USD, Dollar: Monetary Base - Masse monetaire
Source: 321Gold.com Monetary Base UP >> Inflation UP >> Gold UP
ClarityLife Cell Phone for Seniors Now Available
Here's an important cell phone for seniors update. Clarity has announced this month that the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is now available for senior users.I have blogged about the ClarityLife cell phone for senior citizens before and you may see my ClarityLife Cell Phone for Seniorspsot here. However, at the time of that post the handset was not yet being offered in the US. This mobile device for the elderly is designed specifically to answer the needs of senior users.
The ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is being described as an "Amplified mobile phone." This means that the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors offers 20 decibels of amplification for senior users who have less than perfect hearing. This also means that this handset for the elderly is Hearing Aid Compatible.
Elederly users will appreciate the ClarityLife cell phone for senior citizens because its design is based on simplicity and user-friendliness. This entails that seniors users only need to press a minimal number of buttons to complete a call or send a text message. Senior users can easily learn how to operate the simple and easy to use this mobile phone for the elderly.
Let me illustrate the simplicity of using this cell phone for seniors. Users can easily place and receive calls with the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors using four large buttons. They can also receive immediate assistance in case of an emergency by pressing the red emergency button.
The ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is designed to cater to the special needs of the elderly. This cell phone for seniors have large buttons for easy dialing and a large backlit screen and large text size. The ClarityLife cell phone for senior users also offers a Flashing Visual Ringer, Strong Vibrating Ringer and a Built-in Flashlight.
Senior users can get the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors unlocked directly from Clarity for a retail price of $270. However, the the ClarityLife cell phone for senior users can only be used in GSM networks.
Tune in to this blog for more mobile phone for senior citizens and related news and updates.
ClarityLife Cell Phone for Seniors Now Available
Here's an important cell phone for seniors update. Clarity has announced this month that the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is now available for senior users.I have blogged about the ClarityLife cell phone for senior citizens before and you may see my ClarityLife Cell Phone for Seniorspsot here. However, at the time of that post the handset was not yet being offered in the US. This mobile device for the elderly is designed specifically to answer the needs of senior users.
The ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is being described as an "Amplified mobile phone." This means that the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors offers 20 decibels of amplification for senior users who have less than perfect hearing. This also means that this handset for the elderly is Hearing Aid Compatible.
Elederly users will appreciate the ClarityLife cell phone for senior citizens because its design is based on simplicity and user-friendliness. This entails that seniors users only need to press a minimal number of buttons to complete a call or send a text message. Senior users can easily learn how to operate the simple and easy to use this mobile phone for the elderly.
Let me illustrate the simplicity of using this cell phone for seniors. Users can easily place and receive calls with the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors using four large buttons. They can also receive immediate assistance in case of an emergency by pressing the red emergency button.
The ClarityLife cell phone for seniors is designed to cater to the special needs of the elderly. This cell phone for seniors have large buttons for easy dialing and a large backlit screen and large text size. The ClarityLife cell phone for senior users also offers a Flashing Visual Ringer, Strong Vibrating Ringer and a Built-in Flashlight.
Senior users can get the ClarityLife cell phone for seniors unlocked directly from Clarity for a retail price of $270. However, the the ClarityLife cell phone for senior users can only be used in GSM networks.
Tune in to this blog for more mobile phone for senior citizens and related news and updates.
My new Touch Screen Phone
I recently started using a new touch screen phone, the Samsung i900 Omnia. I told myself that this is an experiment of how new phones will work, and seeing that I am in the phone application business, had to get one to use myself. (I am not an Apple-person, so the iPhone would not have done it for me).As with all modern phones the Omnia comes with everything: GPS, FM radio, MP3 player, 5Mpixel camera, Card recognition, support for PowerPoint, Excel and Word... you name it. Ordinary e-mail or Push e-mail either delivered via WiFi or full HSDPA 3G, all of this packed into a phone smaller than my previous Sony Ericsson. And it can do Mobile banking too. The existing Fundamo application for Mobile Money runs seamlessly - even better than on the older phones.
One thing is clear. Consumers will be confronted by so many features and functions on modern phones that mobile banking/payments will definitely be lost in all the noise. Unless mobile banking is used frequently, the average consumer would not know where to find the functionality. As developers of mobile banking applications, we will have to think carefully how we make mobile banking part of the modern cellphone users life. I believe that this is only possible if we use more "push" functionality and integrate mobile payments with more and more of the applications.
