 Web2.0, Telematics,Homesteads. |
| Remote Access. By EMILY BIUSO Published: October 2, 2008 |
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| Technology has left a long line of casualties: the typewriter, the rotary phone, the cassette tape. Now you can add the housesitter to the list. Why enlist a stranger to stay in your home when, with a little wiring (or wirelessly) and an Internet connection, you can water your lawn, adjust your thermostat or turn your lights on and off from any remote location? You can even watch a live feed of your house provided by any number of hidden cameras. Home-automation systems have been available on the mass market for a few years, but the ability to control appliances in your home remotely is a newer phenomenon, according to Danny Briere and Patrick Hurley, authors of ''Smart Homes for Dummies.'' ''In the past year, you've seen the price of wireless cameras drop precipitously,'' Briere says, making these systems more widely available and affordable. On a flight to Utah for a family vacation with his wife and two kids, David Finkelstein realized that they had forgotten to set the central air-conditioner in their Boca Raton, Fla., home to vacation mode. But instead of fretting that it would be blasting away all week, Finkelstein logged on to his computer when they arrived in Utah and reprogrammed it. ''As long as I can get to the Internet, I can control my house,'' says Finkelstein, who frequently logs on to the live feed of his property while he's away, to see whether storms have blown debris into the yard. If anything's awry, he can call his service and have the problem fixed before he even gets there. Control4, the home-automation system Finkelstein uses, offers any number of customizations, starting at about $500 for a basic home-theater controller and running to many thousands of dollars for systems covering the whole house. ''The sky's the limit on price,'' Hurley says. Will West, the C.E.O. of Control4 and the father of six children, uses his own home-automation system for everything from monitoring the comings and goings of his 18-year-old son (he can program the security system to e-mail or text him with the time his son enters the house at night) to listening to three kinds of music in his bathroom at once (he has 3 zones of audio in his bathroom and 21 zones in other parts of the house). When he puts his 3-year-old daughter to bed, she pushes a button, activating her bedtime music and a timer that will dim her lights after 20 minutes. ''Little things like that make your life better,'' West says. But what about the potential dark side of all of this remote access — the constant monitoring, the obsessive-compulsiveness? Finkelstein insists that the ability to monitor his house at any time, from any location, is liberating rather than burdening. ''I don't feel obsessive or compelled to do it,'' he says. ''I feel a greater sense of security.'' |
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Acceso y visualizacion remota para residencias.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
VoIP, totalmente por Internet, ofrecida por un proveedor de servicio celular.
VoIP, Phone Smart |
| A Wireless Carrier Offers a Different Inducement to Drop the Landline By BOB TEDESCHI Published: February 11, 2009 "calls are carried over the Internet, not the Verizon Wireless network. For many users, this means venturing for the first time into the world of voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, calling." |
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| Here's news you won't see too often from a wireless carrier: Last week Verizon unveiled a new phone that is not a mobile device. Rather, the Verizon Hub is a home phone system that the company claims is a giant leap forward from traditional landline phones. The reality? The Hub is indeed a leap, and for Verizon subscribers who have important add-on services, lots of friends and family members using Verizon and $250 or so in disposable income, it will be a worthwhile upgrade. Whether it is enough of a leap forward for others is far less certain. For starters, you can't even use a Hub unless you already have an account with Verizon Wireless, which immediately knocks about 70 percent of the American population out of the running. Beyond that, the device is similar to a phone you might see on an executive's desk. The device, measuring about 6 inches by 11 inches, has a wireless handset and a seven-inch LCD display with a readable 800-by-480-pixel resolution. But the Hub is different in many ways from the typical phone/speakerphone/dock combination, and not just because it's more expensive than most ($250 before a $50 mail-in rebate, plus $35 a month for the service, which includes unlimited calls in the United States and Canada). First, calls are carried over the Internet, not the Verizon Wireless network. For many users, this means venturing for the first time into the world of voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, calling. But in this case, it's a mostly meaningless distinction, since Hub calls are as clear as landline calls. The only reason it's worth mentioning is that Verizon won't sell you a Hub unless you live in an Enhanced 911 service area, where 911 calls to emergency services from VoIP phones can be identified by address. The bigger difference between this and other phones is what the Hub's little screen can do. In Relay mode, it is a desktop SMS device, on which you can receive, compose and send text messagesand picture messages. But you can do this only as long as you're communicating with other Verizon users — which, again, limits the Hub's utility. |
