mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide

A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide.

Using mobile phones has enormous potential for increasing access to healthcare for poor people aroundd the world, and for improving clinical outcomes. Now a new association, the mHealth Alliance, has been launched to support this emerging field and increase the scale and impact of the many small prokects around the world.

So new, the Alliance has so far no website, press release, or organizaton yet, it was announced to the BBC as part of the GSMA World Congress in Barcelona. The mHealth Alliance is currently under the auspices of three foundations, the UN and Rockefeller Foundations in the United States, and the UK-based Vodafone Group Foundation.

Deploying mobiles in health care in developing countries is not only promising for health outcomes, it is also a hot and potentially lucrative business area. There is enormous interest by NGOs, donors, telcoms, mobile vendors, researchers, and governments in the the use of mobile phones for increasing healthcare for the poorest people in the world.

Three foundations have announced their intention to join in a "mobile health" effort to use mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide.
The UN, Vodafone, and the Rockefeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance aims to unite existing projects to improve healthcare using mobile technology.

The alliance will guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how they can save lives in the developing world.

The partnership is now calling for more members to help in mHealth initiatives.

The groundbreaking "mHealth for Development" study produced by the UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership lists more than 50 mHealth programmes from around the world, showing the benefits that mobile technology can bring to healthcare provision.

The report also outlines how such programmes offer value to the mobile industry.

That, said UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership head Claire Thwaites, is a crucial step in an industry that like so many others stands at the edge of a downturn.

"I think there's a real need to have an alliance," Ms Thwaites told the BBC at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

"It's looking at scaling up and bringing governments together with NGOs and corporations, and it will commission pretty rigorous research on what the market opportunity is for mHealth, answering the question: why should a business get involved in this area?"

Bringing a "value proposition" to network operators is what could bring together the individual, small-scale efforts that so far have existed as purely humanitarian endeavours.

Andrew Gilbert, European president of Qualcomm, says that his firm has launched 29 different programmes across 19 countries, involving some 200,000 people, as part of its Wireless Reach campaign.

"It's not a charitable thing, it's very much aimed at allowing these solutions to become self-sustaining," he said.

Connecting areas
Because 3G mobile technology is cheap and easily made widespread, Mr Gilbert added, comparatively small amounts of investment can wreak great change in these so-called emerging markets.

Connecting areas
Because 3G mobile technology is cheap and easily made widespread, Mr Gilbert added, comparatively small amounts of investment can wreak great change in these so-called emerging markets.

In India, there are 1m people that die each year purely because they can't get access to basic healthcare," said Dan Warren, director of technology for the GSM Association, the umbrella organisation that hosts the MWC.

"The converse angle to that is that 80% of doctors live in cities, not serving the broader rural communities where 800 million people live."

Simply connecting rural areas with city doctors using mobile broadband would allow the provision of better healthcare to more people, and many of the initiatives to date have focused on that kind of connection.

In 2007, the GSMA supported Ericsson in its Gramjyoti project, providing broadband to the remote Indian villages in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

A band of paramedics in a mobile broadband-equipped van visited the villages and were able to cover vast areas, referring many queries back to doctors in major cities.

Fragmented market
Yet mobile technology, as much as it can multiply the efforts of city-dwelling doctors and bring diagnoses to far-flung villages, cannot make up for some shortfalls.

"There's 4 billion mobile phones now in the world, 2.2 billion of those in the developing world," said Ms Thwaites. "Compare that to 305 million PCs and then look at hospital bed numbers: there's 11 million of them in the developing world."
As a result, mHealth projects must also be able to provide an ounce of prevention, and the report sheds light on some particularly successful initiatives.

In South Africa, the SIMpill project integrated a sensor-equipped medicine bottle with a SIM card, ensuring that healthcare workers were advised if patients were not taking their tuberculosis medicine.

The percentages of people keeping up with their medicine rocketed from 22% to 90%.

The medium of text message can overcome sociological barriers as well.

The Project Masiluleke SMS message campaign provided people with free text messages, with the remainder of the 160 characters used to provide HIV and Aids education.

In Uganda, the Text to Change text-based HIV quiz campaign resulted in a 33% increase in calls to an HIV information hotline.

"There are a couple of interesting benefits that the project brought to light," says UN Foundation spokesperson Adele Waugaman. "One of them is the benefit of talking to people in their local language.

