TECHNOLOGY

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

10 Boredom-Busting USB Desk Toys

Let’s face it, unless you’re an astronaut or a rock star, work is pretty darn dull most of the time. Don’t despair though, as technology can help fill the gaping void of boredom that being stuck in the office creates.

Thanks to the wonders of USB gadgetry you can cram your time at work chock-full of fun, frolics and laughter, making your cubicle the cool place to hang.

We’ve selected 10 excellent examples of USB desk toys and gadgets for your perusing pleasure, so take the first step to banish boredom in your workplace today by having a little look below, and let us know your own favorites in the comments.

1. USB Whack It

best cool fun usb office desk toys games gadgets

A modern take on the vintage arcade classic, USB Whack It is a great way to take out all your pent up frustration in the workplace.

Cost: $20

2. Tengu

Tengu lights up and lip syncs to audio with a variety of facial expressions to amuse you and your fellow cubicle-dwellers.

Cost: $30

3. USB Touch Drums Set

Although desktop drumming with pencils can also do the trick, why not try rocking out on this small-scale USB-powered drum set instead?

Cost: $22

4. USB Plasma Ball

A tiny model of the Tesla original, this plasma ball will add a mesmerizing dash of science to your desk. It’s educational and fun!

Cost: $12

5. Riff Rocker

If drums aren’t your thing, then how about the Riff Rocker? This pocket-sized guitar is compatible with sites likeJamLegend

, meaning you can enjoy some Guitar Hero-style gaming in the office.

Cost: $14.95

6. Tiny USB Rechargeable Helicopter

We can only begin to imagine the fun flying missions you and your colleagues can come up with using this mini chopper. Just don’t get caught.

Cost: $44

7. USB Missile Launcher

Office warfare can bond co-workers together, boost morale and lift spirits. It can also poke your eye out, so watch where you point that thing.

Cost: $49

8. USB Robot Owl

A very “kawaii” Japanese import, the USB Robot Owl doesn’t do much (he blinks his eyes and turns his head from side to side), but he looks so darn cute doing it, he’ll more than earn his perch on your monitor.

Cost: $19.99

9. USB Basketball Desktop Dunk

Complete with a scoreboard and cheering crowd sound effects, we think a desktop one-on-one should be the way all office disputes are settled.

Cost: $19.99

10. Pop-up Pirate USB Hub

Finally, another retro classic gets the USB treatment. You know that filing can wait when there are pirates to be popped.

Cost: $63

Why Webcasts Are Perfect for Tapping Into Emerging Markets

Lara Fawzy is co-author of Emerging Business Online: Global Markets and the Power of B2B Internet Marketing, and currently a marketing manager for Cisco’s African region. Lara is also Director and founder of her own firm, ebocube Consultancy, and conducts online marketing training.

The term “emerging markets” refers to countries experiencing relatively recent industrial and technological change, resulting in rapid economic growth. These markets were hit by the recession, but many remain in a robust growth position. Trading with businesses in these economies can offer a high return, but the endeavor involves a lot of uncertainty and risk.

However, Internet penetration in emerging markets is growing at a dramatic pace, and businesses are particularly enthusiastic early adopters. Commerce and lead generation in these markets are now just a click away, and one way to pique interest is through video webcasting.

Webcasting is relatively new in emerging markets, and has proven to be extremely popular. While the media in developed economies often outshines the humble webcast, business leaders in emerging economies have taken to it with enthusiasm.

How Webcasts Work

Webcast content can be in the form of video, audio, PowerPoint, other presentation software, or any combination of the above.

A good webcasting platform will be streamlined, reliable, and enable “attendees” of your online event to access your live content with ease from any Internet connection.

Additionally, many platforms enable you to make your event viewable after you broadcast through a video-on-demand feature. That way, your valuable content doesn’t disappear after the show’s over, but can continue to engage an international audience for as long as there is interest.

Webcasting for Marketers

Webcasting is a flexible and enduring marketing technique that has a variety of uses:

Raising brand awareness

Acquiring and retaining loyal customers

Generating sales leads

Communicating product/service launches

Training

Seminars

Benefits include:

Cost-effectiveness: While marketing budgets are being cut or scrutinized, webcasting is an extremely inexpensive way to drive engagement and supplant costly physical events. There’s no space to rent, travel expenses to incur, or staff to pay.
Interactivity: Because webcasts occur in real time, they are ripe for interactivity. Ask your audience to participate in Q&As, through polls, or by communicating with them one-on-one.

