Monday, March 31, 2008

Millenium Dome, "The O2"

London's Millennium Dome has been transformed over the last two-and-a-half years into a music and entertainment venue now called simply 'the O2'. This week silicon.com got a sneak preview of the new-look Dome.
The 23,000-seat arena has been built by AEG and is sponsored by mobile operator O2. The technology infrastructure for the venue was installed by NEC


NEC has implemented a venue-wide RFID-based smartcard system to control staff access that is linked to the venue's time and attendance system. These are two of the terminals on which staff will place their cards.

The first customer extension of this will be an RFID-based loyalty card for corporate box holders. NEC said the technology is also available to create a full customer identity management system that would cover car parking, purchasing and collecting tickets - and allow Minority Report-style interaction with digital signs and adverts at the venue.

Rfid Bumblebees

Scientists are making a beeline for RFID technology to open up new frontiers of research into insect behaviour. Tiny RFID chips have been attached to hundreds of bees at labs in east London by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, using the process seen here.
The chips allow researchers to monitor the movements of the entire 200-strong bee colony using RFID readers attached to the hive and artificial flowers.

RFID Ladybag

Some Canadian universities students have come up with a fun and even fashionable spin on RFID technology: a bag that tells you when all of your necessary accoutrements--keys, cell phone, wallet--are accounted for. It's part of their project called LadyBag.

The project has been underway for a couple years. The project, run by six women, has several prototypes in progress. RFID tags can be placed in items that simply can't be left out of the bag (umbrella, keys, makeup bag, iPhone, or whatever). The LadyBag's RFID tracking system detects when something isn't in the bag that you've told it should be.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

AirAsia needs to update inflight snacks with POS




On the pipeline, after launching web-check ins and kiosk check ins, AirAsia will later introduce PDA check-ins. Great! Will Air Asia launch their mobile POS for inflight snacks where flight stewardess key in the items in PDA according to meals order by passager and issue a print receipt using mobile printer? Some experts (FAA rules and regulations) say that some Avionics equipment may incur harmful interference from Portable devices, especially if you use a GPS devices on board an aircraft (it will radiate RF energy). Hey, why allow laptops on board then...We just have to wait and see.
Picture of mobile print station.
I went to Giant Supermarket the other day, i saw that the PC and Citizen barcode printer was stack inside the trolley, very messy as the power cables runs along the walkway. Hey, how about investing in a proper mobile print station !!!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Singapore Oceanarium goes RFID


Love Fishes? I hope there are no Green Peace activist here. In order to increase your knowledge, Singapore Underwater World has tagged its fishes with Texas Instruments rfid chip so that you can clearly identify each of the fish species. Next project, they gonna tag the sharks!

RFID toy for kids


Little Tikes has a whole new series of kids’ toy kitchens full of interactive technology. The MagiCook Kitchen comes with pretend food embedded with electronic tags (RFID) that can be read by sensors on the stovetop which then respond with the appropriate comment in three languages (English, French, and Spanish). Place an apple near it, and hear it say," wanna make apple pie? "

Monday, March 24, 2008

Top Ten Reasons to buy a PDA

Top 10 Reasons to Buy a PDA ( Hello, Malaysians!)
------------------------------------
According to the Chicken Littles out there, the sky has fallen on the PDA market and it's dead.As usual, Chicken Little is wrong. PDAs are alive and well. Admittedly not as well as we'd like and not as well as this marvelous category of tremendously useful little computers deserves, but alive and well nonetheless. Many millions of Palms and Pocket PCs are being sold every year. It's not the 60 or 80 million a year that was once predicted, but it's still well over ten million, depending on what definition of "PDA" one uses. That's a lot of PDAs. Neither has the industry abandoned PDAs. Last year, Hewlett Packard introduced more new Pocket PCs than ever before. Palm continues to offer a good variety and low and high end models, and with the LifeDrive introduced the first-ever PDA with an internal hard drive. So here are, in descending order:

10. BIG screens! Original PDAs like the Apple Newton MessagePad had massive screens measuring 5-1/2 inches diagonally. The MessagePad 2100 even had a 6-inch display! Since today's PDAs are a lot smaller than those early models, their displays are smaller, too. However, most still measure 3.5 inches diagonally, and some -- like that of the HP iPAQ 4700 -- are a full 4 inches. Compare that with the displays of an average cellphone! The screen on my Motorola flip phone is a minuscule 1.5 inches, barely larger than a postage stamp. In addition, almost all PDA screens use "transflective" displays. That means they combine the best of a "transmissive" indoor screen (transmissive, because the LCD screen lets the light from the backlight through) and a "reflective" outdoor screen (reflective, because it reflects the sunlight and gives the screen great contrast). The tiny screens on most cellphones, in contrast, are only transmissive, and some still use ancient passive matrix technology. Finally, the latest PDAs have high resolution 480 x 640 displays, which means almost 200 dots per inch. That's almost twice as many as in most notebook displays!