"Also, HIV is very stigmatised in South Africa, so people don't like to discuss it publicly. The benefit of getting these private text messages is it's a new form of access that addresses these stigmatisation and privacy concerns."

Healthcare includes improving quality of life as well. One case study from Qualcomm's Wireless Reach programme, - 3G for All Generations - shows how mobile broadband has brought the company together with the Spanish Red Cross and Vodafone Spain to provide a custom software solution for Spain's elderly.

They can have video calls with care providers, call for help, or simply have a chat, providing real social interaction without anyone needing to travel.

Each of these and the many more in the new report showcases the potential of the technology but underlines the significant stumbling block of mHealth so far.

"The biggest problem is fragmentation of small projects," says Ms Thwaites.

"A lot of the work being done on the ground is NGO- and foundation-led, but let's join those efforts with the Microsofts and the Qualcomms and the Intels and the Vodafones.

"There's a business case for it now; you have to have the experience of the NGOs on the ground talking to the big corporates out there and creating real business models, and that's why I think the mHealth Alliance can tackle that."

US Broadband Infrastructure Investments necessitate Transparency

broadband infrastructure investments planned as part of the economic stimulus package need transparency if they're to be effective

The key public policy problem with broadband is that citizen-consumers and policy-makers still lack basic information.

Government investment in broadband networks has emerged as one of the more contentious parts of the economic stimulus legislation slated for a Senate vote Tuesday. Already, at least $2 billion of a planned $9 billion for broadband has apparently been cut from the latest bill, as legislators and interest groups squabble over who should control Internet communications funding, and under what rules.

What should be less controversial is that intelligent spending decisions about funding for high-speed Internet connections can't be made without excellent and transparent data about our broadband infrastructure.

The key public policy problem with broadband is that citizen-consumers and policy-makers still lack basic information. The Bush administration set a goal of achieving universal broadband by the end of 2007, then declared "mission accomplished" without providing much evidence to substantiate its claim. And under former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, the agency refused to release what data it did have about competitors in the broadband marketplace.
President Obama's commitment to "change" has included a more hands-on approach to promoting broadband. Throughout the presidential campaign, and repeatedly since the election, Obama has emphasized the importance of "expanding broadband lines across America." With input from his telecommunications advisors, the House stimulus bill included $6 billion for broadband. Early versions of the Senate measure raised the total to $9 billion.
Statistics?
Equally important is Obama's commitment to empirically-driven policymaking. In January, Obama became only the second president—after William Howard Taft in 1909—to invoke "statistics" in an inaugural address, when he spoke of "the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics."

The US spends more than $8 billion a year on statistics. Much of that goes to fund the Census Bureau and data collection about agricultural and labor markets, such as the monthly unemployment report, which on Friday brought the grim news that the economy had shed 598,000 jobs in January. Last week, when the Agriculture Department released its own census, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack reminded reporters: "Numbers and data are very important. They direct policy; they shape policy. They can tell us what we are doing right. They call tell us what we are doing wrong."
Yet almost none of this $8 billion in statistical spending goes to compiling information about broadband, the infrastructure of the knowledge-based economy. And the data that has been collected has been made to mislead.
The FCC—the official record-keeper on private-sector telecommunications—for years claimed that there was adequate competition in broadband because the median ZIP code was served by eight separate providers. The Government Accountability Office's assessment of the same data found a median of two providers per ZIP code. Worse, the FCC refuses to release the information that it has about competition.
A variety of organizations—including my own free web service, BroadbandCensus.com—have stepped in to do our best at collecting, compiling and releasing public broadband information. We believe that if you want to build a road, you need a map that tells you where existing roads lie before you begin taking construction bids, let alone start pouring concrete. Where will our nation's new broadband highways, by-ways and access points be built? Who's going to let the contracts? Who will own this infrastructure?
These questions can't be answered without detailed broadband data. To that end, I've supported a proposed "State Broadband Planning and Assessment Act," which could be introduced as an amendment to the fiscal stimulus measure. The goal of this effort, as of BroadbandCensus.com, is to unleash the Internet as means of sharing information about the Internet itself.
For two-and-a-half years, I've been trying to get access to basic broadband data for the public, including citizen-consumers, businesses, and local policy-makers. I've been seeking to identify which carriers offer service in a particular ZIP code, as well as smaller units, like census blocks. In September 2006, when I headed a project at the Center for Public Integrity that investigated the telecommunications industry, we filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FCC to force them to release basic broadband data about carriers by ZIP code.
The project obtained and displayed similar location information about broadcasters and cable operators from the FCC's cumbersome web site. But our attempts to get broadband data were thwarted by the FCC and by industry. AT&T, Verizon Communications, and the lobbying organizations representing the Bell companies, the cable companies, the cell phone carriers, and wireless broadband providers all asked the FCC to deny information to the public. Even though every consumer who buys broadband knows the name of the company that provides them with service, the telecoms argued that compiling this information into a single location would reveal "proprietary" data. The FCC agreed.

