Las tiendas Apple de EEUU, Australia, Canadá, Francia, Alemania, Japón y Reino Unido abrieron sus puertas a largas filas de clientes que esperaban comprar el último teléfono desarrollado por Steve Jobs.
El iPhone 4S de Apple Inc finalmente llegó hoy a las tiendas de los principales países del mundo, aunque aún no en Chile, y los fanáticos se lanzaron a obtener el último aparato desarrollado en vida por Steve Jobs, muchos de ellos comprándolo como tributo al ex líder de Apple. "Creo que mucha gente va a comprar el iPhone 4S porque fue el último iPhone en el que trabajó Steve", dijo Wil Batterham, de 15 años, que junto a su amigo Tom Mosca fue el primero en comprar el nuevo teléfono en la tienda de Apple en Sidney. Mientras que en lo relacionado a nuestro país, su llegada se espera recién para diciembre.
"La gente está diciendo que fue bautizado por él, como iPhone 4S, por Steve", agregó.
Cuando se les preguntó cuál sería la primera función que usarían del iPhone 4S, Mosca contestó: "Preguntar donde está Steve", refiriéndose al software activado por voz "Siri" que trae el teléfono.
Cientos de personas hacían una larga cola en la tienda en Sidney, protegiéndose del frio matinal. Las 13 tiendas de Apple en Australia fueron las primeras en abrir sus puertas a las 08.00 hora local (18:00 en Chile) para vender el iPhone 4S.
El presidente ejecutivo Tim Cook y su equipo esperan que el primer dispositivo lanzado sin el visionario ex líder de Apple al mando de la compañía, salvaguarde su liderazgo en el mercado global. El iPhone 4S -presentado al mundo sólo un día antes de la muerte de Jobs- fue calificado de decepción porque no llegó a ser una revolución en diseño, pero las entusiastas reseñas se centraron en el software "Siri", que se activa con la voz, lo que desde entonces ayudó a establecer un ritmo récord en los pedidos iniciales por internet.
Los fanáticos de Apple no parecían decepcionados el viernes en Sidney mientras hacían fila para comprar el nuevo teléfono, antes de que las ventas comenzaran en Japón, Alemania, Francia, Gran Bretaña y América del Norte.
Apple dijo que no revela cifras de ventas el día del lanzamiento, por lo que contabilizarlas podría ser difícil. La compañía dijo que había recibido más de un millón de pedidos online en las primeras 24 horas tras su lanzamiento, superando los 600.000 por el iPhone 4, aunque ese modelo se vendió en menos países.
La quinta generación de iPhones de Apple usa chips de Qualcomm Inc, Toshiba y de una serie de compañías más pequeñas de semiconductores, según la firma de reparaciones iFixit, que abrió el aparato el jueves. El primer día de ventas de un nuevo dispositivo de Apple normalmente es una celebración jubilosa en todo el mundo, pero Apple ha evitado cualquier mención o exhibición de Jobs para las ventas globales del iPhone 4S, prefiriendo un enfoque "más empresarial que lo usual".
Pero los fanáticos de Apple en Sidney se aseguraron de que Jobs fuera parte del lanzamiento, con un pequeño santuario con flores, velas y fotos afuera de la tienda. El nuevo modelo del icónico teléfono de Apple viene con un procesador más rápido y una cámara mejor y más sensible a la luz, pero poco más lo diferencia de su predecesor.
Research In Motion's reputation for reliability took another bruising Wednesday, as technical glitches affecting millions of BlackBerrys around the world spread to Canada, giving users another reason to switch to competitors.
The BlackBerry outage — the biggest in the company's history — even reached Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office.
Andrew MacDougall, spokesman for the prime minister, took to social networking site Twitter on Wednesday and tweeted: "Am being impacted by RIM/Berry service outage — please call if you need to reach me."
Outages for RIM's (TSX:RIM) instant messaging service, email and browsing started at the beginning of the week in Europe and then spread to the Middle East, Africa and hit Canada on Wednesday.
The list of affected regions also included areas of South America, as well as Asian markets including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and India.
"It's a huge embarrassment for a company that has built its reputation on the notion of service and reliability and when all else fails your BlackBerry will still work," said Michael Gartenberg, director of research at U.S.-based technology firm Gartner Inc.
