Best of the Decade from PC Mag

In addition to the normal “end of the year” articles and predictions for next year, I’m also starting to see “end of the decade” articles — like this one from PC Magazine. What were/are the best products, services, and technologies of the past decade?  Here’s their take:

Google
Apple iPhone
Apple iPod
Facebook
Wi-fi
Broadband Internet access
TiVo
GPS
Windows XP
Apple iMac

Pretty amazing to [...]

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Planning for Success Cookbook

If you haven’t yet seen it, MaintainIT has posted their third cookbook for technology in libraries — Planning for Success.  This time they are focusing on maintaining and sustaining the technology in your library.  Major sections include:

Planning and Decision-Making
Communication and Partnerships
Buying and Deploying Technology
Maintaining and Sustaining Technology
Networking and Security
Innovation, e.g., free/open source tools, gaming, Web [...]

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USB 3.0

The next version for USB is available now, but probably won’t be seen by consumers until 2010.  USB 3.0, also called “USB SuperSpeed,” is focused on speed — it should be about 10 times faster than the USB 2.0 standard.
To give you an idea of how fast this is, these numbers from from a slide [...]

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E-Rate Schools Now Require Education

The House and Senate have passed S. 1492, which has 2 titles:

Title I – Broadband Data Improvement Act
Title II – Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act

When I first heard about this bill, I only knew about the first part, which deals with determining broadband speeds across the nation and promoting affordable broadband for everyone. [...]

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Cell Phones Looking for Best Connection?

Last year, Google submitted a patent that was just published in September.  Here’s the abstract:
A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication session, receiving from at least one of the one or more of telecommunication carriers a bid to [...]

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T-Mobile G1 Phone

Most people may recognize this as the “Google Phone” — or at least the phone everyone thought Google was going to make.  Instead, Google created the operating system — Android — for this phone, called the G1.  T-Mobile is the first to use this operating system for a real phone.  We should see other cell [...]

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Live Mesh and The Cloud

Cloud computing has started to make the rounds.  The idea of having everything available to you no matter where you are is very appealing.  Your email is on one server, your files on another, your favorites on another, your company’s files on another, your back-up on another.  Everything could be “in the cloud” — at [...]

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Connection Speeds in Texas

Speed Matters has surveyed Internet connection speeds for 2 years now. Their results are available for download.  However, you can also see each state up close and personal.  Although their download speeds for Texas look right, their upload speed map is way off — it has most of the state uploading at 2 megabits or [...]

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Second Life Moves to Mobile Phones

I’ve been working with Second Life off and on for the past few years.  One of the issues I’ve always come up against is the robustness of the system and connection that is needed in order to have a satisfactory experience.  So, you can imagine how surprised I was to see that Second Life has [...]

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Romance Novels Via Cell Phones

Harlequin Books now has a series just for busy women — Harlequin On The Go. They send their electronic books to cell phones in small, daily installments — 5-10 minutes each. Each installment takes up about 8 screens of text.
This service is currently available only to Verizon customers, but all national cellular carriers [...]

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