The FCC did not want disclosure, and neither did the telecom incumbents and their lobbyists. They did not want successful broadband competition.

In its legal briefings, the FCC argued that releasing the data would lead to competition in communications—which was why it couldn't release the data! "Disclosure could allow competitors to free ride on the efforts of the first new entrant to identify areas where competition is more likely to be successful," the agency told the federal district court in Washington.

The once-vaunted virtue of competition in federal telecommunications policy—the underpinning of the 1996 Telecom Act—had taken a back seat to the privilege of supposedly proprietary information. The FCC did not want disclosure, and neither did the telecom incumbents and their lobbyists. They did not want successful broadband competition.
Congress was critical of the FCC's meager broadband statistics. In October it passed the Broadband Data Improvement Act to prod the agency to collect broadband data at a level more granular than the ZIP-code. The FCC began doing just that in June, as the bill was working its way through Congress.
But under pressure from telecom lobbyists, Congress dropped a core provision from the House version of the bill: the requirement that a separate agency, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, take responsibility for conducting a national broadband census and producing a public map with the names of individual carriers and where they offered service.
The House version of the stimulus bill reintroduces the NTIA broadband map. But it takes out any mention of publicly releasing individual carrier names. Worse, the Broadband Data Improvement Act enshrined the business model favored by the carriers: providing information to an entity like Connected Nation, which agrees to excise the names of broadband providers from the maps they produce.
The House stimulus bill allocated $40 million to this business model. Last week's version of the Senate stimulus bill upped the total to $350 million.
President Obama has the opportunity to make broadband a priority in his administration by ensuring that the NTIA creates a public map of our national broadband providers and infrastructure. Map in hand, the Obama administration's broadband policy should be guided by three important principles:
1) Use the Internet to empower citizens and consumers.
With the FCC keeping broadband data out of the hands of the public, I started BroadbandCensus.com to publish the same information that any consumer can know: the name of their Internet service provider and type of broadband connection, how much they are charged for service, and the Internet speeds they are promised and actually delivered. The government of Ireland publishes exactly the same information on its communications ministry web page.
Some broadband data efforts focus on the needs of telecommunications carriers and their unionized employees. Based in Kentucky, Connected Nation has been promoting their state-wide maps of broadband availability as a means for providers to sell more service. The Communications Workers of America's Speed Matters campaign has collected random speed tests from Internet users to provide a snapshot about download and upload speeds. Both of these initiatives are good, so far as they go.
But to rigorously understand the condition of broadband, we can't rely only on the information provided by the carriers. It needs to be verified by Internet users. To truly unlock the power of Internet-enabled "crowdsourcing," an effective broadband strategy must focus on citizens. Empower them by releasing basic information and letting citizen-consumers add to the mash-up. It's about making citizens contributors as well as constituents.
2) Ensure that infrastructure investment is made on the basis of cost-benefit data.
In 1790, the United States was the first country to institute a periodic national census. What started as a questionnaire seeking only demographic information had broadened by 1840 to information about employment in mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and the "learned professions and engineers." Such information has enabled our government, our universities and our business sector to rely on good-quality statistical information.
We're going to need that kind of data, and a lot more of it, to make sound investment decisions about broadband. Because of our nation's agricultural origins, our statistical agencies provide far more data about crop production than they do about broadband availability, speeds, or prices. In the absence of good data, the temptation is to make public infrastructure investment decisions based on political pressure or lawmaker influence, rather than upon solid cost-benefit analyses.
3) Use the transparency of the Internet to regulate incumbents through public disclosure.
The regulatory philosophies of the New Deal—maximum and minimum wages and prices, hands-on federal regulation—have faded and are not likely to be revived even in the current crisis. Yet one Depression-era innovation of Franklin D. Roosevelt remains as valid as ever: the disclosure-based regime of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC is vigilant in requiring punctilious compliance with requirements that public companies disclose details of their operations. By and large, the SEC doesn't require substantive actions so much as it requires procedural compliance and full disclosure. Open information flows mean that poor corporate decisions are punished in the marketplace.
Equally important is that role that independent efforts, like those of BroadbandCensus.com and others, can play in collecting and aggregating public broadband data about speeds, prices, and reliability.
For more than a year, BroadbandCensus.com has provided a platform allowing Internet users to compare their actual broadband speeds against what they are promised by their carriers. We use the open-source Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) of Internet2. All speed test data is publicly displayed under a Creative Commons license. This approach to public monitoring Internet traffic has recently been followed by Google and the New America Foundation and their "Measurement Lab" initiative, which also uses NDT.
Ultimately, broadband carriers that offer good speeds and good service will see the value in an objective and transparent broadband census. Fortunately, consumers don't need to wait on the carriers to begin collecting and publishing broadband of their own.
Neither should the government. No matter how much Congress decides to allocate to stimulate broadband, it should insist that information about speeds, prices, technologies, and specific locations of high-speed Internet availability are publicly available to all.

