The next era of the public payphone is about to begin
Kabir Chibber @quinto_quarto
Every major city in the world has a network of public phone booths on most streets-absolutely crucial to the running of the city only a couple of decades ago but now just taking up space in the age of smartphones. In Britain, home of the iconic red telephone booths that have been around since 1926, many booths have fallen into disrepair.
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British Telecom now allows the public to adopt a booth for as little as a £1. Since 2009, more than 1,500 phone boxes have been turned into florists, wildlife information centers and tiny art galleries. One, in the tiny village of Kington Magna, was turned into what may be the country’s smallest library. BT supports putting defibrillators in adopted kiosks for isolated communities for whom medical care may be too far away. (Ironically, you can’t call emergency services from the booths.)
Everyone is considering the issue. In South Africa, the country is looking at turning all 79,000 of its phone booths into Wi-Fi hotspots, and China has been converting its booths since 2011. So what will replace the humble phone booth?
In New York, the current contracts for the city’s 9,000 remaining public payphones, which started in 1999, finally run out on Oct. 15. The city will soon reveal who has bid for the next generation of public payphones and what their proposals are.
Google is rumored to be among the bidders to turn the phone booths into something more than Wi-Fi hotspots, and IBM, Samsung, and Cisco all attended the initial informational sessions. The city is inspired by the High Line, the derelict freight-railroad line in New York’s Meatpacking District that is now a beautiful public park. “Personally, the High Line is one of my favorite things in the world,” Nicholas Sbordone, a spokesman for New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, told Fast Company. “It was able to be reinvented and reused and now everyone loves it. I’d love for something similar to happen with payphones in this city.”
The DoITT already ran a test program in 2012 to provide free Wi-Fi from some payphone booths-which was very popular. Free Wi-Fi and free calls to 911 and 311-the emergency and information numbers, respectively-will definitely be part of the next wave of public-phone booths. But the request for information from the DoITT asks the companies to answer several questions on the future of public-phone booths, including whether payphones should even remain part of the service.
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This is not an idle question. More than 27 million phone calls were placed from New York payphones in 2011 and there’s a “significant usage of sidewalk payphones to place 911 calls,” the city says. Emergencies are always the test of a technology, and payphones went through a mini-revival in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. “Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day,” a spokesman for one of 13 payphone franchises told the Wall Street Journal. “In times of distress, the people of the city love them.”
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There is also the question of advertising. The city made $17.4 million in franchise commissions for payphone advertising in 2013. Can that be replaced-or augmented? We will find out the answers that Google and others may have to these questions when their proposals are revealed.
What are the (dis)advantages of hydrogen fuel cells versus Lithium-ion batteries, when used on a large (e.g., nationwide) scale?
Five or so days ago various media reported that Japan intends to focus on using hydrogen as the energy storage medium of choice for its nation’s vehicles. On a purely technological and pragmatic level, what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?
Aspects worth mentioning might include:
The efficiency of the hydrogen producing reaction
The J/Kg energy density after factoring in its heavy-duty housing
The efficiency of oxidization into kinetic energy
The cost of building and maintaining a massive state-wide hydrogen supplying infrastructure
The scalability (economies of scale) of the processes involved
I would find it especially informative if you could juxtapose these considerations against an all-electric solution of the kind Tesla seems to be aiming for, and backed up your comparisons with hard science!
People are actually buying the Amazon Fire phone
Dan Frommer @fromedome
Amazon’s first phone-the Fire Phone-is not a hit with critics, who have mostly panned its interface and app selection. But it is finding some sort of audience: The standard-issue Fire Phone has been Amazon’s top-selling mobile phone all week.
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Quartz has saved a copy of Amazon’s feed of its top-ten best-selling contract phones each hour since midday Monday, graphed below. The basic, 32 GB Fire Phone has been in the top position every hour-except once in the second position. The 64 GB version, which costs $100 more, has mostly been outside the top ten. (At the time of writing, it’s no. 16.) Assorted Samsung and LG phones usually fill the rest of the ten.
Without knowing actual sales figures-something Amazon will likely never disclose, at least in any useful format-it’s tough to draw any significant conclusions. Amazon’s own devices are often near the top of its bestseller lists, such as various Kindles and the Fire TV on the top-selling electronics list, so this is no surprise.
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Perhaps this is a symbol of the Amazon homepage’s sheer interest-driving power, as Amazon has used its top slot to promote the Fire Phone. Perhaps Amazon sells so few phones overall that the top slot isn’t much of an achievement. In June-before Amazon’s phone went on sale-a rep for NPD Group, a market research firm, told Quartz that “Amazon is not a factor in sales of smartphones in the US.”
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Or maybe-critics be damned!-people actually want to try this thing. Whether they keep it is another story. Initial Amazon reviews are not great-it currently has 3.3 stars of five, a full star below the Samsung Galaxy S5. And a search of its 311 reviews returns 46 results for “return.”
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We’ll keep an eye on the sales rankings to see if anything changes after the initial launch buzz dies down. For the record, Amazon declined to provide actual sales stats.
