks like the are plugging into Google Maps for this one, although I’m not sure how well the writing will work using their navigation knob.
• Trip assist: This part is quite nice, grabbing information pertaining your planned trip from different web sources and presenting it in a useful manner. You can, for example, see the weather forecast for the trip, as well as giving you the possibility to make hotel and restaurants reservations from the system itself.
• World radio: Instead of using a normal radio, this one plugs into the web to access all the stations available. The menu gives the possibility to access radio via genre. More interesting is the idea of storing your music in a web server and accessing it through the system directly, without the need to connect an digital music player or storing things locally.
• Internet telephony: It support a voice over IP system built by Ribbit, who have an open API.
• Web browser: They also include a web browser, in case you need to get more information than the one provided with the thin clients above.
• YouTube: Perfect for those boring commutes.

Mercedes-Benz says myCOMAND is programmed so that it automatically collects from the internet all information necessary for a service – be it hotel descriptions, weather forecasts or the details of available parking spaces – and puts it together to provide the desired service. There is no complicated searching via browser. This greatly speeds up access to data.

The navigation knob looks similar to BMW’s iDrive 4.0, a $2,000 option in the 2009 BMW 3 Series and 1 Series, or standard in the 7 Series. NPR tested the Voice Command on the BMWi 7 Series (ram) in 2002 and couldn’t get it to work.

Of course you could put a $200 iPhone, Android G-1 or Nokia’s WiMAX-enabled webtablet on the dash.

Apple’s new iPhone software upgrade is getting good reviews. Version 2.2 includes Google Street View in Google Maps, which allows users to see a 360-degree view of locations. The podcasts section has also been enhanced, so besides being able to download podcasts from iTunes, after the new update you can download your favorite audio and video shows straight on your iPhone over Wi-Fi or a cellular connection.

uLocate works with Sprint for location-based services on its WiMAX network.

PC World says the day of the in-car satnav may be over, with GPS smartphones like the Apple iPhone 3G outsripping their sales. Global shipments of satnavs or PNDs (Portable Navigation Devices) were down 6 per cent in Q3 2008 in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa - falling behind shipments of smartphones with built-in GPS, which soared from 4.7 million last quarter to 10.4 million in Q3 although North America and Asia Pacific still seeing good volume growth.

Nokia is already the third largest provider of mobile navigation solutions across all platforms in EMEA, behind TomTom and only narrowly behind Garmin.

Related DailyWireless stories on transit connectivity include; BMW iDrive Gets Makeover, Livable Streets Network, Google Streetview on Cell Phones, Rest Area Hotspots Closed, Chrysler Offers Internet Access, Portland Commuter Rail Readies Wi-Fi, Chrysler Rolls Out U-connect , Ford Sync, Mobile Livecasting, Google Transit Maps + WiFi, Chrysler: Wi-Fi Car This Year, The Connected Bus, Hotspot for Bedouins, Chrysler Getting WiMAXed, Verizon Traffic Mapping , Gadgets That Listen, Analog Cellular to Shut Down, Microsoft Vrs OnStar and 3-D Traffic/Weather Maps.

Android, Applications, Bluetooth, Cellular News, EV-DO/HSDPA, GPS, Gadgets, Innovations, Location Services, Mobile TV, Radio Policy News, Security, Society & Telecom, Transit Connectivity, WiMAX News, iPhone | No Comments »

Clearwire shareholders decided Thursday it would be a good thing to collect $3.2 billion from Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and team up with Sprint to build a new national high-speed wireless network, says the Kansas City Star.

“Today, our shareholders have taken a transformative step toward enabling an entirely new mobile Internet experience for consumers and businesses across the country,” Benjamin Wolff, chief executive officer of Clearwire, said in a statement. “With an unmatched spectrum portfolio, a next generation all IP network, an ever-expanding ecosystem of mobile 4G devices, and the backing of some of the most innovative communications, entertainment and technology companies in the world, Clearwire is ready to redefine mobile Internet services in the U.S.”

With the affirmative stockholder vote, the consent of its lenders in hand, review of the transaction under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 by the U.S. Department of Justice complete and approval from the Federal Communications Commission, no further consents or approvals for the transactions are required. The company is continuing to work toward closing the transaction before year-end.

An Illinois circuit court removed — for the time being — one of the last obstacles to the creation of the “new” Clearwire Monday, telling Sprint affiliate iPCS that it must pull its motion for a temporary restraining order on the deal,

The $14.6 billion venture, to be called New Clearwire, promises faster speeds than the latest cellular networks. Sprint currently offers the service in Baltimore under the Xohm brand and expects to roll out in Washington DC and Chicago soon. Clearwire is expected to roll out Mobile WiMAX in Portland, Oregon, early next year.

Clearwire is expecting to cover 100 million U.S. citizens by the end of 2010, and reach 200 million potential users by 2015.