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Guiding principles for U.S. broadband infrastructure economic stimulus

As Congressional leaders and the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama mull economic stimulus legislation including a portion of which is expected to be devoted to telecommunications infrastructure to boost broadband Internet access, I offer these guiding principles:
1. The focus should be on the so-called "last mile" or local access network portion of the system. There's a broad consensus that the lack of adequate broadband access in the United States is due to technological shortcomings on this segment of the telecommunications infrastructure, its weakest link. The overall goal should be full build out of this currently incomplete but vital infrastructure to serve all residents and businesses.

Solar power a ventilation system that can cool the car without help from the engine.

Solar cars still a way off

Toyota's third-generation Prius, due at dealerships this spring, will have an optional solar panel on its roof. The panel will power a ventilation system that can cool the car without help from the engine, Toyota says.
But it's a long way from the 2010 Prius to a solar-powered car, experts told CNN. Most agree that there just isn't enough space on a production car to get full power from solar panels.

"Being able to power a car entirely with solar is a pretty far-reaching goal," said Tony Markel, a senior engineer at the federal government's National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado.

In the new Prius, the solar panel will provide energy for a ventilation fan that will help cool the parked car on sunny, hot days. The driver can start the fan remotely before stepping into the car. Once the car is started, the air conditioning won't need as much energy from a battery to do the rest of the cooling.

"The best thing about using solar is that regardless of what you end up using it for, you're trying to use it to displace gasoline," added Markel.

The question is, how much gasoline can solar power offset? Markel said his lab has modified a Prius to use electricity from the grid for its main batteries and a solar panel for the auxiliary systems. He believes the car gets an additional 5 miles of electric range from the panel.
According to recent articles in Japan's Nikkei newspaper, Toyota has bigger plans for harnessing power from the sun. Nikkei reports that Toyota hopes to develop a vehicle powered entirely by solar panels. The project will take years, the paper reported.

When contacted by CNN, however, a Toyota spokeswoman denied the existence of the project.

"At this time there are no plans that we know of to produce a concept or production version of a solar-powered car," said Amy K. Taylor, a communications administrator in Toyota's Environmental, Safety & Quality division.

Motorists don't have to wait for a 2010 Prius to drive a solar-enhanced car, however. Greg Johanson, president of Solar Electric Vehicles in Westlake Village, California, said his company makes a roof-mounted panel for a standard Prius that enables the car to travel up to 15 additional miles a day.

The system costs $3,500, and it takes about a week to make one, Johanson said. Billy Bautista, a project coordinator at the company, said Solar Electric Vehicles gets so many requests for the system that there is a backlog of several months.

The company's Web site says motorists can install the panels themselves, although it recommends finding a "qualified technician."

The system delivers about 165 watts of power per hour to an added battery, which helps powers the electric motor, Johanson said.

But others said it would take a lot more power than that to replace an internal combustion engine.