Measuring Success in New Markets

The success of webcasts can be measured in ways similar to live events with the added advantage of tracking attendees in real time. Metrics include:

Registrations: Determine how many attendees you can expect prior to the event.
Attendees: Once the webcast is over, determine your full audience.
No shows: Once the webcast has begun, you can determine how many registered attendees never log in.
Drop-off rate: While the webcast is in progress, most tools will tell you when attendees drop off. Connect this with the content in motion at the time of the drop-off to improve the retention rate of future webcasts.
Cost per attendee: Divide the production cost of the webcast by the number of attendees to better determine your return.
Number of questions asked or submitted and by whom: Take a look at reports on how many questions you received and who asked them. You can also advise attendees to e-mail you or the speaker if you are unable to answer all questions during the webcast.
The exact time a question was asked: Questions may have increased during a specific section of the broadcast. This may highlight specific areas of interest in the local market
Voting/polling in real time: Measure the participation of attendees in opinion polls. The results can be insightful.
Attendee evaluation: Use a questionnaire at the end of the event. Feedback is likely to be more honest because the attendees are not face to face with the presenter, and their opinions are not biased by a free lunch.
Leads and lead conversions: These are registrants who have answered lead qualification questions while registering or have requested contact by sales in your evaluation questionnaire. These leads or potential leads should be added to your sales management tool.

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

While reaching out to emerging markets is a global endeavor, you must think about the local business community you are targeting. Webcasting is a great way to tailor your local marketing strategy. Before jumping in, think about language, business culture, and timing.

While there’s certainly a lot to consider, the potential ROI is can be significant.

Wear Your Tweets on Your Ring Finger

Ever composed a tweet so poignant, so incisive, that you’ve wanted to carve it into titanium, wear it on your ring finger and lovingly call it “My Precious”? Well, now you can, thanks to Tweet Rings.

Tweet Rings is a brand-new service from Amsterdam-based startup Alphabeth.com, whose motto is: “Some Tweets should last forever!” (To be fair, they all do, as they are housed in the Library of Congress, but nevermind.)

The idea of decking yourself out in Internet culture is nothing new, but these rings are slightly more classy than other iterations.

I, for one, plan to get, “why do some people smell like baby dolls? what is that?” engraved in “classic silver,” as I feel it to be some of my best work, and therefore wholly worthy of immortality.

Friday, January 14, 2011

wireless mobile communication systems

The First generation wireless mobile communication systems were introduced in early eighties and second generations systems in the late 1980s were intended primarily for transmission of voice. The initial systems used analog frequency modulation where as the second as well as the subsequent mobile systems use digital communication techniques with time division multiplexing (TDM), frequency division multiplexing (FDM) or the code division multiple access (CDMA). The third generation wireless systems which are just getting introduced in the world markets offer considerably higher data rates, and allow significant improvements over the 2G systems. The 3G Wireless systems were proposed to provide voice and paging services to provide interactive multimedia including teleconferencing and internet access and variety of other services. However, these systems offer wide area network (WAN) coverage of 384 kbps peak rate and limited coverage for 2 Mbps. Hence providing broadband services would be one of the major goals of the 4G Wireless systems.

Features of 4G Wireless Systems

The following are some possible features of the 4G systems :
1. Support interactive multimedia, voice, video, wireless internet and other broadband services.
2. High speed, high capacity and low cost per bit.
3. Global mobility, service portability, scalable mobile networks.
4. Seamless switching, variety of services based on Quality of Service (QoS) requirements
5. Better scheduling and call admission control techniques.
6. Ad hoc networks and multi-hop networks.

3G Vs 4G

The following table shows comparisons between some key parameters of 3G Vs possible 4G systems.

3G 4G

Frequency Band 1.8 - 2.5 GHz 2 - 8 GHz
Bandwidth 5-20 MHz 5-20 MHz
Data rate Up to 2Mbps ( 384 kbps WAN) Up to 20 Mbps or more
Access Wideband CDMA
Multi-carrier - CDMA or OFDM(TDMA)
FEC Turbo-codes Concatenated codes
Switching Circuit/Packet Packet
Mobile top speeds 200 kmph 200 kmph

Physical and MAC Layer specifications

One promising underlying technology to accomplish the divisiveness is multi-carrier modulation, a derivative of frequency division multiplexing. MCM was earlier used in DSL modems and digital audio-video broadcasts. It is a baseband process that uses parallel equal bandwidth channels to transmit information. Normally implemented with Fast Fourier transform (FFT) techniques, MCM's advantages include better performance in the inter symbol interference (ISI) environment, and avoidance of single frequency interferers. However, MCM increases the peak-to-average ratio (PAVR) of the signal, and to overcome ISI a cyclic extension or guard band must be added to the data.

