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Archive for the 'Public Service' Category

Drone Airshow at Google I/O

Posted by Sam Churchill on May 16th, 2013

Engadgetreports a fleet of camera-equipped, remote-controlled blimps are live-streaming Google I/O on YouTube, right now, It’s called Google AirShow and it’s taken over the airspace within Moscone Center. Chris Miller, a software engineer with AKQA (Facebook), explained to Engadget they use an off-the-shelf model airship that’s flown manually via standard a 2.4GHz radio. Each blimp [...]

New Zealand Installing 3,000 WiFi Phone Booths

Posted by Sam Churchill on May 14th, 2013

Ruckus Wireless today announced that it was selected by Telecom NZ, the national communications service supplier in New Zealand, to transform conventional payphones into outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots in locations across the country. Telecom’s initial pilot project, completed in less than 12 weeks, outfitted phone booths in holiday locations over this past Christmas in December 2012 [...]

Real-time Transit Maps

Posted by Sam Churchill on May 9th, 2013

Jason Brown, a Portland developer, was often foiled by the bus-arrival estimates generated by TriMet’s TransitTracker, reports the Oregonian’s transit columnist Joseph Rose. Inspired by real-time transit maps, like the SF Live Bus app and accompanying website in San Francisco, the 23-year-old Portland web developer has created PDXLiveBus, “the coolest real-time TriMet map in the [...]

Best TTS Apps for Android

Posted by Sam Churchill on May 8th, 2013

Phone Arena rounde up some of the best text-to-speech engines available in the Play Store. They offer better voice quality than what typically comes packaged with an Android handset. IVONA Text-to-Speech HQ Arguably one of the best natural voice synthesizers, Ivona was recently bought out by Amazon, but its TTS apps are still present for [...]

NASA Launches 3 PhoneSats

Posted by Sam Churchill on April 26th, 2013

Over the weekend, NASA successfully launched into space three satellites consisting mainly of smartphones. The PhoneSats, have been transmitting signals to ground stations on Earth and will remain in orbit for as long as two weeks (#NASA_PhoneSat). The Phonesats took off from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia with three satellites; PhoneSat 1.0, dubbed [...]

California Gold Country Gets White Space

Posted by Sam Churchill on April 23rd, 2013

California ISP Cal.net, a commercial ISP, has deployed white space broadband to serve mountainous regions of California’s Gold Country. Carlson Wireless is calling the deployment “the nation’s first independently funded commercial-grade TV white spaces broadband network.” Carson’s RuralConnect uses UHF spectrum. The software-defined radio offers user-configurable data rates, modulation rates, and channel bandwidths. At 470 [...]