Wireless Blog

Garmin just today announced that together with BMW Motorrad they have developed the new BMW Motorrad Navigator IV .

Researchers are using Bluetooth technology to observe the meanderings of tens of thousands of festival-goers at a top European rock festival, hoping their findings will launch a new generation of tracking devices.

A recent server crash at Dailywireless (sorry about that), has taught me a lesson — enjoy life, friends, and the summer holidays.

Dailywireless is taking the day off. Happy Independence Day. And Canada Day, too. Summer is grand.

Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. , the largest overseas R&D center of Huawei Technologies Co.

The first jailbreak application for Apple's new iPhone 3GS has been made available just two weeks after the iPhone debuted. George Hotz, a 19-year-old Google employee originally from New Jersey, created the application.

Jailbreaking the iPhone 3GS allows a user to install any programs directly onto the iPhone, including applications that are not from Apple.

Hotz, at the age of 16, was credited with being part of the team that unlocked the first-generation iPhone. The unlock, announced in a blog post, allowed users to operate the first-generation iPhone with any SIM card. Hotz traded his unlocked iPhone for three regular iPhones and a Nissan 350Z.

"Normally I don't make tools for the general public, and would rather wait for the development team to do it. But guys, what's up with waiting until 3.1? That isn't how the game is played," Hotz wrote in his blog Friday. "We release, Apple fixes, and we find new holes."

In his blog post, Hotz provides a step-by-step explanation of what users need to do to jailbreak the iPhone 3GS and teases that a jailbreak for the Mac OS is coming soon.

Jailbreak Preparation

Before jailbreaking the iPhone 3GS, Hotz warns users to be prepared by having Windows (not Windows 7) installed on a PC, the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with 3.0 firmware. He also warns potential jailbreakers to first back up all their files and programs.

Once the preparations are complete, Hotz urges those interested in completing the break to go to purplera1n.com.

Once at the Web site, Hotz instructs users to click "make it ra1n" and wait. On bootup users need to run Freeze, the purplera1n installer app.

"Hopefully you'll figure out what to do from there," Hotz wrote. If not, users are instructed to e-mail purplera1n support or call a support hotline.

Purplera1n is small enough, Hotz wrote,...

First integrated device providing IEC 61000-4-5 surge protection for PoE applications saves 55 percent of space consumed by conventional protection circuitry GENEVA , June 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Power over Ethernet , or IEEE 802.3at, is the industry standard enabling devices such as Voice-over-IP phones, wireless-LAN access points, RFID tag ...

When he parks his car, author Timothy Ferriss snaps a photo of the nearest cross streets with his camera phone. In business meetings, he'll often take pictures of sketches and notes made on a whiteboard. When he's out for dinner, he'll whip out the phone again to capture an image of the label on the wine he's drinking. He never knows when he'll want to recall the data later.

Ferriss, a productivity expert, blogger, and author of the best-selling book The 4-Hour Workweek, then ships those photos to what he calls his "augmented brain," which exists not in his head, but on the Web.

He is one of a growing number of people using a Web-based service and software application running on smartphones and PCs called Evernote that is quickly becoming a receptacle for much of the ephemera that otherwise gets cluttered and sometimes lost in a person's busy life.

At first, Ferriss resisted the suggestion from readers of his blog that he try the application. "I have this philosophical stance where I tend to avoid accumulating new gadgets and software because usually they create more work than they are meant to prevent," Ferriss says. But when a few reader suggestions turned into dozens, he decided to try it. "At first it wasn't clear what the appeal was. But the more I used it, it became really clear why they liked it."

Word Recognition in Photos

Founded by Stepan Pachikov, who co-founded handwriting recognition software company Parascript and is a former vice-president of Silicon Graphics, Evernote is designed for people struggling to become more organized. A February survey by the National Association of Professional Organizers, a trade group, found that 96 percent of some 400 adults said they could save time every day if they were better organized. "No one remembers everything as well as...

Soon Dell Netbooks, specifically the Dell Mini 10, will be available with a $69 Wireless 700 Card which will make the netbook navigation capable, just like your smartphone.

Craig Settles reports:

It looks like the long awaited rules for the broadband grants process are finally coming out sometime this afternoon. VP Biden is laying out the vision (not to be confused with the rules) in Erie at the moment. The good stuff should be on the various agency Web sites later.