The problem began as a technical failure in Europe, but snowballed into a global problem as messages sent from outside of Europe to the continent while the system was down piled up undelivered and clogged the network, the Waterloo, Ont., company said.
"What it's looking like is that over time, that backlog has built and has started impacting those other systems," said David Yach, RIM's chief technology officer.
Yach said RIM is working around the clock to send the undelivered messages, noting that the problem isn't related to a security breach.
"All of the email will be delivered. We will not be dropping any email messages," Yach told a webcast to discuss the outages.
"Our priority is to get the service up and running because at the end of the day that's what's going to make our customers happy is to have their BlackBerrys working again," Yach said.
RIM also apologized.
In a letter posted late Wednesday on RIM's website Robin Bienfait, RIM's chief information officer, apologized for service interruptions and delays. She said email systems are operating around the world and they are continuing to clear any backlogged messages.
"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down," Bienfait said. "We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."
However, an apology didn't seem to be good enough for the government of Colombia, which reportedly asked RIM to compensate users affected by the glitches.
RIM's last outage was in December 2009 and it also experienced an outage in 2008.
Gartenberg said the outage comes at a key time for the company.
"It's coming at a time when RIM is facing increasing competition from companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft, all launching new products," Gartenberg said from New York.
RIM has been losing ground in the hyper-competitive North American market to Apple and Android devices in recent years. Although it's still a leader in the business market, Apple has been making inroads with corporations.
Apple's new iPhone 4S, announced last week, is set to hit stores Friday.
Technology analyst Troy Crandall said he expects the outages to have more of an effect in the corporate market.
"That's the bread and butter still for RIM," said Crandall of Montreal-based MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier.
"It just kind of puts the thought in people's heads — might it be time for a switch?"
However Crandall also noted it won't help attitudes among younger users who have taken to BlackBerry Messenger for real-time chatting.
In addition to the service outages, RIM acknowledged on its website www.blackberry.com there was a BBM-related hoax making the rounds.
While the company didn't spell out what the hoax was, at least one independent website that tracks the mobile device industry reported that users of BlackBerry Messenger were encouraged to forward the fake message to all their contacts as a way to help RIM fix the overload caused by the outage.
RIM's website said hoaxes are an industrywide issue and any type of device could be used to persuade users to forward messages.
"RIM recommends that users simply ignore the message and do not forward it, since this would only serve to expand the reach of the hoax message,” the company's website said.
William Blair & Co. analyst Anil Doradla said if RIM doesn't fix the outage problem quickly, the urge to switch to other devices will grow.
"Days like this tick consumers and enterprise off against this company," said Doradla, who's based in Chicago but was in India and affected by the outage.
"People who are on the fringes and are thinking about going away from RIM, days like this clearly motivate them to do that," he said from Bangalore, India.
Doradla noted that RIM's servers handle all email and BlackBerry instant messages and that means it has to spend millions to keep pace with the growing volume of data.
RIM has about 70 million BlackBerry subscribers around the world and most of them also use the BlackBerry instant messaging service, creating a non-stop flow of messages.
Canadian carriers said some of their BlackBerry customers were affected.
"Our customers are concerned but after explaining what's going on, they understand the situation," said Telus spokeswoman A.J. Gratton. "It's too soon for us to see any significant move from one type of device to another."
Bell (TSX:BCE) spokesman Mark Langton said BlackBerry email service was back on line, but there would be delays as queued messages get cleared.
"Affected users are experiencing delays in sending and receiving emails," Langton said in an email.
Adding to RIM's woes, Toronto-based investor Jaguar Financial Corp. renewed its call this week for a shakeup of RIM's management and either the sale or split-up of the company.
RIM earns revenue from both the sale of its smartphones and a monthly fee subscribers pay to use its secure email services and instant messaging capabilities, which means users switching to other phones could eat away at its profits.
Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Robison said the outages do hurt RIM's brand but noted it's facing other challenges.
"You can see by the absence of market reaction that the brand is already in disrepair already," he said from San Francisco.