App idea for high-def camera: Face warping
Here's an idea that's been floating around in my "Maemo ideas" list in Maemopad+, but which I have not yet had time to look into, so I'm publishing it here in case anyone wants to implement it: Make photos with the camera on the internet tablet and then have morphing effects (like Cheese) and also a manual stylus-driven "power goo" (like Kai's Power Goo) mode.
I know, it's pointless, but having seen many people having several minutes of fun with the FaceWarp Java app that comes pre-installed on some Sony Ericsson phones, I can see this being a fun app for showing off the Internet Tablet to friends.
Does this sound like a killer app for the next device that is going to have a "high-def camera"? I don't know. It would be interesting if someone tries to get Cheese running on the tablets and have some fun with it. And of course, add these effects to the videophone app, too!
I know, it's pointless, but having seen many people having several minutes of fun with the FaceWarp Java app that comes pre-installed on some Sony Ericsson phones, I can see this being a fun app for showing off the Internet Tablet to friends.
Does this sound like a killer app for the next device that is going to have a "high-def camera"? I don't know. It would be interesting if someone tries to get Cheese running on the tablets and have some fun with it. And of course, add these effects to the videophone app, too!
Counter-Terrorism targets cellphone banking
I have noticed that Cellphone banking is being targeted again as a mechanism to fund terrirism activities (Read here). In a way I have an appreciation for these type of posts. The fear of a payment instrument that is real-time, easy to access and largely anonymous is of course scary. Such a payment eco-system can easily be utilised to fund harmful activities without being able to track the perpetrators.
The reality of mobile banking is that it has not (and will most probably not) create such an eco-system. As a matter of fact, mobile banking would enable much more control, transparency and auditability for international transactions than what is currently possible. As such, it is my believe that counter-terrorism bodies should applaud cellphone banking initiatives.
Internet-based payment systems are much more prone to harmful eco-systems. The difficulty in auditability, authorisation and identification of participants in the payment system makes it much more likely to be miss-used. In the light of this, I find it quite amusing that one can contribute towards funding the Counterterrorism blog using Paypal.
Best Google Offices across the world
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is legendary for pampering workers. Little expense is spared to keep workers happy, helping make the company a magnet for 1,300 job applications per day. Here's a quick view of some of the Google offices around the world.
Google's Mountain View Office:
Located at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, this is the headquater for Google.
Google's New York Office:
New York office is Google’s largest software engineering center outside of headquarter Mountain View.
Google's Zurich Office:
The Zurich offices are located in Switzerland and is more of fun, serenity eggs, foam-filled meditation bathtubs, and fishtanks.
more photos here.
Google's Taipei office:
Google Taipei is located at one of the world tallest skycrappers Taipei 101, from 37th floor to 73 floor.
Google offices are spread all across the world.
Image/Pic soucrces
Here is a video tour of the Google's New York Office
Google's Mountain View Office:
Located at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, this is the headquater for Google.
Google's New York Office:
New York office is Google’s largest software engineering center outside of headquarter Mountain View.
Google's Zurich Office:
The Zurich offices are located in Switzerland and is more of fun, serenity eggs, foam-filled meditation bathtubs, and fishtanks.
more photos here.
Google's Taipei office:
Google Taipei is located at one of the world tallest skycrappers Taipei 101, from 37th floor to 73 floor.
Google offices are spread all across the world.
Image/Pic soucrces
Here is a video tour of the Google's New York Office
The Future of Mobile Banking
It has been some time since the first mobile payment solution was prototyped during the late 1990's. It would be correct to say that next year mobile payments and banking have been around for a decade. Many challenges were overcome and many deployments made. During the past ten years many mistakes were made and a lot of money has been invested (and lost!) to develop the industry to the current stage.Mobile banking has come of age. The little baby is without doubt a teenager today and many banks and mobile operators have made serious commitments to making mobile banking real. Mobile banking moved from the maverick fringe to maintstream relevance with many success stories and case studies. The question is, what can we expect in the future... next year and (if it is possible to look that far in the future), the next ten years? This is some of the things that I believe will materialise:
In the short term, it is my expectation that the following would happen
- I expect that we will see a massive increase in the number of subscribers to mobile banking functionality. The penetration of subscribers are already quite impressive, especially in countries like Kenya and South Africa, but this performance will be replicated in other countries as operators and banks get better at the products and increase investments in marketing and services.
- As the numbers increase towards the end of the year, we ill see an exponential increase in transaction volumes, particularly phone to phone payments. The most important catalyst for this will be the cash-in and cash-out facilities created. With an increase in subscribers, increased value of cash held in values, transactions will follow.
