Mobile & Wireless

Pilot fish at this software company is helping the marketing team plan a user conference. And the networking requirements are very impressive: Each demo machine must have full Internet speed.

Paying your restaurant tab gets a little easier. And you might even get to prowl online while eating.

ATHENS, GREECE -- One of my favorite magazines, The Economist, published a very good special report last month called "Nomads at last" in which they explored the "extreme telecommuting" lifestyle.

We don't need al-Qaeda to blow us up. We are perfectly capable of lighting the fuse ourselves, courtesy of our inability to share information vertically and bilaterally.

ATHENS, GREECE -- We've all gotten them. Somebody accidentally presses the speed dial or redial button on their cell phone. You get a call and get to "listen in" on the caller, who doesn't know they dialed. They're called "butt calls" because they can happen when someone sits on their phone.

My phone knows my wife better than I do, apparently.

I am, shall we say, more than a little cynical, even by my standards, when it comes to wireless networking. For example, I really, really have doubts about the wisdom of moving up to 802.11n. That said, I think the monster Mobile WiMax deal, which was announced today, may actually go places.

ATHENS, GREECE -- I told you Thursday in this space that Apple iPhone users discovered free Wi-Fi access at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots.

Today Vodafone announced that it would bring the iPhone to 10 countries in the latter half of 2008. The countries are:

This company has about 50 Wi-Fi phones, and users really seem to like them. But for one of the less savvy — and more irritable — users, the learning curve is a bit steep ...

At Interop 2008, I realized that a visit to Vegas can be called a success if you don't get hit by a car while jogging there.

Not only is the Apple iPhone the most popular phone for browsing the internet, it is also the most popular phone for uploading pictures. Flickr, the worlds largest gallery of online pictures (by some accounts) rates the amounts of pictures uploaded by each type of camera phone. Guess who just passed the 5 megapixel Nokia N95?

Request comes to pilot fish to provide employee data for the companywide address book. That's no big deal. Time to code: 60 minutes. Affected employees: 8,000. Now flash forward two years ...

AGIOS NIKOLAOS, GREECE - iPhone users around the United States have confirmed that AT&T is giving them free Wi-Fi access at their many hotspots nationwide. All they have to do is enter their iPhone's phone number to gain access.

I see that a group calling itself the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is warning its members to limit the amount of proprietary business information they carry on laptops and the like because they're afraid that government agents can seize that data at border crossings.