Shares in Research In Motion closed down 87 cents, or 3.5 per cent, at $24.27 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
En un comunicado RIM admite que aún hay retrasos en el tráfico de datos, por lo que aún no hay fecha estimada para estabilizar la navegación.
13/10/2011
Ya van por lo menos cuatro días desde que el servicio de Blackberry comenzó a presentar problemas, y recién en las últimas horas la empresa fabricante de los terminales, Research In Motion (RIM), asegura que están logrando estabilizar el sistema de forma parcial para Estados Unidos, Canadá y Sudamérica, aunque aún sin entregar un plazo para lograr estabilizar la navegación.
Según la empresa la navegación se irá reponiendo en las próximas horas, aunque aún existen operadores cuyos servidores están en Europa, por lo que aún no pueden reponer el servicio de internet. En lo que respecta al resto del mundo, por ahora los correos electrónicos han comenzado a operar, aunque aún no se logra reponer la cola de mensajes pendientes desde la caída, situación similar a lo que ocurre con la mensajería, mientras que la navegación se mantiene suspendida.
Así el ritmo más alto de reposición del sistema parece estar en Estados Unidos, donde la única traba está en el servicio de mensajería de Blackberry, que aún no logra la estabilidad deseada.
Aún no se puede precisar la cantidad de clientes en el mundo que se han quedado sin servicio debido a la falla, cifra que en Chile sería de por lo menos 200 mil usuarios, según lo señalado por la operadora Movistar.
Lo que sí está claro es el origen del problema: el fallo de un conmutador que ha generado el estancamiento de datos, descartándose cualquier ataque de hackers, y confirmando que los correos que no han llegado a su destinatario podrán ser enviados nuevamente cuando se logre estabilizar el servicio.
El nuevo teléfono portátil de Apple fue lanzado el martes 4 de octubre y la preventa comenzó el 6 de este mes.
10/10/2011
La preventa del nuevo teléfono móvil de Apple, el iPhone 4S, superó el millón de unidades en las primeras 24 horas en que se ofreció, con lo que superó el récord previo de 600.000 unidades, dijo el lunes la firma tecnológica estadounidense.
La empresa de la manzana comenzó a tomar las órdenes por el nuevo aparato un día después del anuncio de la muerte de uno de los fundadores de la firma, Steve Jobs, el 6 de octubre sólo en algunos países, entre los que destacan Estados Unidos, Canadá, Alemania, Francia y Japón.
Apple anunció además que comenzará a vender el móvil en otros 22 países a fines de octubre.
It seems like an answerable question, right?
But no one really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly infinite digital universe that is the internet.
Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the internet's collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that's stuffed between our ears.
"The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons," Kelly writes in his 2010 book "What Technology Wants."
"Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links -- but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is."
Wild, huh?
Well, at long last, an answer may be coming.
A group called the World Wide Web Foundation -- appropriately founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much created the internet -- is on a quest to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the internet really is.
With a $1 million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, the foundation's CEO, Steve Bratt, said in a recent interview.
Here's how the foundation described the project in an e-mail to CNN:
"The Web Index will be the world's first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries."
Bratt stressed that it won't answer every question people have about the internet, but he hopes the index, which will be presented as a series of annual reports, will go a long way toward filling in some of the gaps.
"We want to be really careful about what will happen (as a result of the Web Index) because we just don't know," he said. "But this will be probably the best opportunity to quantify" the Web.
So, what kind of tools does one use to try to measure the internet? Certainly not yard sticks and rulers, right?
Bratt said the Web Foundation will conduct surveys of internet users, interview relevant people and try to gather data from internet service providers, national governments and search engines such as Google to come up with its findings.
In addition to looking at how big the Web is, the group wants to use data to tease out the role social media sites had in sparking revolution in the Middle East this year. And it wants to find out what kinds of websites people all over the world are looking at; what websites exist; and how internet trends differ from country to country and region to region.
The International Telecommunications Union digs into some similar questions, publishing reports on the number of internet users in various countries and how fast connections are around the world (South Korea is by far the fastest, in case you were wondering. The United States is super-slow in comparison).
Bratt said the Web Foundation's work will supplement, not replace, what the ITU does.
