IM (instant messaging) for the enterprise is being touted as something new.
Don't you believe it. I recall using ICQ Corporate at an ISP in Cleveland in
1998. Is it news because Wall Street is starting to take it seriously? You
bet!
Today, serious broadband speeds are omnipresent in the enterprise. Broadband
delivers "instant," and everybody loves instant, not just the enterprise
(anyone notice the markets that sprouted from TV dinners?). Instantaneous
data delivery facilitates the most desirable instant of all instant
communication, or IM.
Instant communication everywhere, all the time is a definite advantage
for an ever more mobile workforce. But then comes the rub, er, hack.
Peer-to-peer applications like IM are prone to security issues. Veteran IM
provider Yahoo! recently discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in both
its IM and chat programs. We've ... (more)
Most rainbows are colorful shining heralds that a storm has passed. "Project
Rainbow" leaves us in a fog as to what is to come. So do frequently named
participants such as IBM, Intel, AT&T, and Verizon by their silence. At its
vaguest, Project Rainbow is a consortium that loosely ties at least the
aforementioned companies together. According to a consensus of surrounding
industry hearsayers, the purpose is a serious verbal rumination about the
plausibility of a nationwide 802.11 network that all participants could
profit from. The fact that Project Rainbow exists with such certai... (more)
Outside of North America, mobile entertainment is commonplace among a vast
throng of the young and mobile...but why do Europe and Japan lead the way? Is
it just lagging technology or a combination of cultural and geographical
marketplace disparities? Are the hardware and network limitations or barriers
insurmountable? WBT's David Geer investigates, and speaks to sundry U.S.
software developers who are jumping on the m-entertainment bandwagon right
now even though its arrival still seems to them to be 1824 months away.
All right, who wants fresh, hot mobile entertainment? Who's of... (more)
Nextel is building on its industrial voice service success with a broad
professional data service that features 30 new J2ME applications, with 20
more in the works. Starting with several choice partnerships and customers
old and new, it is now set up to deliver tailored mobile data solutions.
Applications
The available applications bring more than access to corporate databases, and
e-mail and Internet access to the table. The various developer offerings
provide a range of utilities from fleet management services, such as GPS, to
package shipping automation that interfaces with curr... (more)
Which "wireless that works" application wins the award for long-standing,
highly critical, and longest distance? That's the wireless at work at NASA;
in particular, the wireless technologies that are crucial in shuttle
missions.
Powerful wireless technologies and applications can be unique from one
mission to the next. This was the case with the recent payload experiments of
the NASA OMNI project (Operating Missions as Nodes on the Internet). This
project was in fact an example of successful wireless IP research on the
STS-107 (Space Transportation System) mission. There are cer... (more)
David Geer is a contributing writer to WBT, a journalist, and a computer technician. He graduated from Lake Erie College in 1993 with a BA in psychology and has worked in the computer industry and in the media since 1998.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
