Work from home schemes popping up
A lot of bigger internet marketing companies studying the different things happening behind the scenes on internet had warned about scams and spams. This has in fact been recently revealed by PhishBucker.org that the scamming schemes have increased at least three folds. One of the primary reason for these schemes to increase is that of unemployment badly affecting people’s lives and at times their thinking ability as well. The scam makers have now more sources online through which they can target you and know that you are desperate about finding something very lucrative in terms of monetary rewards. Be aware of these schemes. Try to ascertain their credibility through the different sources to know if they are really going to give the money. This is no surprise but people should get ready for more of this as at least the short term future of the world economies is not likely to improve significantly to have a material impact on people’s jobs and lives.
We have also recently discovered a forum which you can visit for the latest on technology new at www.webtrendforum.com
Alex EReader
Yet another Android driven e-reader springs up into the already mushrooming market of e-readers. It is one of those rare species of dual screen e-readers you see in the market. (The other two being Barnes & Noble Nook and Entourage). It does a lot more then performing a mere function of e-reading. The other tasks that it can do for you include internet surfing, multimedia viewing, and other apps. Some of the key features of the device are.
- Dimensions 8.9 x 4.7 x 0.4 inches
- Headphone jack
- Mini USB port
- Two built in speakers
- Electronic paper display with resolutions of 800 x 600
- 3.5 inch display
Kyocera’s First Android Phone Zio M6000
Kyocera has just unleashed its first Android Phone. The phone is Zio M6000. The new phone developed by the Japanese cell maker is said to have Android 1.6 as its operating system. The phone supports a lot of bands as 800/1700/1900MHz. This is necessary for any phone when different network service providers work on different bands.
Some of the salient features of the phone include
- Display of 3.5 inches
- Wide Screen WVGA with pixel support for upto 800 X 480
- 3.2 megapixel camera with very fast frame capture rate of 30 per second
- Other goodies include digital compass, slot for additional storage that supports upto 32 GB storage
New Android OS is about to launch. The phone features are good but competition demands a lot from the companies in terms of adding much more to their phones, as survival of the fittest has been the rule for quite sometime now prevailing in the cell phone industry.
Sprint Android Phone Updates
Getting bored with the use of older Android OS 1.6 and 2.0 on your phones. Mention not, and don’t worry. Your phone will be redecorated with all the new sounds and whistles in the newer version for Android 2.1. Although a confirmed date for the release of the new OS hasn’t been announced but it is expected to come around or before mid of 2010. A lot of questions have been put forth by the current users on the release of this new OS. Many fear their phone might get obsolete (as always 
) and this new OS will require new hardware as well. This remains to be seen what new features will it bring in and what would its impact be on current phone users with Android as OS.
Radiation powered batteries by Widetronix
“I don’t think about the future. It comes soon enough” Einstein
We often think what the hell is wrong with the batteries. Why in the world we have to get them charged when we have to do some other important thing in our live. We are unable to find any answer for that. Well you might be surprised but the answer has come right in front of your eyes. Lithium technology has pushed too far and it seems that significant improvement might not happen. Widetronix is focusing on building a new type of battery which would run from the decay of the radioctive material (obviously the safer one). These batteries won’t have to be charged and will go on for quite a longer time. Though the decay would not obviously be dependent on the neutron side but infact on the electrons side (as we need current here). These batteries are expected to last for more then 20 years. That would be huge. Silicon carbide semiconductors have been built especially for the purpose to not get affected by the radiation. The use is not expected to be only for telecom or any one activity but it would be used at all those places where small power is required for longer periods of times in sensitive sensors and other lower powered devices. The product is not yet delivered in the market and expected around 2011. It would however mark a era in energy sector development.
Youtube VS Viacom
Youtube and Viacom have been locked into a court battle. Fighting on the copyright infringement issue that is expected to be resolved soon. Youtube a Google company has been sued for copyright infringement by Viacom worth $1 billion.
When Youtube started its operations it excepted all kinds of videos from the different sources. It has been claimed that some of these videos belonged to Viacom and so Viacom needs compensation for that. One the other hand Youtube has argued that if it had been approached to stop these videos from being displayed on it, it would have definitely done so. There have been claims with some counter claims from both sides. A lot of speculations move around and till anything comes out clear, everything for now remains mystified.