The foundation is starting work on the Web Index soon and is still seeking funding for the project, he said. The first of five annual reports will be available early next year, the group says.
Apple's product announcements were treated like rock concerts by tech journalists when Steve Jobs was leading them.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Author describes pandemonium surrounding Steve Jobs press conferences
The Apple co-founder had cult-figure status in the tech world
The company's product annoucements are blockbuster events
One audience member shrieked with joy as Jobs announced iPad in 2010
(CNN) -- Dozens of video-capable smartphones -- most of them Steve Jobs' own creations -- peered out over the sea of technology journalists like digital periscopes.
Nothing particularly video-worthy was going on in that moment: It was January 2010, and a bunch of us tech writers, wearing plaid and skinny jeans and funny hats, were waiting in line outside the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco for an Apple news conference.
But a line outside a news conference where Steve Jobs will appear is no normal line. It's the kind of thing you might just want to record every second of. And so, when our media handlers, wearing bright T-shirts with the simple Apple logo, let us into the building where Jobs would unveil his company's "magical" iPad, pretty much everyone in the audience raised his or her iPhone in unison and clicked "record."
I'm sure our collective scramble down a hall toward a dimly lit auditorium was recorded and uploaded dozens of times.
Apple's revolutionary co-founder, who died Wednesday at the age of 56, had that kind of power over people -- even the ostensibly objective technology press corps, which breathlessly hangs on Apple's announcements as if their gadgets have the power to change the world.
Which, if we're being honest, they do.
Steve Jobs was 'out of place and time'
China remembers 'Master Jobs'
Steve Jobs leaves lasting legacy
Steve Jobs' family tree
"The world has lost a visionary," President Barack Obama said in a statement posted Wednesday night on the White House blog. "And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."
"So much talk on Twitter of Steve Jobs, but Twitter HQ has been eerily quiet the past few hours save the clicking of keyboards he tailored," Twitter designer Mark Trammell posted on his popular Twitter feed. All around the world, it seems, people used the technology Jobs created to remark on his impact and his passing -- a testament to the personal impact Apple's suite of iProducts has on many of our lives.
Regardless of your technological tack -- whether you're addicted to that red light that blinks on top of the BlackBerry or swear your allegiance to the Android overlords -- it's hard to deny the industry-changing power of Jobs and the Apple brand. Before the iPhone, an app-running, touch-screen device didn't exist. It was the first true smartphone, just as the iPad was the first true tablet computer. But way before that, back in a California garage in the 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak essentially kick-started the personal computer revolution. In part, I owe the fact that I'm able to type this story and send it to you over the Internet to the vision of Jobs and Wozniak.
If the technological history explains part of the hype that surrounds every press conference Jobs presided over, his personal life tells more of the story. Gallery: Steve Jobs' life offstage
After we iPhone-holding hordes made our way into the auditorium where Jobs would reveal Apple's tablet computer, I took a seat next to a buttoned-up tech analyst and noticed the music playing over the loudspeakers: Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."
"How does it feeeeeeeel...." Wired wrote on its live blog of the event, quoting the lyrics. (In case you're not familiar with that phenomenon, tech bloggers, myself included, post -- instantly and publicly -- pretty much every word Steve Jobs utters at these press conferences. Apple doesn't allow live video feeds, so these insta-blogs are the only way to get information about new Apple gadgets out to the salivating public in real time).
When Jobs emerged, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation. Again -- all iPhones in the air.
As he paced the stage in front of a massive, glowing PowerPoint-style presentation, wearing his trademark mom jeans and black turtleneck, a scruffy beard and Harry Potter glasses on his face, writers hung on his every word.
He told us the iPad would be "truly magical and revolutionary," and the doubters believed him.
"I went into it prepared to be very skeptical," Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng told me after the event, "but I was impressed."
That's partly because Jobs carried weight like no one else in the industry. His presentations were the rock concerts of the technology world. His ability to connect new gadgets with human wants and desires -- their ability not just to make you a productive worker but to connect you with loved ones -- took them to another level.
His onstage charisma is something everyone since -- most notably Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -- has tried to imitate, without quite the same success.
That's partly because of style but also because of history.
