Archive | October, 2007
Voice over IP Communications specialists Best4IP have created a site with a view to bringing together a wealth of information on the subject of SIP telephony, VOIP telephony and their related features and implementation.
Best4IP is a natural progression of focus from a company which has specialised in providing cost effective and bespoke communications solutions for its clients for over 10 years.
Voice Over IP is rapidly becoming the industry standard when it comes to the installation of PABX ‘s and larger switches.
I have a relatively spacious flat with a nice garden, my two children have ample room to run around and play, indeed they could be said to have taken over the better part of our living area with their various toys, games and activities.
That is why I started looking into the option of adding a Conservatory to my abode. We decided that loosing a few square meters from the garden would be little sacrifice compared to the benefits of an extra room, and one which would be dedicated to adult tastes.
So, I started investing Conservatories online and found a wonderful array of possible solutions. With prices from as little at under a grand I was immediately interested, and soon found myself in the process of ordering a superb looking “lean to”.
The unit was delivered within a week and the construction was a painless process, it looks good and there is more space in the house, now I am out of it….
This was several months ago, and now I sit in my leather armchair, glass of whisky in hand, the rain makes a wonderful sound as it patters lightly on the conservatory roof and the double glazing ensures that the racket from inside the house doesn’t spoil my moment.
I have a great business idea and am looking for a partner in the North of England.
Here, in the affluent south, everyone is buying flat screen/LCD Tv’s and plasmas, we are so rich down here that we are practically giving away the old traditional TV Sets.
What I need is a contact up north ( where old tellies must be worth gold dust) so I can ship them up there and sell them for top dollar.
I reckon that I could drive through the wealthy streets of Hove in a truck saying: “we collect your Tv’s” and fill it up in no time.
I could then drive around the better off areas of the north and sell these very same television sets as luxury items to the north people.
You see I still haven’t got it cracked, I use the GPS Sat Nav on my Nokia N95 all the time in the car. I set the route using the landmarks feature and calculate route. Then I show on map and start tracking. Generally, if I have decent satellite signals the GPS functions fine.
It is only a pity that you can’t use it in widescreen mode as the GPS receiver is located in the base of the N95′s handset. I have been thinking of trying to find a small LCD screen with video in ports so that I can use the TV Out of the Nokia to have larger screened in car navigation available.
Driving along I either glance down at the mobile on my dashboard ( I still have not got a decent in car cradle for my N95 but am looking ) or I hand the handset to my daughter who confirms yes, we are still on the blue line.
I am nearing the stage when these steps must be overcome; I need a cradle, a new screen, and above all, I need a screen with a better size, for glancing and I will need some Navigational Software so that I have voice prompts to tell me where I am wand when I need to turn and all of that stuff.
Looking online for Navigational Software ( I am loathe to click accept on the Nokia’s internal menu as this must be the most expensive option ) I find some interesting alternatives;
- CoPilot Live 6 : – from www.alk.com/copilot/pocketpc.asp at around £50 looks ok and is fully featured, but it appears not to use the same maps ( from smart2go ) as I am used to. I also worry about hidden data charges.
- Wayfinder :- from www.wayfinder.com has be recommended many times on the Symbian forums
- Route 66 from 66.com is also a frontrunner and the fully featured product Mobile 7 S60 looks by far the best I have found online
I will be trying to find online trials of demos of each of these different S60 Navigation Software for my Nokia N95 and will report once whey have been assessed.
I am by no means a DIY amateur, I have managed, in the past, to carry out a few quite breathtaking pieces of home improvement. My proudest hour was, most likely, the replacement of a large TV aerial on our roof. I managed ( and this was in a foreign country) to purchase several poles, a load of wire and an aerial. I learnt how to split and wire up coaxial cables and spent around 100 hours positioning the aerial itself.
When I say that was my proudest hour, I mean that my darkest overshadows it by a long mile, it negates 20 years of well intentioned and often flawlessly lucky stabs at DIY. Last year I decided to re plaster my child’s bedroom. The initial stages went well, the room was cleared and the walls chipped down to reveal a rough and ready surface upon which to lay my plaster. In fact I followed every step perfectly. The plaster went on smoothly and, after a suitable time period, I wallpapered, every one was extremely impressed, none more so than myself; my children really knew their dad was a real DIY man. However, as we all know, Knowledge is Power, and I had not really, so it turned out, mixed up the plaster very well. Now I should have realised that that was a critical part of the project as a whole, I should have looked online at a DIY website and made sure I had the proportions rather closer to the ideal than my rough guess.
What a fool I felt as my daughter’s wall slowly crumbled and flaked away onto the floor, along with the expensive princess © wallpaper we had carefully applied to it..
In retrospect I learnt a lot, trouble is so did everyone else, they had a good lesson in what a fool I am.
In a mobile, connected world, maps are becoming a hugely strategic asset. All kinds of burgeoning digital revenue streams are being created on the backs of maps: local search, friend finders, family tracking, location-aware advertising and turn-by-turn navigation. If you control the map, you control the game.
In July, the industry woke up to just how valuable maps could be when TomTom, the Dutch manufacturer of personal global positioning system navigation devices, said it would buy Belgian mapmaker Tele Atlas for approximately $2.7 billion.
TomTom was quick on the draw; since the deal, Navteq stock has shot up 86%. But not doing the deal could have turned out to be even more expensive for Nokia given that it is a customer of Navteq: If the likes of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ), Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) or personal navigation device maker Garmin (nasdaq: GRMN – news – people ) snapped up Navteq, they could easily put Nokia out of the map business by refusing to renew its license in a few years, or hurt it badly by jacking up the price of maps.
Now Nokia can tell the others where to go. Navteq claims it has the most accurate maps in the world, in part because it sends out more than 700 workers in vans every day to take down detailed road information. Navteq also bought Traffic.com a year ago for $179 million, giving it real-time traffic information in more than 50 U.S. cities. Seven out of ten of the in-dash car navigation systems in Western Europe and the U.S. use Navteq. More than half the GPS-equipped mobile devices sold in Western Europe and North America have Navteq maps embedded in them.
Nokia uses Navteq data to power the maps in its new phones equipped with GPS chips, including the N95 and 6110 Navigator. Owners of these phones get free maps and can upgrade to Nokia’s turn-by-turn navigation service, called Smart2Go, for $13 a month or $112 a year. Nokia also debuted two in-car navigation devices this year and a GPS accessory that turns any Bluetooth phone into a personal navigator.
The Garmin and TomTom-type personal navigation device business is booming. Unit sales are up from 2.5 million in the U.S. last year to 7.5 million for this year. But Nokia is mostly eyeing the opportunity in GPS-equipped phones. Only 11% of the 1 billion cell phones sold last year had GPS chips in them. By 2011, more than a third of new cell phones will, creating a $3 billion a year business in cellular navigation in the U.S. and Europe, according to Sanford C. Bernstein research. That means 500 million GPS phones walking around in cities and towns, creating a powerful two-way sensor network that Nokia and others can tap for selling targeted advertising, friend-finder services and city guides.