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| The Hub is one of the first home phone systems with visual voice mail. It gives the phone number and sometimes the name of the person who left the message. That means you can skip to the important voice mail first. You can also quickly program the device to send an e-mail message when you have voice mail waiting or to only send messages marked urgent. The Do Not Disturb function will send every incoming call directly to voice mail without ringing the phone — a nice feature if your children, like mine, try to flee the dinner table every time the phone rings. And you can program the service to ring three separate phone numbers — your cellphones, for instance, if you don't want to miss an important call. Other Hub features increase the usefulness of services that previously had been available only on the Web. Those who use Verizon's Chaperone service, for instance, can use the Hub to quickly check a child's location on a map, and change the settings so the service sends an alert when the child moves a certain distance from a location. The Hub can also be used to send directions to a Verizon phone, assuming the recipient subscribes to the carrier's VZ Navigator service. In some cases, the Hub comes close to getting it right, but doesn't quite make it. Instead of using a laptop or the Yellow Pages, you can search the Hub's directory for people or businesses, then type in a phone number and get directions. But the directory itself has a major flaw. You can't simply type "pizza" and "10036" and get results, unless 10036 is your home ZIP code. Rather, you have to create a location for every ZIP code you intend to search outside your home area, then select that location and start your search. Even the Hub's vast video library, courtesy of Verizon's V Cast service, included some puzzlers. Among more useful videos, like one on how to make a daiquiri and previews of scheduled cable TV shows, were those offering "Christmas Food and Fashion" tips. Of the hundreds of videos available on V Cast, I didn't find any that convinced me the service offers anything better than what is on the Web. If you're not great at navigating the Web, this could be useful in much the same way that AOL was helpful to Internet newbies years ago. Otherwise, it probably won't get much use on your Hub. Much better — and, thankfully, more up to date — were the movie listings, which included trailers you can watch on the Hub. And it was easy enough, from the Web page dedicated to my Hub, to add photos and turn the device into a digital photo frame. So much for what the Hub can do. What it can't do is perhaps just as important. So far, you can't surf the open Internet with this, nor can you check e-mail. Verizon says it may add these services later, along with software refinements that will correct some of the flaws I noted. In the device's current incarnation, though, is it worth it? If you've got a Verizon subscription with multiple lines and unlimited data service (for all your intrafamily texting) and if you use the Chaperone and VZ Navigator services often, it is indeed worth considering. If not, this device isn't worth switching for — at least not yet. QUICK CALLS : E-mail: phonesmart@nytimes.com |
Monday, February 16, 2009
El Celular, navegando nuestras vidas con mapas.
Internet, Smartphones. |
| The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives By JOHN MARKOFF Published: February 16, 2009 |
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| The cellphone is the world's most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information. It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map. "The map underlies man's ability to perceive," said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world. As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user's location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you. Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map's power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month. On its face, Google's new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are. But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. "Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services," said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes. It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps. "We're way early on, and we don't know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet," said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. "But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing." Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now "augment" reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user's surroundings produced by the phone's camera. With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one's surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world. "I always said the next interface would be Quake," said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. "How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you're looking at in the physical world?" Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers' travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships. "When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there," said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks. |
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| A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion. Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection. On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view. Recently, for example, Sam Ashton, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together. Mr. Ashton said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts. The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps. "Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective," said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information. For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think? "I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate," said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. "Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps." Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications. "This is a new metaphor upon which others can build," said Michael Halbherr, Nokia's vice president for social location services. |