Related WiMax stories on Dailywireless include; Clearwire: Show Us the Money, Xohm Marks the Spot, Chicago Xohmed Next?, WiMAX Doomed? Not., Mobile WiMAX: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control?, Mobile Data: Replacing Landline Broadband?, AT&T: No “Special Rights” for Clearwire, WiMAX Roundup, Cisco & Fujitsu Beamform Live Video, Motorola: People Get Ready, Barry West Talks, Intel + India’s BSNL = 100m WiMaxers, XOHM to Launch with Location Services, Denver Gets Fixed WiMAX, Clearwire: Retrofits Come First, Moscow WiMAXed, WiMAX Gets Cheaper - Theoretically, Clearwire: Anytime Now, WiMAX Roundup, Mobile WiMAX: Live in Idaho Falls, WiMAX: September in Baltimore, WiMAX Forum Certifies 2.5GHz Gear: Good to Go, Clearwire: We’re Gonna Be Big, Sprint: We’re the “3rd Pipe”, WiMax: East Meets West, Sprint: Samsung WiMAX Ready to Go, Battle of the (Muni) Bands, WiMAX: Cheap, Fast and Out of Control, It’s Official: Sprint, Cable & Google Building WiMAX Network, Mobile WiMAX Cooking- But Still in the Kitchen, WiMAX Roundup, Australia Unwired, Australian Blowup, BT’s European WiMAX Plan, Backhaul Delays Xohm Rollout, Hesse on WiMAX, Sprint’s WiMAX Rollout?, Sprint-Clearwire Deal Dead, Sprint Considering WiMAX Spinoff?, Sprint Forces Forsee Out, WiMAX Demoed on Chicago River, The Launch, ICO Wants Its Mobile TV - via DVB-SH, Google Apps for Clearwire, Sprint WiMAX: It’s Called “Xohm”, Xohm “Partners”?, Death to WiMAX?, Verizon: It’s LTE, and Sprint: It’s WiMAX!.

Corporate News, WiMAX Deployments, WiMAX News | No Comments »

On Friday, Verizon will offer the BlackBerry Storm — a touchscreen-based handset for $250 with a two-year contract. It’s Verizon’s answer to the iPhone, featuring a touchscreen, a 3.2-MP camera and UMTS/HSPA connectivity (but no Wi-Fi). A $50 mail-in rebate will bring the cost inline with Apple’s entry-level offering.

The BlackBerry Storm is a lot of things — but it’s no iPhone says Wired. James Kendrick of JK Ontherun loves it. Apple Insider has a review roundup:

• Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg - “Overall, the Storm is a very capable handheld computer that will appeal to BlackBerry users who have been pining for a touch-controlled device with a larger screen.”
• Wired’s Daniel Dumas - “If you’re locked into a contract with Verizon, want a touchscreen phone, and are willing to put up with an OS that moves like a tranquilized yak, then yes the Storm is for you. Otherwise, your best bet is an iPhone or the very capable BlackBerry Bold.”
• PC World’s Yardena Arar - “But people who were hoping for a credible iPhone alternative fortified with BlackBerry’s strengths as a mobile tool for corporate travelers will likely find the Storm a disappointment. When it comes to touch interfaces, Apple still has no peer.”
• The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Benderoff - “The faithful BlackBerry user may be better off with the Bold, another RIM model with multimedia muscle plus two fast network connections.”
• CNet News.com’s Bonnie Cha — “Die-hard texters, e-mailers, and corporate users may be better served with the BlackBerry Bold or other QWERTY device.”
• Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan - “The Storm is a strong effort from RIM, but it’s not quite the killer phone that they or Verizon need it to be.”
• Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky - “Ultimately, this could be a great platform with a little more time in the oven, but right now, it feels undercooked.”
• Mobile Tech Review - “Overall the Storm is a pleasing and competent phone– if you like RIM’s new touch screen technology.”

BillShrink helps consumers find the right phone and plan given their personalized usage patterns. Here’s their comparison between Storm vs. iPhone vs. G1 and Storm vs. iPhone vs. G1 vs. Instinct.

Android, Cellular News, Corporate News, EV-DO/HSDPA, Enterprise, Gadgets, Radio Policy News, iPhone | No Comments »

T-Mobile USA and Yahoo are introducing Web2go across T-Mobile’s portfolio of phones. Web2go makes it easier to view and navigate the Web with a customizable home page and a simplified experience.

With web2go, customers can create a personalized home page and visit virtually the entire Internet from their mobile phone. Yahoo! oneSearch powers mobile Internet searches, available starting today on millions of T-Mobile phones. OneSearch intuitively returns search results grouped around the person’s intent.

For instance, when customers search for a sports team, Yahoo! returns the latest scores, schedules, team profiles, roster, news, images and a link to the team’s Web site. Alternatively, if a user searches for a movie, Yahoo! returns show times at local theatres, reviews, news articles and information on the cast.

OneSearch is available by download to users of many phones. However, since mobile users traditionally don’t download applications to their phones often, Yahoo can reach more users by preloading the button on their phones.

Yahoo will reach 105 million U.S. mobile subscribers between its deal with T-Mobile and an earlier one with AT&T.

T-Mobile is also announcing new pricing plans. “All-in-one devices,” such as Sidekick devices, will be priced at $25/month for unlimited Web and 400 messages. For unlimited text messages, it costs $35/month. For feature phones, which they call “phone first” devices, customers can pay $10/month for 50 MB of Web access and 200 messages; or $20/month for 100 MB Web access and unlimited messages.

The announcement came hours after Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer told an audience that, while he has no interest in reviving any attempts to purchase Yahoo, he is interested in a partnership pegged to searches.

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