Jobs' status as a counterculture figure -- the kind of guy who loves Bob Dylan, whose company asks fans to "think different," and who went on a find-yourself pilgrimage in India, where he experimented with psychedelic drugs -- puts him in a more sacred place in the public consciousness than other tie-wearing tech execs, who seem like photocopies of each other compared to someone with Jobs' rich personal history.
No one videotapes the walk into a Microsoft press conference hosted by Steve Ballmer, for instance. I've been to those, too.
Jobs' story is almost painfully American and it reads like a screenplay: Driven individual from humble beginnings sells Volkswagen bus to found company in his family's garage; in process, revolutionizes music, digital movies, computing and mobile tech.
"To technology freaks and geeks, he is a 'demigod', whose product launches are adulatory affairs regularly likened to religious revivalist meetings," the British newspaper The Guardian wrote in 2006. "The Jobs life story -- humble birth, rise and fall, then miraculous comeback -- has even been likened by Apple fanatics to the heroic myths of Odysseus, Jason, Krishna and Christ."
Maybe all this, in part, explains why the suit-wearing analyst sitting next to me at the 2010 iPad event literally shrieked with joy when Jobs announced some details of that tablet, including a detachable keyboard he could use to file reports on the go.
I don't claim to fully comprehend the pandemonium that surrounds a Steve Jobs press conference. In June 2010, about six months after the iPad event, I attended Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (known to insiders as WWDC) at San Francisco's Moscone Center. That massive glass building was cloaked in an Apple logo big enough to have its own ZIP code. Inside, the usual suspects were waiting for a chance to see Jobs unveil the latest-generation iPhone, which turned out to be the iPhone 4.
I was in a pack of tech bloggers waiting behind a velvet rope, just outside the giant conference room where the event would be held. We were talking about all the latest iPhone rumors -- would it really be a game changer, etc. -- when security guards (really) lifted the velvet rope to let us in. Keep in mind there were maybe 100 writers and photographers covering this event and we were getting let in before anyone else -- to choose our seats in a room with at least 2,000 chairs.
Bottom line: We were getting really good seats, no problem.
Still, the moment that rope lifted, there was a mad rush.
I didn't expect it at all, and almost got knocked out of the way as these laptop- and camera-toting journalists sprinted -- literally sprinted -- into the empty news conference.
At the time, I thought this was completely insane.
But, upon reflection, I don't condone it, but I get it.
They were rushing not to hear about the iPhone 4. They wanted the best chance possible to get close to a man who's been described as the Thomas Edison of our time. A legend.
A man who, in his own words, "put a dent in the universe."
You don't get that kind of opportunity every day.
An Indian talks on his mobile phone during a mass marriage ceremony for some 525 poverty-stricken couples from the India-Pakistan border area on April 13, 2009.
The 'end of isolation' for world's poor
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Affordable mobile phone access has caused a quantum leap for the world's poor
From 2005 to 2010, cell phone use tripled in the developing world to 4 billion subscriptions
In Kenya, mobile phone banking services are used to make $1 billion transactions a month
Economist: "The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development"
When renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs visited rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa in 2005, he saw impoverished communities with poor drinking water, feast-and-famine crop cycles and rampant malaria infections. What he didn't see was mobile phones.
"Now mobile phone ownership is perhaps 30% of households and cell phone coverage is widespread," said Sachs, director of the United Nations Millennium Villages Project, which focuses on improving 14 rural villages across 10 African countries as a model for wider prosperity in the region.
The advent of the mobile society may have brought convenience and a cultural sea change to the U.S. and Europe, but in the poorest regions of the world, affordable mobile phone access has caused a quantum leap in services -- like calling for medical help, sending a quick letter to loved ones or starting a savings account -- that Americans and Europeans have taken for granted for generations, analysts say.
"The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development," said Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of the 2005 book "The End of Poverty."
"Poverty is almost equated with isolation in many places of the world. Poverty results from the lack of access to markets, to emergency health services, access to education, the ability to take advantage of government services and so on," Sachs said. "What the mobile phone -- and more generally IT technology -- is ending is that kind of isolation in all its different varieties."
