Tech

Telephony is the leading publication for all communications service providers: new and incumbent, wireline and wireless.
Telephony’s weekly editorial coverage provides timely, comprehensive and analytical reporting on all aspects of the broadband economy. Our editors provide perspective on the network technology innovations, content developments and business drivers that affect all forms of broadband communications service providers.
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I’m a rural-living person who often consults people on how to get broadband Internet connectivity to their middle-of-nowhere homes. There’s some good news for most of those people. HughesNet, the big guy in the satellite Internet service space operated by Hughes Network systems (no relation), has announced that later this month that it will begin [...]

This monthly magazine features exclusive reports of innovations developed by NASA and its industry partners/contractors that can be applied to develop new/improved products and solve engineering or manufacturing problems.
Authored by the engineers or scientists who did the work, the briefs span a wide array of fields, including electronics, physical sciences, materials, computer software, mechanics, machinery/automation, [...]

A super-fast, new global network’s controllers will turn it on sometime this year, but exactly when it will be available to you and me, in the same way the Internet we know is today… only time will tell.
As is practically always the case, the new technology driving the “Grid” network was borne out of need. [...]

I shopped on a site because I saw a few items on sale in the store’s ad that came with the Sunday paper. According to the ad, the sale applied to the online store. The store’s site marked ALL blankets at 40-50% off. In looking for the blankets, I noticed they were not marked down, [...]

“Forgot password?” should be instant. The site should simply request the user to enter the email address and immediately let the user know if the email address is in the system or not. Otherwise, you could lose out on ordering opportunities.
We tried to order dinner online and Paul (SO) forgot his password. He entered [...]

I was unsubscribing to emails and notifications from an email account I no longer use. One of the Web sites used “Cancel” to mean unsubscribe. This could confuse the visitor because it could be mistaken for cancel the whole process and leave things as it is. “Unsubscribe” or “Remove” do the job.
Another newsletter that I [...]

Recently, a client who supported Web standards worked to design her newsletters to use cascading style sheets (CSS) for layouts instead of tables. Designers cheered. Readers jeered. One problem with this approach: email clients.
Outlook may dominate, but how many of us have second or third email accounts with Web-based email clients like Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, [...]

Can’t honestly say that news of iPhone malware is all too shocking. However like finding malware on any mobile device, knowing that it is fundamentally changing something that we just do not consider to be a target for the most part, is quite disheartening.
Officially, this threat is said to be more prank than problem. Yet [...]

These days, thin clients are not really news. Whether the clients are running Windows or Linux, the market is anyone’s ball game at this point. Well, that is until I found this: the Jack PC. As the wow factor goes, this device had me from this moment on…
They can be powered either through a plug [...]

It’s no surprise that blogs are catching on with B2Bs (business-to-business). BtoBOnline confirms it by referencing a Knowledgestorm and Universal McCann survey.
“Blogs are the perfect forum for business and IT professionals — readers want to hear about a company or a product from ’someone like them,’” says Matt Lohman, director of market research, KnowledgeStorm. “And [...]

More and more businesses are adding tech support reporting features, knowledgebases and expanding frequently asked questions — including businesses whose core business doesn’t include technology. Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid, has a tech support-like reporting tool — the kind of tool you expect to find on web server hosts and software development companies.
Michael [...]

SanDisk Corporation has unveiled a solid-state storage solution that works in conjunction with a PC’s hard drive to store and launch the computer’s operating system and software applications. The new SanDisk Vaulter Disk tag-teams with the hard drive to provide enhanced performance over a PC that has only a hard drive. Both Vaulter and the [...]

How to Ruin Web Design — The Design Curve is a simple and accurate view of what happens to a design when more people get involved in providing feedback and the time spent in changing the design. [Link from Web 2.0 Blog]
If you don’t read the rest of this entry — this picture tells all [...]

Guy Kawasaki discusses The Art of Customer Service. He offers ten tips for successful customer service. Unfortunately, all culture changes must have buy-in from the C-level executives and direct reports. And this doesn’t mean getting buy-in for earning a piece of paper that says you’re Six Sigma or CMM certified. It means living and breathing [...]

When I switched teams to a tech writer position, my company provided me with a second monitor. At first, I didn’t like it. The cursor was driving me nuts and I was constantly moving windows.
Now I can’t stand working on a computer or laptop with one monitor and wouldn’t mind a three panel monitor. Currently, [...]

Do a search for any telecommunications company and you’ll see plenty of complaints about all of them. That’s because their systems are complex.
I’ve worked at two telecommunications companies for ten years and it gave me perspective into why customer service is often not a smooth process. Both of these companies have been around since the [...]

Finally. It took one month, 46 email messages, and two visits to the store to resolve a problem with my Sidekick II. The solution wasn’t complicated, but I can’t honestly say it would’ve worked had I not got a new SIM card.
SMS (short message service) had not been working for months, but I didn’t notice [...]

I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool Palm PDA user. I was working in a corporate IT department back in the 1990s when US Robotics introduced the first PalmPilot, the Palm 1000. I climbed the Palm upgrade ladder as new models came out (The Palm Vx was my favorite, a genuine home run in design and [...]

Do you enjoy touching your computers? That may sound weird and creepy, but I’m not talking about touching your computers in general. Instead, I’m referring to the way in which you interact with them. For many of us, the keyboard and mouse are still our primary methods of interacting with computers, and they work just [...]