Extendance: High-Tech Business Experts Blog

For once I found in Business Week a tech article that I can fully share my own opinion with. It's about the hottest topic in the consumer tech industry right now, the iPhone, which will be launched tomorrow in the US. Of course the funny thing is that it was actually not written by a Business Week editor but by a management consultant working for Oliver Wyman. At least they (BW) made the smart decision to have someone else write it.

Continue reading "iPhone's future"

Posted by Ralf Haller in New ICT Solutions at 16:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: Apple, iPhone

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Thursday, June 21. 2007

Flash Runs HOT

It first occurred to me while I was reading stories at the Inquirer that some of the time when I was reading the story the fan on my laptop switched on. Odd, I thought, but not much more. Then I noticed the same thing happening on other sites. Not all, and even on sites where it happens not every page. Odd, I thought, but not much more. Finally the light went on. Pages with some sorts of Adobe Flash adverts are the culprits. When you visit a page with the right (wrong?) sort of flash, CPU usage goes up enormously even though you are doing nothing more strenuous that occasionally pressing the down arrow. In the extended entry you can see my CPU jump from an average of under 10% to about 60% at a particular moment. You'll have to trust me on this but that moment is when the page with the flash ad rendered itself the first time.

I can understand a peak when the page loads. What I don't have any sympathy for is seeing it remain high. There seems to be no reason for it other than (I guess) sloppy programming somewhere. I should note it isn't all flash pages, or even all flash ads, but it seems to be consistent with ads from particular vendors. Lenovo is one, but it is certainly not the only one.

The moral of this story? If there is one it is perhaps that flash causes global warming ...

Continue reading "Flash Runs HOT"

Posted by Francis Turner in New ICT Solutions at 20:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Wednesday, June 20. 2007

Will OnAir stay in the air?

Today OnAir the company behind inflight GSM phone call and data services got the official go ahead from the European Aviation Safety Association (EASA). The Geneva-based company is a joint venture of well-known companies SITA and Airbus.
The GSM picocell network is coming from IPaccess (installed by Siemens) as far as I know, which belongs to Motorola now. Whether this system/service will take off is not clear though. A similar service Connexion run by Boeing was shut down after investing billions of US dollars.

What I think could be in OnAir's favor though is that they are running on a lower budget, which at least seems to be a wiser approach here, allowing the service to grow with customer installations.

The link back to earth is done via a satellite communication service from Inmarsat over a Thales system. On the ground, Monaco Telecom is doing the link to the Internet, so it really is a true global system. It will first be available on Airbus A318 short-haul planes, and the following airlines have signed on so far: Air France, bmi, Ryanair (on their Boeing-737 fleet), TAP.
Don't expect high-speed data though. 80 passengers have to share - worst case - a 864kbps link.