There's probably more pervasive coverage in Kenya than in many areas in Europe Michael Joseph, former CEO of Safaricom
Moreover, the profusion of payment services via cell phones puts places like Kenya and Uganda in the vanguard of mobile financial services. "You can walk in the middle of rural village in Rwanda and use a mobile phone to pay at a recharging station to recharge LED lights," says Amanda Gardiner, acting program manager of Business Call to Action, a New York-based non-profit organization that is helping to bring more mobile phones to Africa's rural poor.
"I'm always flabbergasted I don't walk into Home Depot and see these services here, just swipe your cell phone and go," Gardiner said. "In some ways, they're really leaping ahead of us and going right to the future." Kenya's "mobile-money" revolution
From 2005 to 2010, cell phone use tripled in the developing world to nearly 4 billion mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Nowhere was the growth faster than in Africa, which saw mobile use grow more than 400% during that time frame, according to ITU. That means more money -- a 2006 University of Michigan study found that every 10% increase in cell phone penetration grows the local economy by 0.6%.
The simple ability to make a phone call has far-reaching economic consequences, Sachs said.
"Places where traditionally, people would walk livestock for a week or two without knowing what kind of price they'll fetch -- should they go to Khartoum, Nairobi or Port Saeed? Now they can call ahead and find out where to get the best price," Sachs said.
The low cost of setting up mobile towers and plunging costs of handsets has allowed cell phone coverage to grow even in poor, rural locations, said Michael Joseph, former CEO of Safaricom, a Kenyan telecom provider which grew from 17,000 users when he started in 2000 to more than 18 million when he stepped down in 2010. "There's probably more pervasive coverage in Kenya than in many areas in Europe," Joseph said.
Business models set up for selling services to the poor -- such as buying pre-paid phone service and charging by the second rather than the minute -- made cell phone use affordable, but Safaricom's development of banking services via cell phones revolutionized the telecom business in poor countries.
In some ways, (Africa) is really leaping ahead of us and going right to the future Amanda Gardiner, acting program manager of Business Call to Action
Safaricom, in partnership with the U.K.'s Vodafone, started M-PESA (short for mobile pesa, Swahili for "money") services in 2007 that allow customers to digitally transfer cash via mobile phones. Two years later, 10% of the country's GDP was being circulated through M-PESA, according to a 2010 World Bank report. Now Kenyans make $1 billion a month in transactions via M-PESA, where cash can be deposited and transferred at one of 20,000 stores, Joseph said.
"The growth of GDP in Kenya would be half what it was the past 10 years if it wasn't for the mobile phone," said Joseph.
"About 70% of all jobs in Kenya are in the informal sector -- selling goods on the side of the road, that sort of thing -- and now to start a business all you need is a cell phone," said Joseph, who now is a fellow at the World Bank focusing on mobile money services.
As a result of M-PESA, more cash is moving -- and staying -- in smaller villages, building up the local economy, said Olga Morawczynski, who spent 18 months in Kenya studying the impact of mobile banking services there.
"Now that money is being delivered locally, they didn't have to physically go to the nearest urban center to get cash," said Morawczynski, who is now working in Uganda on mobile banking programs for the Grameen Foundation's AppLab program. "I noticed village stores had seen a demand in 'city goods' -- things you wouldn't typically get in the villages before like furniture, or a particular hair-straightening product for women. Mobile apps for poverty
Cell phone technology has unleashed new ways to help the poor in developing countries, Sachs said, but businesses have led the way.
"Cell phones are spreading almost entirely on a market basis ... only now are we starting to get the applications for it on the social services side," Sachs said. "And the genius of prepaid phone cards has made it possible for the poor to gain access to this technology without government involvement ... it's largely governments stepping out of the way and letting commercial companies come in."
How Steve Jobs inspired Africa
Safaricom's mobile banking model is being brought to areas from Bangladesh to Uganda. The United Nations Development Bank last month announced a program to bring mobile phone service to 3 million more poor people in Africa and South Asia by 2013. Mobile technology is now being used in Gambia to track medication stock levels in rural villages, Gardiner said. For the UN Millennium Project villages, the pre-paid mobile card is now being used as a model for pre-paid electrical service.
"We're able to do very quick mapping and needs assessments with smartphone with GIS capability," said Sachs, project director. "We can cover an area of assessment in weeks, something that used to take years."
