Category: Communications

Cross-Platform Instant Messaging – Do We Really Need It?

I have used various forms of instant messaging over the years and as one service has come to the fore others have paled into former shadows of themselves. For me, it all started with ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) before MSN Messenger really started to absorb users in the later half of 1999 and the following …

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Net Filtering vs NBN – What’s it Gonna Be?

As the last few years (and particularly the last few months) have unfolded, we have seen the mandatory web filtering debate get knocked around the press whilst the NBN (only now coming online in a few towns conveniently before an election) got its fair share of airtime. Apart from the issue of credibility and electability …

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Keep Track of Friends and Loved Ones with Foursquare

A quick one before I head back to the airport to fly back to Sydney. With the rise of location services in recent years people have been able to find places close by when the time suited. In an earlier post, I wrote about WorldSurfer which allows you to use sources such as Google or …

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3D Newspaper – Genius or Gimmick

A couple of days ago the miss us and I arrived in Bangkok and I was surprised yesterday to see that the Bangkok Post had printed most of its photos and a good deal of its advertisements in 3D. Given that it was a printed newspaper, it had to use the traditional blue and red …

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No Inflight Calls For You!

Shortly after ACMA had given the green light for cellular communication technology to deployed in aircrafts, QANTAS and Jetstar have quickly put the brakes on any such deployment in their fleet. In a blog entry earlier this week I touched on how this technology could become a nuisance particular on longer international flights. At the …

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Where’s the Speech Recognition?

About fifteen years ago, my dad purchased the first PC to grace the family home. It was pretty good for its time as it sported a Pentium 120MHz CPU, 16MB RAM and a massive 1GB hard drive. It also came with a pretty hefty price tag. Shortly after we purchased the computer, we saw a …

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Check Naming Conventions for Consistency

Just a quick blog before I hop on a flight back to Helsinki. One thing I noticed in Denmark was how they labelled floors in buildings, particularly when it came to labels in elevators and around escalators. Unlike what www expect in Australia, the ground floor is marked as “zero” with floor above it incrementing …

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Australian Airlines to Offer Inflight Cellular Services

In a previous post I wrote about how about how our friends across the ditch were getting access to inflight SMS as well as data for smartphones. That was a couple of months ago and it seems like us Australians weren’t about to be outdone by the Kiwis according to this SMH article. As expected …

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In-Flight Power Makes a World of Difference

At the time of writing this article, I am somewhere over the Northern Territory near Darwin at 38000 feet with another 4620km to go before reaching Hong Kong. Since there is no in-flight access to the Internet this article would have been published some time after I landed. That’s not such a big deal for …

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Microsoft Employees to get Windows Phone 7 Devices

Having worked with and been interested in technology for a while, I have always been a big fan of companies “eating their own dog food” . For those of you unfamiliar with this expression it basically refers to a company using the products that it creates. Ironically, the expression was coined within Microsoft in the late …

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