We tend to think of mobile phones as a matter of convenience, allowing us to be productive and entertained while we’re on the go. But a team of researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has created a simple and inexpensive device that when used with a mobile phone can help diagnose vision problems. The underlying principles [...]
We all know how fast technology can change markets and businesses. Now the web and the mass proliferation of mobile phones, as well as falling costs for all kinds of technologies, are allowing rapid change to affect more than just the developed world. And advances in technology and the falling cost of delivery are driving [...]
The text messages to the 22-year-old Virginia woman arrived during the day and night, sometimes 20 or 30 at once. Her ex-boyfriend wanted her back. He would not be refused. He texted and called 758 times. In New York, a 17-year-old trying to break up with her boyfriend got fewer messages, but they were menacing. [...]
Modern man no longer communicates via cave painting, yet hieroglyphs may be making a comeback — thanks to the cell phone. Colorado native Kai Staats has invented a new language for cell phones that replaces words with pictures to represent actions, nouns, and places, making his invention essentially a modern form of the hieroglyphics used [...]
As patrons at Bull Feeney’s danced to a ’90s cover band and sipped from cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Eric Coulombe, the manager, fiddled with what he says is the latest weapon against the rowdiness and fighting that has long plagued the bar scene in this seaside city — an iPod Touch. Bar owners and [...]
I arrived in Niger three months ago to help the Concern Worldwide country team scale up and roll out an emergency program to respond to the emerging food crisis. It’s hard to say when exactly this shifted from an “impending crisis” to a real humanitarian emergency, but we are there now. And we are putting [...]
First the British invented waterproof Wellington boots; now they’ve invented a way to derive power from those boots. Could corduroy-friction-power be far off? The European telecom firm Orange, which sponsors the huge Glastonbury Festival at the end of June, is promoting its new “Power Wellies” as a means for festivalgoers to keep their cellphones charged. [...]
Let’s face it, there’s a reason why “stupid” is a euphemism for “inebriated.” And to prevent young adults from acting irresponsibly while hitting the sauce, researchers in Scotland are launching a pilot program to send text messages to “hazardous drinkers” as a means of preventing binge drinking and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. [...]
he World Cup could lead to an increase in data usage on mobile phone networks and lead to the services becoming “oversaturated”, according to industry analysts at management consultancy firm Deloitte. As technology has improved, it is now easy for users to stream entire football matches on their mobile phones, using BBC iPlayer’s iPhone-optimised website, [...]