Facebook and School Grades
A lot has been said about why or why not to use social networking sites. What impact they will have on the studies? I recently found a very interesting research on Facebook’s blog saying that “researchers found no impact on school grades even there wasn’t much different between the grades of heavy social media users and light social media users. Check out in the words of facebook
(Courtesy story copied from The Facebook Blog http://blog.facebook.com/)
Chuck Martin and a team of researchers from the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business & Economics recently found that the amount of time students spend using social media and services like Facebook does not affect their grades. I talked with Martin, a lecturer at the school and the CEO of organizational research firm NFI Research, about those findings as well the use of social media in his classroom and its impact on the workplace. Martin is the author of eight business books, including his soon-to-be released “Work Your Strengths.”
You and a team of researchers recently looked at the correlation between using social media and grades. What would you say is the big finding from your perspective?
In addition to the finding that there isn’t a correlation, what were some of the results about just how much students are using social media?
For the purposes of the study, we considered social media to be Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn…. This study was very wide. It was 1,100-plus students out of the 12,000 at the university, and we surveyed every college at the university.
But of the heavy users of social media, 63 percent got high grades, and of the light users, 65 percent got high grades. So there is no real difference between the two. And of the heavy Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. The light Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. It was identical.
And did that surprise you?
It didn’t. Interestingly, the hypothesis of the students was that there would be no correlation and they were correct. But if you talk to any adults, adults were totally surprised by this. And adults and parents typically have the view that you need to spend more time on your homework and less time on your social media so that your grades stay high. Well, it turns out that it makes no difference.
Why do you think there is this disconnect? Is this just a generational gap, or something about how people use (social media) differently?
It’s not just generational, it’s actually behavioral. If you look at the students today, they have grown up with things like Facebook and YouTube and blogs and so forth, so it’s not a separate thing. In the early days of the web, people would be at work or school and they would start surfing the web and two hours later they would come back and say, “What was I looking for? I forgot.”
They basically got lost in the experience, and today with social media it’s actually become integrated with people’s lives. So it’s not a separate thing where people leave life and go do (social media). It actually has become part of what they do every day….
They have a multitasking ability that’s a little different?
I created a course for the university called “Social Media in Marketing.” (During class) we had my presentation on the screen live, and we were dipping in and out of the web. We had a live Twitter feed projected to a large screen, and we had a third screen with another projection, where we had a back channel so that people could communicate anonymously on the big screen…. There were three big screens in front of the classroom with three live network feeds, and we also had video and we had people patched in by Skype.
Everybody in the room used a computer for the entire three-hour class, and they were encouraged and actually did interact. They were tweeting with people around the country during the class about the content, and people were tweeting from outside the classroom from different parts of the country with questions that we would then tackle as a group.
And it turns out that the engagement level of the students was higher than a traditional classroom. We talked to a neuropsychologist, who is actually one of my co-authors, about this multitasking aspect and his view was that it’s not really multitasking. It’s really using different media simultaneously on the same subject matter.
That’s really fascinating because the conventional wisdom is, “Oh, this is just a distraction from paying attention to the lecture.”
Right, we had people come in and monitor the class. We had trustees or we had the finance people, and they were all astounded by what they were seeing. Every class was longer than it was supposed to be because we couldn’t really get the students to stop.
Do you find that it extends the conversation outside the actual class, and are there other ways of using things like Facebook beyond the lecture?
We actually, for that course, ran the course on Facebook…. Since this was social media, we decided that we needed to use social media and we created the course on a private (Facebook) group. So all of the members of the class were in the group, and then each of the (study) groups created their own Facebook groups for their teams. The difference between that and a traditional course was the course then ran 24/7 because people were having conversations about the content all the time…. We will be teaching this course again in the summer and will be using Facebook for that as well.
Thinking further out, though, do you think that more classrooms will begin to adopt this idea of using social media both in the class and outside?
When we were doing the social media course…we had requests from outside the classroom from other parts of the country that they wanted a live streaming feed. So one time we just streamed it live onto the Net, and that’s because of the demand. It’s not necessarily because the teacher said he wished to do this. It’s because the market said, “Hey, we should do this.” Once you use the back channel in a classroom, for example, and it’s highly interactive, it’s difficult not to have it.
Where do you see Facebook and social media fitting into the workplace moving forward? What would be your advice to business leaders?
Let (employees) do it and encourage it. It’s just like in the classroom: The great fear of adults for our class was that (we would have) all these people behind computer screens and that they weren’t going to be paying attention to the class (but) going to be shopping and doing all these other things online.
Nobody did that, nobody. It just didn’t happen, and if that happened it would mean that I was failing as a teacher.
It’s the same thing in business. If you let your employees do their work more effectively, they will work more effectively.
Matt, a manager on Facebook’s communications team, passed paper notes as a back channel when he was in school.
