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Posts Tagged ‘Germany’

Another optical wireless experiment shows us that LEDs will beam your future downloads

Beaming data with light is hardly a new thing, but lately we’ve seen a number of attempts at making it rather more usable and, more interesting, rather more speedy. We’re starting to get the feeling that those maybe/maybe not dangerous microwave-based systems have had their days numbered. The latest to beam bits with blinkenlights is a team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications in Germany, which will be showing its stuff at the always happenin’ Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition in two weeks. The team was able to use a commercial LED and get an impressive 230Mb/s transfer rate, which doesn’t compare to the gigabit Penn State managed or 500mb/s Siemens pulled off, but those were done using rather more specialized hardware (like the Siemens rig pictured above). It’s interesting stuff, and we’re looking forward to see the commercial applications for this tech, but we do have one nagging question: what if you want to surf in the dark?

Another optical wireless experiment shows us that LEDs will beam your future downloads originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to Track Twitter Friendships for Business and Pleasure

Finding the right people to follow on Twitter can offer a real competitive advantage in many lines of work. Some people are very good at it, they are super connected and they find great people to follow. Now a new service built on top of Twitter lets you ride the coat tails of those well-connected people and easily follow whoever they add as friends on Twitter, too.

Thorsten Zoerner is an IBM product marketing manager based in Germany. He’s built a wonderful little service called RSSFriends that really fills a niche and makes some very powerful things easy to do.

RSSFriends offers an RSS feed of new people that any Twitter account begins following or anyone that stops following a designated account. Here are three ways I’ve begun using this service.

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1. Finding the Friends of the Famous & Influential

I don’t want to creep anyone out, but if you’re someone I think is really interesting and has interesting taste in friends – I may be getting an IM now with the Twitter username of everyone you start to follow. For the past week I’ve been tracking a number of interesting people with RSSFriends feeds run through the RSS to IM service Notify.me. It’s pretty interesting.

I get a handful of messages throughout the day that say things like “Person X that you are tracking just made friends with Person Y.” Then I look at Person Y and in many cases, I start following them too. It’s pretty great.

2. Show Off Your Taste in Friends

RSSFriends + Yahoo Pipes + TwitterFeed = @marshallkbuds. That’s a new account I created just to show off the names of people I make friends with on Twitter, in case you’re interested in meeting them too.

I also used a service called Feed.Informer to display a widget on the sidebar of my personal blog of the most recent people I’ve made friends with on Twitter. I think that’s interesting and valuable information that I will benefit from sharing.

3. Track Your Company’s New and Departed Friends

Finally, RSSFriends also offers an RSS feed of any accounts that follow or unfollow a given account. That’s got brand management written all over it, doesn’t it? I haven’t been able to get this feature to work yet for the @rww account but I suspect that may be because it has too many followers already. For a small business, this could prove quite useful.

So far this service has proven most useful to me as a way to discover interesting new Twitter users. It’s pretty incredible to think that I can follow along behind some of the tech world’s most interesting people and consider for subscription all the people they add as friends on Twitter. That’s the kind of thing that a social network with open user data makes possible, though. It might feel a little creepy but the utility is undeniable. Hopefully people will use services like this for good and not evil.

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OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD

CeBIT gets going next month, but OCZ Technology’s not waiting around for the show to begin. Instead, it’s pushing out details on its swankest SSD ever ahead of time, which will hopefully make room for some fancy prototypes to take up space in Germany. The Sandforce-based Vertex Limited Edition (LE) is based around an all-new architecture, and the company claims that this drive is its “fastest, multi-level cell (MLC), performance-based drive yet.” How fast, you ask? How’s about 270MB/sec on the read side and 250MB/sec on the write side, not to mention 15,000 IOPS. Unfortunately, it’s still stuck on the SATA 3Gbps interface, but for those indifferent to that lingering 6Gbps alternative, you can be on the lookout for these to ship in 100GB ($399.99) and 200GB ($829.99) flavors for a limited time.

OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bioloid robot goes climbing on its own, will one day rip your from your hiding tree

It’s a well documented fact that the Robot Apocalypse is only a matter of weeks, moments or scores away, but today we’re facing the grim reality that it may already be underway in certain sections of Germany. Thanks to a tie-up between whiz kids at the Technical University of Dortmund and University of Manitoba, the so-called Bioloid you see above can actually scale walls on its own. As in, autonomously. The robot doesn’t rely on a predefined motion sequence; instead, it looks up and figures out the most efficient way to get from the bottom to the top based on the X / Y positions of the grips. Future versions of the critter will utilize a full-on vision system, but hopefully we’ll have outposts established on Mars by then in order to maintain some semblance of freedom. Peep the horror show after the break (if you must).

Continue reading Bioloid robot goes climbing on its own, will one day rip your from your hiding tree

Bioloid robot goes climbing on its own, will one day rip your from your hiding tree originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Germany advises its citizens to say ‘nein’ to Internet Explorer
Autsch! In light of the recent attacks on Google China and Microsoft’s revelation that an Internet Explorer security flaw served as an impetus in the assault, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security has released a warning to its population: avoid IE. Specifically, the report calls out the latest three versions — 6, 7, and 8 — but let’s face it, those older versions should be avoided on grounds of usability alone. Boy, bet the Bonn-based agency is happy about that Windows 7 web browser ballot screen, eh?

Germany advises its citizens to say ‘nein’ to Internet Explorer originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Galileo sat-nav system back on the map, said to be ‘up and running’ by 2014
Remember Galileo, Europe’s proposed GPS-like satellite navigation system? It’s back in the headlines, and according to the Telegraph, UK-based Surrey Satellite Technology and Germany’s OHB System have jointly secured €566 million (that’s $815 million in US currency) to build 14 more satellites. The funding continues until 2013, whereby 22 satellites will be order. Full satellite navigation requires 27, and ultimately the European Union wants 32 technological waypointers. Launch date? Apparently 2014 — we’re hopeful, but this road has been wrought with delays before.

Galileo sat-nav system back on the map, said to be ‘up and running’ by 2014 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I want to buy a game here in Germany that my sister and brother-in-law´s family will enjoy playing together. What board games are popular that the whole family, including children ranging from age 9-15, will enjoy?

Achtung! Motorola Milestone now free on contract in Germany, sort of

Filed under: Cellphones

Achtung! Motorola Milestone now free on contract in Germany, sort of originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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