"The most powerful thing about cell phones is how it has released money flow incountries that have poor infrastructure and often are in crisis situations," Morawczynski said.
"It also teaches people terms such as 'pin number', 'account', and 'transfer,' these kind of technical foreign terms that serve as a nice transitional toward using financial banking services for the first time. People are realizing it's better than keeping money buried in the ground."
Pieces of German telescope to return to Earth in coming weeks
Sat, 8 Oct, 2011
The "ROSAT," an old German space telescope, which is due to come crashing back to Earth in several weeks…
MONTREAL - For the second time in about a month, earthlings have reason to fear a falling satellite.
This time it's an old German space telescope that will plunge to Earth in the coming weeks — and Canada falls within the potential impact zone.
There are many reasons to hope ROSAT steers clear of this country — 785 of them, to be exact. That's the weight in kilograms of the satellite's mirrors, equivalent to a standard-sized polar bear.
The chances of someone actually getting hit by debris from the uncontrolled satellite are hardly any different from those predicted before last month's fiery return of another satellite, which came down over the Pacific Ocean and caused no damage to humans.
NASA had calculated a 3,200-to-1 chance of that satellite causing injuries back on Earth; for the ROentgen SATellite, it's calculated at 2,000 to 1.
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) advises on its website that the large X-ray observatory, the size of a mobile home, is due to re-enter the atmosphere around the end of October.
ROSAT shut down in February 1999, more than eight years after its launch, and it has no propulsion system to alter its re-entry.
The satellite's orbit covers an area between 53 degrees north and 53 degrees south, meaning it could come down anywhere between Canada and South America.
ROSAT weighs 2.4 tons in all. The latest studies suggest up to 30 individual pieces of ROSAT weighing a total of 1.6 tons may reach the Earth's surface.
Holger Krag, an expert at the European Space Agency's space debris centre, is focusing mainly on the giant mirror system, which is shielded from heat and could survive re-entry.
Krag points out there are between 10 and 30 uncontrolled satellite re-entries annually.
But he stresses not many are really big.
"There are only a few objects that have really high masses and with the high likelihood that parts of them will survive re-entry," he told The Canadian Press.
Krag points out it's hard to predict where any decommissioned satellites will eventually come down because of the density of the atmosphere.
He admits that, even a few hours before re-entry of ROSAT, there's no way of being able to give a precise location.
"It's just impossible to predict the behaviour of the atmosphere," he added.
But Phil Langill, a University of Calgary physics professor, says the concern that someone on the ground will get hit by pieces of ROSAT should be taken with a grain of salt.
"Most of the people live in populated areas, not out in the country," he said in a recent interview.
"The probability that this thing is going to hit a populated city is so, so small because the whole scope of the land mass over which it travels is so, so small."
Langill says there are still a few large satellites among the more than 8,000 orbiting objects that are being tracked by the United States Space Surveillance Network.
The network says about seven per cent of the space objects are operational satellites, while the rest are debris.
"All the satellites that were launched in the last 10 to 15 years are much smaller and those ones would not survive any re-entry," said Langill, who is also director of the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory.
"It's only the ones that were launched in the late '80s and early '90s that are still up there that were large in size, large in mass and could survive the fiery re-entry to make it to the ground.
"But once we get to the next few years, and these big ones come down, then the only ones that will be left up there will be the smaller-package ones."
Langill also tried to explain how scientists determined that ROSAT presents a 2,000-to-one chance of casualties.
"The simplest calculation and the one that I think they use is you just take the total surface of the Earth over which the satellite passes in its normal orbital path and divide that by the total number of people on the ground that occupy that amount of land mass," he said.
"So you simply do the number of people divided by area and you get a number like one in 2,000."
Langill admits he's disappointed the exact spot where pieces of ROSAT may come down can't be accurately predicted.
"I think it would be a great opportunity to get together for a glass of wine with your neighbours and watch this thing come out of the sky. That would be a fantastic thing to see, that would be a lot of fun."
An Indian talks on his mobile phone during a mass marriage ceremony for some 525 poverty-stricken couples from the India-Pakistan border area on April 13, 2009. 