Two different types of MCM are likely candidates for 4G as listed in the above table. These are the multi-carrier CDMA and orthogonal FDM using TDMA.

Similar to single carrier CDMA systems, the users are multiplexed with orthogonal codes to distinguish users in MC-CDMA. However, in MC-CDMA, each user can be allocated several codes, where the data is spread in time or frequency. Either way, multiple users access the system simultaneously. In OFDM with TDMA, the users are allocated time intervals to transmit and receive data.

Differences between OFDM with TDMA and MC-CDMA can also be seen in the types of modulation used in each subcarrier. Typically, MC-CDMA uses quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), while OFDM with TDMA could use more high-level modulations (HLM), such as, multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) (where M = 4 to 256). How-ever, to optimize overall system performance, adaptive modulation can be used; where the level of QAM for all subcarriers is chosen based on measured parameters.

Channel Access
The allocation of the spreading codes or the time slots can be done in such a way that the throughput is maximized. For example, all the resources can be allocated to a user whose channel is very clean and users who have very noisy channels can be allocated little amount of bandwidth till their channel becomes better. However, the allocation should maintain certain amount of fairness while distributing the resources.

Error control coding

In 4G systems rate-adaptive coding schemes can be used which can make use of the channel information from the measured parameters or feedback from the Mobile Terminal (MT). A Hybrid ARQ scheme can be used to minimize the overhead in case of retransmission. Space time codes, multiple antennas systems like the smart antennas can be used to further improve the data rates.

Higher Layer Issues in 4G

4G is going to be a packet-based network. Since it would carry voice as well as internet traffic it should be able to provide different level of QoS. Other network level issues include Mobility Management, Congestion control,and QoS Guarantees :

Mobility Management

Mobility Management includes location registration, paging and handover. The MT should be able to access the services at any place possible. The global roaming can be achieved by with the help of multi-hop networks that can include the WLANs or the satellite coverage in remote areas. A seamless service (Ex : soft handover of the MT from one network to another or from one kind of service to other) is also important. The hand-over techniques should be designed so that they make efficient use of the network (routing) and make sure that hand offs are not done too often.

New techniques in location management might be implemented. Each MT need not do location registration everytime. They can instead do concatenated location registration, which reports to the network that they are concatenated to a common object. Ex- MTs in a train need to re-register only when they get off the train and till the network knows that they are in the train.

Congestion Control
Congestion control will be another critical issues in the high performance 4G networks. Two basic approaches can be taken towards the congestion control : 1. avoidance or prevention of the congestion and 2. detection and recovery after congestion. The avoidance scheme will require the network to suitably implement the admission control (measurement based or pre-computed model) and scheduling techniques. The detection and recovery would require flow control and feedback traffic management. A conservative approach might be proposed for the 4G systems because of the wide variety of QoS requirements.

Quality of Service (QoS)
4G systems are expected to provide real-time and internet-like services. The real-time services can be classified into two kinds:
1. Guaranteed : pre-computed delay bound is required for the service. Ex voice
2 : Better-than-best effort :
Predictive : Service needs upper bound on end-to-end delay.
Controlled delay : service might allow dynamically variable delay.
Controlled load : Service needs resources (bandwidth and packet processing ).

Guaranteed and Controlled Load services are proposed to appear in 4G.

Some new challenges in 4G

1. Multi-access interface, timing and recovery.
2. Higher frequency reuse leads to smaller cells that may cause intra-cell interference or higher noise figures due to reduced power levels.
3. The Digital to analog conversions at high data rates, multiuser detection and estimation (at base stations), smart antennas and complex error control techniques as well dynamic routing will need sophisticated signal processing.
4. Issues in the interface with the ad hoc networks should be sorted out. 4G systems are expected to interact with other networks like the Bluetooth, hiperlan, IEEE802.11b, etc.
5. Voice over multi-hop networks is likely to be an interesting problem because of the strict delay requirements of voice.
6. Security will be an important issue.
7. A new IP protocol might be needed because of the variable QoS services and the network should do " better than best " effort.
8. Networking protocols that adapt dynamically to the changing channel conditions.
9. Seamless roaming and seamless transfer of services.

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