- I do not expect any mainstream standards emerging as different suppliers offer different solutions, but I expect an increase in the ability to inter-connect different solutions with one another. Even today it is possible to send money from a Western Union system to a GCash system. I expect more of these inter-connections to be built.
- Most mainstream (relevant) banks would participate in mobile banking. At a stage not to far in the future all banks will realise that they will have to invest in this technology in order to stay relevant and they will.
- Because mobile banking holds the promise of extremely secure authentication (actual implementation of digital signatures), I expect the emergence of dedicated identification devices. These devices will hold your identity in digital format. Any transaction will be unlocked by this device in conjunction with your own private key or even possibly biometrics. This device will become the most important thing that you will have with you all the time. (Some people may even be happy for the device to be implanted in them).
- With an exponential increase in the number of people with access to bank accounts, more people will be able to receive money, have access to funding and this will lead to a massive increased economic empowerment. This will directly lead to a better life for more.
- Ultimately, I expect cash to totally disappear as people start recognising the problems associated with cash.
Mobile Money Academy
One of the biggest challenges of this fledgling industry is a lack of skills. The deployment and operations of Mobile Money solutions requires a diverse set of skills almost never present in one individual nor in one company. Diverse knowledge and experience is needed covering the following areas of specialisation in order to successfully deploy mobile financial services:- High volume and secure transactional systems
- Marketing and distribution skills
- Regulatory expertise
- Skills related to fraud management
- Operational expertise of a new generation of banking systems
- Management of banking functionality (reporting, treasury functions etc.)
MMT08 Feedback
I was quite critical of the planned MMT08 conference planned for Dubai during Novemebre (Read here). In the end I did attend the conference and must congratulate the organisers. Clarion did a great job of ensuring that many of the key players in the industry got together in Dubai. I specifically enjoyed the networking opportunities - meeting many of my old friends again, but also getting the opportunity to meet key players that I have never had the chance to meet. We need good conference organisers to push the industry forward. If the guys from Clarion can keep it up, they will serve the industry well.
"N900" wishlist: Hardware scrollwheel
One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how I would like to have a scroll wheel (like all normal computer mice have) on the right side of my N800, just below the "Nokia N800" text. This way, I could easily scroll web pages and long texts without needing to use my finger on the touchpad. Using the finger on the touchpad has several disadvantages:
- You hide parts of the content you are reading with your finger
- You might accidentally click a link (in the browser)
- Scrolling through long texts means you have to sweep with your finger from the bottom of your screen to the top, several times
Apart from scrolling, this could act as a nice volume control in media players. Maybe even make the scroll wheel pressable, so we have another button (mute in media players?).
If you have an N800, please try this the next time you want to scroll a webpage: Move your finger over the top right side of your N800, between the "Nokia N800" text and the speaker holes. I don' t know if the scroll wheel would fit onto a smaller device like the N810 (or the "N900").
I think a touchscreen is nice, but having hardware buttons makes the device just easier to use in my opinion. I would even try to make touchscreen clicks by pressing the display, like it is done with the new Apple MacBook touchpads (see apple.com for videos). But there may be patent problems with that, so maybe this is the reason why we won't see that on the "N900". But think about it! Wouldn't it be nice?
That said, please also improve the D-Pad and hardware keyboard on the new hardware :)
Full lenght hollywood movies on YouTube for free
Soon one could see full length Hollywood movies on Youtube for free. In a recent development Google's YouTube, the largest video-sharing website and MGM has entered 
into partnership to bring full-length films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's archives.
For now, the content being made available include MGM's mid-'90s TV series American Gladiators and movies like Bulletproof Monk and 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven but MGM has a big list of movies, check out the list of MGM movies here.
YouTube in October forged a similar partnership with CBS Corp to run full-length archived shows, including "Star Trek," "Young and the Restless" and "Beverly Hills 90210." The new
partnerships put YouTube in more direct competition with Hulu, the online video site owned by News Corp and General Electric's NBC Universal.
By partnering with MGM, Google, which bought YouTube two years ago for $1.65bn, has been searching for ways to make money out of the site without driving away its huge fan base.
YouT
ube is strengthening its position as an entertainment destination where Hollywood studios can reach a global audience.
into partnership to bring full-length films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's archives.For now, the content being made available include MGM's mid-'90s TV series American Gladiators and movies like Bulletproof Monk and 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven but MGM has a big list of movies, check out the list of MGM movies here.