Eric Leonhardt, director of the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University, said that even if solar cells worked far better than they do today, they wouldn't generate enough power for driving substantial distances. The best cells operate at about 33 percent efficiency, but the ones used on vehicles are only about 18 percent efficient, he said.

Leonhardt said it would be more practical to use solar power to help charge a car's battery and use the more efficient panels mounted on a roof or over a parking area to supply the rest of the electricity needed to drive the engine.

"Solar panels really need a lot of area," he said.

Leonhardt thinks Toyota's new Prius is a good first step toward using renewable energy. Some cars get hotter than 150 degrees inside when parked in the sun, so reducing the temperature could mean Toyota could use a smaller AC unit, he added.

Johanson of Solar Electric Vehicles said he'd like to see Toyota bring the weight of a Prius down from 3,000 pounds to 2,000. He also hopes for a small gasoline engine and a larger electric motor. That will probably come in the future, when Toyota unveils a plug-in engine.

In the meantime, Solar Electric Vehicles sells its version of a plug-in Prius, with a solar panel installed, for $25,000, Bautista said.

Toyota is the largest automaker to incorporate solar power into a mass-produced car. But its solar panel is not the first for a car company. Audi uses one on its upscale A8 model, and Mazda tried one on its 929 in the 1990s.

In addition, a French motor company, Venturi, has produced an electric-solar hybrid. The Eclectic model costs $30,000, looks like a souped-up golf cart and uses roof-mounted solar panels to help power an electric engine. It has a range of about 30 miles and has a top speed of about 30 mph.

ABOUT Solar vehicle

Borealis III leads the way during the 2005 North American Solar Challenge passing by Lake Benton, Minnesota.A solar vehicle is an electric vehicle powered by a type of renewable energy, by solar energy obtained from solar panels on the surface (generally, the roof) of the vehicle. Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert the Sun's energy directly into electrical energy. Solar vehicles are not practical day-to-day transportation devices at present, but are primarily demonstration vehicles and engineering exercises, often sponsored by government agencies.

Solar cars
Solar cars combine technology typically used in the aerospace, bicycle, alternative energy and automotive industries. The design of a solar vehicle is severely limited by the energy input into the car (batteries and power from the sun). Virtually all solar cars ever built have been for the purpose of solar car races (with notable exceptions).

Like many race cars, the driver's cockpit usually only contains room for one person, although a few cars do contain room for a second passenger. They contain some of the features available to drivers of traditional vehicles such as brakes, accelerator, turn signals, rear view mirrors (or camera), ventilation, and sometimes cruise control. A radio for communication with their support crews is almost always included.

Solar cars are often fitted with gauges as seen in conventional cars. Aside from keeping the car on the road, the driver's main priority is to keep an eye on these gauges to spot possible problems. Cars without gauges available for the driver will almost always feature wireless telemetry. Wireless telemetry allows the driver's team to monitor the car's energy consumption, solar energy capture and other parameters and free the driver to concentrate on just driving.

Electrical and mechanical systems
The electrical system is the most important part of the car's systems as it controls all of the power that comes into and leaves the system. The battery pack plays the same role in a solar car that a petrol tank plays in a normal car in storing power for future use. Solar cars use a range of batteries including lead-acid batteries, nickel-metal hydride batteries (NiMH), Nickel-Cadmium batteries (NiCd), Lithium ion batteries and Lithium polymer batteries.

Many solar race cars have complex data acquisition systems that monitor the whole electrical system while even the most basic cars have systems that provide information on battery voltage and current to the driver.

The mechanical systems of a solar car are designed to keep friction and weight to a minimum while maintaining strength. Designers normally use titanium and composites to ensure a good strength-to-weight ratio.

Solar cars usually have three wheels, but some have four. Three wheelers usually have two front wheels and one rear wheel: the front wheels steer and the rear wheel follows. Four wheel vehicles are set up like normal cars or similarly to three wheeled vehicles with the two rear wheels close together.