9. Carry your data with you PDAs can easily synchronize with your desktop or notebook computer. And this synchronization goes beyond just your calendar and contacts. A modern PDA has enough storage to accommodate whatever documents you want to carry with you, be they wordprocessing, spreadsheets, presentations, pictures, or even video clips. I always carry a number of my reference and personal documents with me, things that I may need to look up when I am traveling, or stuff that I simply like to have closeby. I also carry several dozen of my favorite pictures on my PDA. Sure, you can stick a couple of your favorite pics into your wallet, but there they get wrinkled and damaged.

8. Edit your documents Few people will ever attempt to write The Great American Novel on a PDA, though theoretically that's possible. However, lots of people may want to proofread, change, or otherwise edit documents on their PDAs, and that can easily be done. Both Palms and Pocket PCs let you edit Word or Excel files. It's not as convenient as doing it on a notebook, but it is possible. And the mere fact that you can actually do useful work on a long flight, while sitting in a waiting room, or just about anywhere else can do wonders for your productivity. I've found that the only time I am truly uninterrupted is when I am sitting in an airplane. And thanks to my PDA, I've spent many productive hours proofing and editing documents. Try that on a cellphone.

7. Travel light You can now buy very light and very thin notebooks, but with notebooks it's always a trade-off. The trends towards ever larger screens has offset the ability to travel as light as possible. There's simply no way to make a 15 or 17-inch notebook that is not large and bulky. And the very small and light ones often have cramped keyboards, suffer from terrible battery life, get scorching hot, or don't have some of the stuff you really need, like a DVD drive. PDAs, on the other hand, are small enough to fit anywhere. Even top-of-the-line models like the Palm LifeDrive or the HP iPAQ 4700 easily slip into any pocket. Which means they are simply handier than a notebook. I've made many trips with just my PDA. Sure I missed all the functionality of a notebook every now and then, but I definitely didn't miss the bulk and weight!

6. Entertain yourself In addition to being "Personal Digital Assistants" with useful business functions, PDAs have always had their lighter side as well. Even the original Newton had a many great games, and today's PDAs are veritable mobile entertainment devices. You have your choice between computer games that often rival (or exceed) dedicated console games, high quality music, and even whole movies. While a PDA is not meant to compete with iPods and portable DVD players, you can easily store hundreds of songs and listen to them in very high quality, and if you have a large enough storage card (or a hard drive like in the Palm LifeDrive) you can watch video. And I haven't even mentioned audio or e-books yet.

5. Take notes wherever you are Having a PDA with you means never having to hunt for a scrap of paper and a pen when inspiration strikes. And most PDAs let you record notes in various ways. You can use them as voice recorders, usually by just pushing a button. You can use electronic ink to scribble something down. If you'd rather have your notes in text, you can either use the onscreen keyboard or the PDA's character or handwriting recognition. The latter doesn't work well for everyone, at least not right off the bat, but once you get used to it it can be a terrific productivity tool. I routinely take notes using handwriting recognition on my PDA during meetings or even interviews. I'll have to fix the mistakes later, but that's no worse (and usually a lot quicker) than having to transcribe from a pad of paper or a tape. I often find I can piece together all the notes I take during, say, a tradeshow, which means I am halfway there to a full report once I upload the notes to a laptop.

4. Browse the web -- anywhere The promise of being able to do web browsing on a PDA has been there for years, but it was always a compromise. Perhaps you had to use some special service that pre-processed web content, which meant it wasn't really web browsing. Or you had to put up with deadly slow downloads that taxed your patience. Or the browser just wasn't up to the job of loading a modern webpage. Most of those limitations are gone now. Web browsing on a PDA will never be like browsing on a desktop or large notebook, but it's perfectly acceptable now thanks to the larger VGA screens, faster processors, more powerful browsers, and speedier wireless connections.

3. Help I'm lost! PDAs make terrific mapping devices. Instead of spending thousands for an in-car system or almost as much for a dedicated GPS/mapping system, you can now simply get a PDA with either a built-in GPS receiver or an external GPS puck that communicates with the PDA via a Bluetooth (and sometimes a USB) connection. This way you can take advantage of the latest mapping technologies while still having a device that can do all the regular PDA stuff. Garmin makes GPS-enabled PDAs based on both the Palm and the Pocket PC platform. Many other vendors sell either GPS-PDAs or GPS packages containing a receiver, PDA mounting hardware, mapping software, and often a car charger.

