Making surfing even faster
Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. may be in the midst of turmoil with eroding worldwide market share, stock price and profits while it works on splitting up the company.
But it's also working on advancing technology, including personal broadband using WiMax and LTE, also known as long-term evolution.
By using WiMax or LTE modules in products, consumer electronics manufacturers and phone makers, can offer more to you in the next couple of years, said Manash Goswami, director of business development, platform technologies, with Motorola's Mobile Devices business in Libertyville.
"These technologies will enable the consumer experience to be more fruitful," said Goswami.
Goswami will be speaking at the 2008 M2M United Conference on Tuesday at the Westin Chicago North Shore in Wheeling.
The conference, hosted by M2M Magazine, will be looking at those technologies Monday through Thursday. M2M means machine-to-machine. It lets devices talk to each other without human intervention.
Goswami said personal broadband technologies could download a 5-megabyte file in about 10 seconds, compared to up to 90 seconds with third generation technology now being used.
Surfing the Internet, streaming audio and video files and gaming could take on a whole new face with faster delivery, he said..
It also could mean different things for different devices, such as creating a new line of gadgets, especially for vehicles, entertainment systems and security applications. It also could be used for natural gas or electricity usage, where the system could monitor consumption, he said.
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint are among the companies looking at this next generation of personal broadband, he said.
"Trends in our industry are based on the demands from consumers," Goswami said.
Surfing: More than half of information technology decision makers in corporate and government sectors are hesitate to adopt Web 2.0, according to a CDW Corp. survey. The Vernon Hills-based company (cdw.com) found that IT leaders are concerned about proper usage and security with Web 2.0, which describes the trend in Web technology and design that enhances creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users. This is what led to social-networking sites and blogs.
About 30 percent worry that Web 2.0 will be used for personal use instead of work, 28 percent are worried about security and 27 percent are worried about employees wasting time.
Chicago-based Navteq, which makes digital maps for location-based devices and vehicles, has launched an online map for Taste of Chicago (map.mapnetwork.com/event/tasteofchicago/).
To mark the release of "The Dark Knight" film, Verizon Wireless (verizonwireless.com) and Nokia are offering the Nokia 6205 The Dark Knight edition mobile phone. It's pre-loaded with wallpapers, voice tones and animated screen savers from the film. It's available online for $69.99.
Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P is considered the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the Top 500 List by International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. It has a peak performance of 557 teraflops, or 557 million calculations per second.
Travelers at O'Hare International Airport can stop by the Boingo kiosk (www.boingo.com) in Terminal 2 now through Thursday to get their computers and cell phones charged up, print color documents for work on the plane, and get a free pass to get online with their laptops.