Technorati : car engine, carscience, engine, information, informationwatch, science, solar power,

Hidalgo County, Texas is considering $500,000 project that would blanket the city with a wireless Internet system

Pharr is considering a $500,000 project that would blanket the city with a wireless Internet system geared toward serving city workers and emergency responders.
Negotiations are still in extremely preliminary stages — and both the city and contractor say a timetable isn't set — but leaders have expressed intrigue at the prospect of a system that can seemingly meet their wildest high-tech fantasies.
"The possibilities for the future are really interesting," Pharr City Manager Fred Sandoval said.
Bobby Vassallo, a wireless Internet consultant, has met with the City Commission twice over the last six weeks to help pitch the concept of a wireless Internet "clothesline" that could help the city handle everything from police video surveillance to wireless water meter-reading.
Behind the pitch is Brownsville businessman Oscar Garza, who leads the corporation Valley Wireless Internet Holdings.
Sandoval emphasized that the city hasn't made any decisions yet.
"It's a very interesting concept," he said. "We definitely want to be at the forefront."
REGION-WIDE
Pharr isn't alone in its consideration of wireless systems.
While wireless Internet is already the standard in some large cities, the technology now seems to be taking root in the Rio Grande Valley.
Cities across the region are pursuing high-tech, wireless Internet options that have the potential to promote efficiency in virtually all municipal departments by keeping workers in the field connected to City Hall.
Using wireless "mesh" systems, cities can provide Internet access over a large area to their employees through a series of nodes attached to structures like water towers or streetlights.
That means building inspectors could send reports back to City Hall from a work site, traffic citations could appear in court computers almost instantly, and police could set up surveillance cameras without fear of their cables being cut.
McAllen is already moving forward with plans to install up to 120 surveillance cameras throughout the city, which will be connected wirelessly to a fiber-optic cable running through the city.
The cameras would be served by a downtown wireless network, which could also provide support to other city workers in the area.
Last summer, a pilot program provided wireless to city workers in Bill Schupp Park. McAllen is currently soliciting proposals from vendors and is scheduled to meet with them today.
The focus of McAllen's project would be city usage, but eventually it could be opened up to residents, said Belinda Mercado, McAllen's information technology director.
Meanwhile, Hidalgo leaders are examining the possibility of creating a citywide blanket of wireless Internet similar to the one Pharr is examining. The system would provide access to emergency responders and residents on two separate networks, explained Rick Mendoza, Hidalgo's information technology director.
He said the talks are in preliminary stages and price estimates aren't available. But the city would like to offer Internet service to residents at no cost.
"We want to offer Internet service to members of our community who don't have the means of getting either DSL or cable," Mendoza said.
He added that a citywide wireless network would help Hidalgo compete with neighboring cities.
Edinburg leaders have also discussed the possibility of creating some sort of wireless system that would include various hot spots throughout the city, though they are only in discussions and the city hasn't started talks with any specific vendors.
Brownsville officials, meanwhile, expect their $6.6 million wireless project to be operational within four months, Mayor Pat Ahumada said.
The city is erecting signal towers, which will provide wireless access to city employees, utility workers and emergency responders, though it remains to be seen how much access the general public will have.
COST
The systems don't come cheap, however.
The network being pitched to Pharr could cost as much as $500,000 for the initial infrastructure, $25,000 a month to operate and even more for cameras, wireless water meters and other high-tech equipment needed to actually take advantage of the system.
At a time when cities across the region are struggling financially, at least some have questioned whether the cost of such an ambitious undertaking can be justified.
Pharr is just starting to climb out from under its financial woes after it wiped out its reserves last year.
"I believe the No. 1 question we should be asking, besides ‘Can we afford this?' is ‘Do we need it?'" said Pharr Finance Director Juan Guerra at a city workshop earlier this month. "From what I'm hearing ... I'm not sure if we do."
TIMING
Interestingly, the Valley's pursuit of wireless comes as cities elsewhere are struggling with their Wi-Fi projects.
Internet service provider Earthlink, which has partnered with Philadelphia, Houston and other large cities on wireless programs, announced layoffs within its municipal division in November. The company told shareholders it no longer makes sense for Earthlink to invest in municipal wireless.
As a result, some community wireless projects have been put on hiatus.
Earlier in the decade, companies like Earthlink offered to provide wireless systems at virtually no cost to cities. In exchange, the networks were privately owned, and the companies could charge subscription fees to consumers or hit them with advertising.
That model is changing, as it has become apparent that broadband access is becoming more readily available and affordable to consumers.
Today, cities are designing the systems for themselves to meet their own needs, such as giving support to emergency workers or keeping public works employees connected while in the field.
Those purpose-driven networks — as opposed to ones that are simply designed to give residents Internet access — are the ones that are now poised to succeed, writes Governing magazine's Christopher Swope, an expert on municipal wireless systems.
Vassallo, the wireless Internet consultant, emphasized to Pharr leaders that the city could create some public hot spots, but providing all-encompassing Internet service to residents isn't worth the cost or stress to the city.
Regardless of how, exactly, Pharr and other cities' projects takes shape, advocates say it's high time the Valley embraces wireless.