2. Use your PDA as a phone Why get a smartphone when you can get a PDA with a phone? Terrific combinations of PDA and phone functionality are available for all major operating system platforms (Palm, Pocket PC, Symbian, Linux, etc.). Unlike smartphones, PDA phones offer full PDA functionality and they are usually premium phones as well. And the PDA and phone sides are seamlessly integrated so that the phone, address book, schedule and calendar all work together.

1. Get your email on the road Being able to get email wherever and whenever is doubtlessly the greatest asset of a modern PDA. The mail clients have become very sophisticated and most can easily handle even complicated mail tasks (attachments, pictures, rules, multiple forwards, etc.). If you have a PDA with built-in wireless data and WiFi, you can get your email virtually anywhere, and it's no longer deadly slow.

Roadmap of Psion Teklogix


Psion Teklogix four-year product roadmap

On eChannelLine.com, Vanessa Ho reports on Psion Teklogix's four-year product lineup, as presented at the company's Ascend 2007 forum in Atlanta. Mobility devices are important as that will be a US$3.7 billion market by 2001, up from 2.4 billion in 2006. 802.1n will be important. In supply chain logistics there will be smaller, more ergonomic next-gen multi-function VoIP WWAN capable devices. Vehicle mounts is a smaller market, under US$1 billion, but still grows 6% annually. Those devices will be smaller, include Vista, sunlight readable touch displays. Another emphasis is enabling speech recognition in all products. Psion Teklogix will continue to offer Widows CE, with 6.0 devices by early 2009. Remote software maintenance and upgrades are important, as well as RFID solutions.

I love rugged PCs

I love rugged machinery and so does everyone else. When a new machine comes in, everyone wants to see it, touch it, comment on in, and speculate how much abuse it can take. And this is where it gets interesting, the degree of abuse.

Rugged machines are, by design, conceived and built to take a beating and survive. But the only way to know for sure if they indeed CAN take a beating is to administer one. And whether or not we should do that is a sensitive issue. A lot of this equipment is not inexpensive. So do we take a $4,000 computer, drop it, twist it, spill coffee on it, try to see if the screen is really scratch-proof and whether it's really water-proof? And then send back, at best, a severely banged-up machine, and at worst, one that is destroyed?

That puts us in an interesting situation. We really think that rugged equipment should be just as rugged as manufacturers say it is, and sometimes we have doubts. We also see some stuff we are not very fond of. For example, glossy metallic surfaces that can and will get scratched in an instance simply should not be on a rugged machine, no matter how cool they look. But even there, do we just mention that in a review, or see just how badly it scratches (or not), document that, and then send it back?

Most rugged machines come with ruggedness specs. MIL-STD results are listed and perhaps compliance with other testing procedures as they may vary from country to country. That can include inhouse testing and third-party independent tests in labs. Now I have seen many of those torture chambers -- the ones of Panasonic, Psion Teklogix, GD-Itronix and Intermec, to name a few. I've seen machines being baked, shaken, rattled, dropped, scratched, exposed to extreme humidity, vibration, pressure, materials fatigue testing and more. The tests are real, and they certainly reveal weak points that are then addressed.

RFID Malaysia Now!


On 9-11 th April 2008, Singapore is going to have RFID world Asia. It's really taking the world by storm. When is Malaysia gonna have that kind of impact? I now testing the new WJ UHF CF card on my Psion Teklogix WAP Gen2 Mobile computer. Will let you know the outcome.

Bluetooth scanner

I was shopping in Ikea, the biggest furniture shop in Malaysia and i saw check out counter was using bluetooth handheld laser scanner from Metrologic Voyager. Fancy that!!! Scanning without wires.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Why do we need mobile handheld solutions?

The benefits are endless including mobilizing your workforce to save operational costs, improving customers' sales experience, resolving customers data management issues, knowing what stock is on hand with real-time access to critical data, etc. A successful mobile deployment will yield hugh results that cannot be measure...

Introduction


Hi Everyone. That 's me in the photo. Believe me, my inspiration came from none other than Kevin Benedict of Mobiledataforce. Established in 2004, Paragon Omega Sdn Bhd, a local outfit has grown from a portable printer hardware supplier to becoming one-stop-solution provider to our system integrator partners in supplying end-to-end products for their mobile solutions. The products we offer from portable thermal printers and mobile computers (Psion Teklogix, HP, Extech, SPRT, Datecs, Citizen ).

Pricing for RFID labels

https://www.digikey.my/product-detail/en/avery-dennison-rfid/700067/1543-1052-ND/5135122