YouTube in October forged a similar partnership with CBS Corp to run full-length archived shows, including "Star Trek," "Young and the Restless" and "Beverly Hills 90210." The new
partnerships put YouTube in more direct competition with Hulu, the online video site owned by News Corp and General Electric's NBC Universal.By partnering with MGM, Google, which bought YouTube two years ago for $1.65bn, has been searching for ways to make money out of the site without driving away its huge fan base.
YouT
ube is strengthening its position as an entertainment destination where Hollywood studios can reach a global audience.
CNN Holographic interview was not actually holographic
Last week CNN literally wowed their audience when they used the hologram technology to beam a reported from Chicago to their newsroom located in New York. But actually CNN's holographic election coverage was all a hoax, it was never a hologram. 
Unbelievable but true, never expected this reputed organisation like the CNN .
Well what CNN did was NOT a hologram, it was a GREEN SCREEN projection. Wolf Blitzer was NOT seeing a person in his studio as he would have if it was real Hologram, he was IMAGINING someone standing on that big red dot and looking 5 feet up from that spot.
What CNN actually did was tomogram, where images of the subject are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen. Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space.
Here's what CNN telecasted on TV
And below is a video where John Chambers of Cisco explaining the general concept of how Hologram works.
Unbelievable but true, never expected this reputed organisation like the CNN .Well what CNN did was NOT a hologram, it was a GREEN SCREEN projection. Wolf Blitzer was NOT seeing a person in his studio as he would have if it was real Hologram, he was IMAGINING someone standing on that big red dot and looking 5 feet up from that spot.
What CNN actually did was tomogram, where images of the subject are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen. Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space.
Here's what CNN telecasted on TV
And below is a video where John Chambers of Cisco explaining the general concept of how Hologram works.
Get Avahi working on Maemo
Avahi is a service discovery service (phew!) for local networks (Apple calls this technology Bonjour). Among other things, its most basic functionality is to allow you to have a ".local" domain for your home network managed in a peer-to-peer fashion. This way, you do not have to remember the IP of your N8x0, but can use "threepwood.local" (if your N8x0 is named "threepwood").
The packages that need to be installed are "avahi-daemon" and "avahi-dnsconfd". There are some other avahi packages available (including GUIs) that you might want to try out. After installing, you should be able to ping your N8x0 from your Linux (with Avahi installed) or Mac OS X (works out of the box) machine.
The only problem: Avahi's daemons and D-Bus start in the same order (S20) on startup, and therefore Avahi gets to be first (alphabetical order), so you have to get root on your tablet and rename all S20avahi-* files in /etc/rc2.d/ to S21avahi-*. This way, D-Bus gets started first and after that, Avahi can start successfully (if Avahi is started before D-Bus, it won't work!).
After that, you can disable the HomeIP applet and start reading and typing IPs around your home network, but let Avahi/Bonjour do the hard work and you just type the easy-to-remember ".local" if you want to SSH to your tablet.
You can do even more fun things when you put "ssh.service" into /etc/avahi/services/ and install "service-discovery-applet" on your Gnome Desktop. This way, you can directly connect via SSH/SFTP to your tablet without needing to remember anything.
What are your uses for Avahi?
The packages that need to be installed are "avahi-daemon" and "avahi-dnsconfd". There are some other avahi packages available (including GUIs) that you might want to try out. After installing, you should be able to ping your N8x0 from your Linux (with Avahi installed) or Mac OS X (works out of the box) machine.
The only problem: Avahi's daemons and D-Bus start in the same order (S20) on startup, and therefore Avahi gets to be first (alphabetical order), so you have to get root on your tablet and rename all S20avahi-* files in /etc/rc2.d/ to S21avahi-*. This way, D-Bus gets started first and after that, Avahi can start successfully (if Avahi is started before D-Bus, it won't work!).
After that, you can disable the HomeIP applet and start reading and typing IPs around your home network, but let Avahi/Bonjour do the hard work and you just type the easy-to-remember "
You can do even more fun things when you put "ssh.service" into /etc/avahi/services/ and install "service-discovery-applet" on your Gnome Desktop. This way, you can directly connect via SSH/SFTP to your tablet without needing to remember anything.
What are your uses for Avahi?
Maemo and me
Hi there. I decided to do some postings about my trusty old N800 and some feature wishes/ideas. Maybe also the occassional rant. If you don't know me, have a look at my Maemo.org profile. Enjoy!
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