Google will begin to offer browser-based offline contact to its Gmail Webmail application

Google announced the release of a new system which allows users to access their accounts offline.

Google Delivers Offline admittance for Gmail

Google will begin to offer browser-based offline access to its Gmail Webmail application, a much-awaited feature.
This functionality, which will allow people to use the Gmail interface when disconnected from the Internet, has been expected since mid-2007.
That's when Google introduced Gears, a browser plug-in designed to provide offline access to Web-hosted applications like Gmail.
Gears is currently used for offline access to several Web applications from Google, like the Reader RSS manager and the Docs word processor, and from other providers like Zoho, which uses it for offline access to its e-mail and word processing browser-based applications.
Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, said that applying Gears to Gmail has been a very complex task, primarily because of the high volume of messages accounts can store. "Gmail was a tough hurdle," he said.
Google ruled out the option of letting users replicate their entire Gmail inboxes to their PCs, which in many cases would translate into gigabytes of data flowing to people's hard drives. It instead developed algorithms that will automatically determine which messages should be downloaded to PCs, taking into consideration a variety of factors that reflect their level of importance to the user, he said. At this point, end-users will not be able to tweak these settings manually.
"We had to make it such that we're managing a sizable amount of information offline and doing it well in a way that's seamless to the end-user," he said.
For example, in Gmail, users can put labels on messages, as well as tag them with stars to indicate their importance, and Google can use that information to determine which messages to download. Sheth estimates that in most cases Gmail will download several thousand messages, preferring those that are more recent as well. Depending on the amount of messages users have on their accounts, they may get downloads going back two months or two years, he said.
Google will begin to roll out the Gmail offline functionality Tuesday evening and expects to make it available to everybody in a few days, whether they use Gmail in its standalone version or as part of the Apps collaboration and communication suite for organizations.
While the feature was "rigorously" tested internally at Google, it is a first, early release upon which Google expects to iterate and improve on. That's why it's being released under the Google Labs label. Users are encouraged to offer Google feedback.
Users have been able to manage their Gmail accounts offline via other methods for years, since Gmail supports the POP and IMAP protocols that let people download and send out messages using desktop e-mail software like Microsoft Outlook and others.
However, the Gears implementation will let people work within the Gmail interface without the need for a separate PC application. When offline, messages will be put in a Gears browser queue, and the desktop and online versions of the accounts will be synchronized automatically when users connect to the Internet again. This will come in handy for people who travel a lot and often find themselves without Internet access, Sheth said.
To activate the offline functionality, users of standalone Gmail service and the standard Apps edition should click "settings" after logging on to their Gmail account. There, they should click on the "Labs" tab, select "Enable" next to "Offline Gmail" and click "Save Changes." A new "Offline" link will then appear in the right-hand corner of the account interface. Users of the Education and Premier Apps versions will have to wait for their Apps administrators to enable Gmail Labs for everyone on the domain first.
Google is also rolling out Gears-based offline access for its Calendar application. However, it will be for now read-only and exclusively available to Google Apps account holders. Previously, Google introduced read-only offline access to the Spreadsheet and Presentation applications in Google Docs, which is also part of Google Apps.

release of offline Gmail.

The early version of the app is available now to users with the U.S./U.K. English version of Google Labs.
Pegged as an "experimental" feature, the app is aimed at maintaining Gmail's functionality even when you're not online. Built on Google's Gear's platform, once enabled the feature downloads a cache of your mail to your PC. When you're logged on the Web, it syncs the cache with the Gmail servers.
While you're offline, you can read, star, and label messages. If you send a message when you're offline, Gmail places it in your outbox and sends it as soon as you log back in. A special "flaky connection" setting splits the difference between on and offline modes ("when you're 'borrowing' your neighbor's wireless," says Google), utilizing a local cache while syncing it with the online version.