Well, sure.
Daily Wireless planned to do a year-end wrap-up highlighting some top news items for 2004. But dubious achievements kept cropping up. So we made a list:
- Nomadix Claims Redirect Patent Nomadix claimed it developed the technology to redirect customers to a sign-up page first.
- Man on the Moon: President Bush wants a new Race to the Moon - and send astronauts to Mars for a “national unifying purpose”. Like space weapons.
- Airgo’s MIMO Chips; Airgo’s MIMO products are a breakthrough; providing Wi-Fi rates to 108 Mbps per channel, while remaining 100 percent interoperable and backwards compatible. Too bad no “pre N” standard exists.
- Nextel’s Flarion Goes Live: Or dead. The Nextel/Sprint merger could change everything. Or not.
- Love Detector: based on layered voice analysis, it applies 8,000 algorithms to 129 parameters of a speaking voice.
- Cingular Buys AT&T for $41B; no matter how money they spend, backend incompatibility could be problematic.
- PortlandOnline Vrs The Blogs: When good bureaurcracies go bad.
- Vulcan Decloaks MiniXP; still vaporware.
- Battle Blimps; The Air Force is testing a V-shaped, 175 foot-long, helium filled airship that’s 25 times the size of the Goodyear blimp in Texas.
- Diplomatic Stink Over Chinese WAPI; China s home grown proprietary extension to Wi-Fi, (Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) raises a diplomatic stink.
- Flash Supercomputer; On April 3, a class at the University of San Francisco assembled the first “flash mob supercomputer,” in the school gym (SlashDot). (Mostly) fizzled.
- Life Bits Wearcam As if.
- MATRIX Expands to 33 States The (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) sold personal information to American Express for marketing purposes.
- WiMax: HPi - Not Oops, nevermind.
- Linksys Community Network Username and password should be set to “admin”.
- Portable Manpacks Good idea. Goes better with EV-DO or 802.16e.
- Plasma Antennas When DailyWireless reported that Markland Technology, a homeland security company, might use their Plasma Antenna in the stratosphere, we were were only kidding. Oops.
- Mexico’s Wireless Revolution Craig’s prototype WiMax community. Mexico and Canada.
- Cellular Jammers Law enforcement knows what’s good for you.
- What About the Radios? “I think the command and control of the public services in this city is a scandal,” said Republican commissioner John Lehman. “There is nothing scandalous about the public-safety agencies in this city,” testified Thomas Von Essen, the former New York City fire commissioner.
- Spaceway Retrogrades & DirecTV Kills Two-Way Spaceway Perhaps most under-reported wireless story of 2004.
- Paging Dr. Zimbardo: The new e-Plates project uses active (battery powered) RFID tags embedded in the plates to identify vehicles in real time. The result is the ability to reliably identify any vehicle, anywhere, whether stationary or mobile.
- Intel Inside Surfboard: With embedded tablet, WiFi, a 1.7Ghz processor and 80Gb hard drive.
- World’s Fastest SMS Typist Kimberly Yeo, 23, typed a complicated 26-word message on her phone in 43.66 seconds.
- Infrasound Pod Dial-a-dolphin allows callers to tune in to the sea animals’ conversations.
- IEEE Votes on UWB (Again) Members can’t get the necessary 75% votes to move forward on a single UWB standard.
- Microchip in Arm of Law: Mexico’s Attorney-General, now has a non-removable microchip in his arm.
- MIMO Comes Home “Pre-N” or not.
- UmbrellaNet Bluetooth-enabled umbrellas form ad hoc wireless mesh networks.
- Godzilla in a Dongle Mark Cuban has been carrying movies on his USB dongle. Says it’s The End.
- BikesAgainstBush Impounded Joshua Kinberg’s bike-mounted, dot-matrix printer for spraying protest messages in the street was demonstrated (once) for MSNBC — which resulted in his immediate arrest and the impounding his bike.
- Philadelphia Plans $10M City Cloud, Philly Faces Fight & Philly Negotiates a Cloud - Verizon wins.
- Rain In Paris Cloud Whatever happened to that grand plan to remake Paris into one huge wireless hot spot? Not much, says the International Herald Tribune.
- Speed Violation Cameras: Beaverton, Oregon reduced the timing of the yellow caution light where they had a camera and made LOTS of money for the city - until they were found out.
- Cognitive Brains Self Organize and talk about television.
- AT&T Wireless Music Store & Starbucks Launches Music Stores Customers can also identify a song on the radio by holding the phone close to a speaker.
- Satellite Radio Wars Sirius reached a five-year, $500 million deal with shock jock Howard Stern. Oh, please.
- Cingular/AT&T Merger Approved They are required to sell operating units and associated airwaves in 16 markets and 10MHz airwaves in Dallas and Detroit.
- Mobile TV Expands & Korea Prepares Videocell Services Crown Castle bought 1.4 GHz spectrum across the United States and have deployed DVB-H technology in a three-site, single-frequency network trial in Pittsburgh. The world next.
- Taipei Unwired Will reach almost 90 per cent of the capital’s population of three million.
- Be Your Own Bell: BeeTelecom has developed a proprietary Linux-based system that enables the average person to set up and manage their own WiFi wireless network with VoIP phone service. Even charge for it.
- Intelsat-7 Goes Dark The cause of the Intelsat 7 loss is still unknown. Of course there’s no reason to expect foul play of any sort.
- Will 802.20 Challenge WiMax? & WiFi Vrs WiMax for City Clouds No. It’s WiMax.
- HardDrive Cell Phone Camera phone comes with a 1.5-gigabyte hard disk.
- Tracking Santa Tracking sleighs and other unidentified flying objects are a tradition with NORAD. This is their 50th year!
- Motes Croak Vanderbilt University has built a sensor network that mimics synchronized frog songs.
- Sprint-tel: Done Deal? & WiFi Cable Phones One good turn deserves another.
- Stealth Satellite & Spot Beam Satellite Launched Same deal.
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