Here’s my preliminary take on the rules and the potential impact of key elements of the rules

Vice President Joe Biden will be the featured speaker on July 1, in the City of Erie, Pennsylvania focusing on the Obama Administration’s commitment to the $7.2 billion “broadband stimulus” provisions of the Recovery Act. Joining the Vice President will be Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA).

Secretaries Locke and Vilsack head the federal departments which are mandated by Congress to disperse the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus monies prior to October 1, 2010. The Recovery Act directed the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) to expand broadband access to unserved and underserved communities across the U.S. The result is the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

The iPhone has inspired a 2nd economy, says Chubby Brain, with over $100 Million going from VCs to iPhone startups.

When the iPhone was initially released in mid-2007, there were only 500 applications available for download. Today, less than two years after the iPhone’s launch, there are more than 50,000.

Apple reports over one billion downloads. Multiply that by a buck.

After a look into the ChubbyBrain database, we identified $102.49 million in total VC/angel investment divided amongst 17 iPhone application startups (as of June 29, 2009).

Perhaps this $100M+ number isn’t surprising given conversation that the iPhone may be bigger than the PC, but over $100 million in the span of less than two years for iPhone predicated startups is noteworthy.

Or perhaps for some of you, this number is a lot less than you expected?

Our $100 million number focuses on those startups who are tethering themselves in a large way to the iPhone platform.

So far, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers leads the way with $50 million committed across six startups. This is, in large part, due to the $100 million iFund they launched in March 2008 with the specific goal to target the quickly expanding iPhone app market.

The NY Times asks, Is there a $100 million mobile app out there? That what Chip Hazard, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, asked a panel of mobile industry veterans during the National Venture Capitalist Association annual meeting in Boston earlier this year.

Rich Miner, one of the managing directors of Google Ventures, the recently formed venture capital arm of the company, said the issue was still a murky one.

They’ll make the guy in the garage happy and some angels very happy, he said. But venture capitalists want to be able to sell the company to another company or to the public in an initial public offering to get a return on their investment. “I’m not sure those venture style exits exist,” he said.

But who cares, really, as long as iShoot’s creator Ethan Nicholas brought in $800,000 in five months on his creation.

MocoNews mentions the small Australian developer Firemint which sold over 700,000 copies of its $0.99 iPhone app “Flight Control” since its March debut, netting the company some $693,000.

AdMob says Apple has sold a total of 30 million combined iPhones and iPod touches. Their data suggests that about 75 percent of those are sold in the US with two-thirds of the combined iPhones and iPod touches using the mobile Web or applications. That results in a total of 15 million mobile Web users for Apple in the US. Give or take. T-Mobile reported last month it sold 1 million Android phones in the U.S. since the G1’s launch in October 2008.

Until recently, there has been no realistic way for individual programmers to make serious money on their own. Most of the software market is dominated by big companies, and the traditional distribution method for independent developers — shareware — isn’t conductive to striking it rich.

By contrast, iPhone App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Palm App Catalog and Nokia Ovi Store are opening new frontiers. They provide a platform for marketing, selling and distributing software; all a developer needs to provide is a good idea and some working code. The Guardian explains How to become an iPhone developer in eight easy steps.

Related Dailywireless articles include; Amazon Buys Stanza E-book App, Location-based Apps: Bigger Than iFart, Verizon iPhone Next Year?, Fourth Screen: Thinking Outside the Box, ATT Family Tracking — & More Tracking Apps, Sensor Nets Get Social, App Store: One Billion Served, Bar Code Redirects to Stories, iPhone Skype, Android Flash, Smartphone users: 100M by 2013, Android Market: Open for Business, Mobile World Congress: Handsets, iPhone: Money Machine, Palm Pre: Looking Good, iPhone Apps May Cost $30K to Develop, iPhone: 10 Million Sold, Apps Store: Red Hot, Mobile World Congress: HSPA, WiMAX & LTE Faceoff, Nvidia: Turbo Boost for Android and WinMobile, Netbooks Embed Broadband, The 8 Megapixel Phone, Handsets: Open, Open, Open, Cisco Beamforms Russia & Kazakhstan, TeleNav Does Turn-By-Turn on Android and 2009 Mobile World Congress.