No One Is Talking About Apple’s Next Big Challenge In Its Partnership With IBM
Sam Colt
In July, Apple announced a landmark partnership with IBM that will leverage Big Blue’s analytics tools and push Apple’s devices deeper into the enterprise.
It’s an exciting convergence of two of the largest tech firms out there, and the end result may erode the PC’s strong grip on the enterprise market.
When the news of the IBM partnership hit, the common theory was that this would be a way for Apple to fix its shrinking growth in iPad sales.
But if Apple wants to boost its business bona fides, it will have to develop a better than just selling a bunch of iPhones and iPads to big companies.
Apps are key too, according to a source familiar with Apple’s enterprise strategy. And Apple needs way to showcase enterprise apps or launch a standalone enterprise app store that would be a hub business employees could go to while setting up their devices.
Penetrating the enterprise will be a heavy lift for Apple. For example, enterprise software giant SAP already has dozens of apps in the App Store, suggesting that there’s something substantial that Apple will need to latch onto if it wants to succeed.
However, enterprise apps are still lumped together with everything from the Kim Kardashian game to Snapchat. And finding the app you want when you need it is still a big challenge for the App Store. Poor curation and search in the App Store are two of the biggest problems developers want Apple to fix.
In short, Apple needs to take its enterprise app ecosystem as seriously as it takes iOS devices.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-enterprise-apps-ibm-partnership-2014-8#ixzz39N8CAxwF
Look out for a new Microsoft cloud service called Sway
Jordan Novet
Microsoft has bought the domain name Sway.com and appears to be planning a cloud service by that name.
Domain name watcher Jamie Zoch noticed the purchase and wrote about his findings yesterday on the site DotWeekly.
“I think Microsoft is getting ready to launch the software pretty soon, or it isn’t likely that they would have revealed they were behind the purchase of the domain name yet,” Zoch wrote.
It’s hard to imagine exactly what Sway.com (which redirects to Bing) might be, although it could well be a cloud-based application, which totally makes sense given Microsoft’s strategic aim these days.
The tech giant went out of the way to associate the term with the phrases “online computer software” and “software as a service,” according to the Sway trademark application that Zoch came across.
That’s fitting for Microsoft, whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, has been positioning it as “the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”
And business-focused cloud services represent a key area of growth for Microsoft. Commercial cloud revenue, including Commercial Office 365 cloud software and Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service, increased by 147 percent on a year-to-year basis in the second quarter of this year. Some businesses that utilize cloud services to boost the functionality of their Office suite or SharePoint may want to consider cloud migration planning services (see here – https://bamboosolutions.com/sharepoint/services/packaged/cloud-migration-planning/) so that the process of moving over to a different provider of cloud-based applications and services can go smoothly.
Correspondingly, it will also be interesting to see what the future holds for Microsoft Azure and database administration. How this plays out will be of particular interest to those who have an understanding of these azure fundamentals exam questions. Without a doubt, database management has emerged as a crucial necessity for enterprises all over the world. Enterprises are generating huge volumes of data with every passing second, and therefore they need organized frameworks for managing the data.
Accordingly, if you have career aspirations involving working as a database administrator or a database management specialist then it might be useful to look for some of the most reputable cloud certifications out there. For example, one of the most prominent cloud certifications for the management of database administration is the dp-300 exam. You can learn more about this Microsoft certification by doing some research online.
Regardless of what Sway proves to be, whoever secured the domain name seems to have figured that the media would be interested. The phone number he or she provided along with Microsoft’s name and address in applying for the sway.com URL happens to be the number for Microsoft’s international public relations team.
The applicant was right. VentureBeat, for its part, is interested. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How hackers could slam on your car’s brakes
Erica Fink @EricaFink
Modern cars are increasingly controlled by computers. And where there are computers, there are hackers.
A report shared exclusively with CNNMoney shows that the 2014 Jeep Cherokee, 2015 Cadillac Escalade and 2014 Toyota Prius were the most ‘hackable’ of 20 car models reviewed by automotive security researchers. The 2014 Dodge Viper and 2014 Audi A8 were the least hackable.
Security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek did their analysis by looking at the technical configurations of different models; they did not actually remotely hack any of the cars in the report.
Miller and Valasek say their goal was to show which vehicles would most tempt hackers, and to encourage the auto industry to make changes.
According to the report, both the 2014 Jeep Cherokee and the 2015 Escalade have an inherent security flaw: The cars’ apps, Bluetooth and telematics — which connects the car to a cellular network like OnStar — are on the same network as the engine controls, steering, brakes and tire pressure monitor system. The only thing that would make the system better would be to utilize video telematics from companies like Lytx, which combines visual data and computer technology with vehicle data, to produce a safer and more efficient form of transportation technology.
In the 2014 Prius, the AM/FM/XM radio and Bluetooth are on the same network as the steering, brakes and tire pressure monitor.
The problem: A car’s networked systems could become a gateway for hackers. If critical functions like steering are on the same network as features that connect the car to the Internet, that can put the vehicle at risk, Miller and Valasek say.