Science & Technology Today

Most of the calling cards companies these days are using VOIP and they definitely offer the cheapest rates for international calling.But I was surprised to see that they are offering US long distance for pennies as well . You may check the latest United States calling card rates and judge for yourself. Most of these services come with No-PIN Dialing feature that allows you to connect to your calls faster and work from any wire-line or wireless phone. Of course for any calling card service, you have to dial an 800 number and if your number is registered with them, you may go ahead and dialed the number you want just after the greeting voice prompt. One such company offering calling card services is Pingo. Pingo seems to be everywhere, go check them out guys.

Nearly are the major carriers have some kind of promotions going on for free phones with a 2 year service contract all the time. I was thinking that most of these promotions are about non-trendy phones until I found Verizon phones.They are currently offering phones like Motorola V325i, Motorola Razr, Motorola Krzr, and LG Mint Chocolate and all of them are very cool phones. It should not be surprising for you people to see Verizon as my first carrier preference as it dominated the recently published J.D.Powers surveys on mobile call quality . J.D.Powers rated all the wireless carrier in six US regions,based on the survey responses of some thirty thousand subscribers. Verizon took the number one rank in four regions by itself and tied with Qwest for first spot in Western region. The only region were it was second was North Central, were U.S.Cellular took the top spot.They also concluded that all the wireless carriers have made vast improvement in call quality due to the rapid deploymen...

Most of us have heard if not used telephone recorders and these phone recorders are cool small devices now.Before I tell you about the devises themselves, let me clarify that you can record your calls in 38 states that permit one party consent---- One party consent simply means that one party to the conversation must have knowledge and give consent to the recording. Two party or all party consent means that every party to the conversation must have knowledge and give consent to the recording. In all 50 states and through federal law, it's considered illegal to record telephone conversations outside of one party consent. Having understood the legal aspect let us look at the devise itself.The older Cassette Phone Recorder versions have been replaced by sleek digital voice/phone recorders with capacity from 12 to 76 hours which can be powered with batteries or AC. Recorders automatically turns on when telephone receiver is lifted, and turns off when hung up. They can be interface to U...

A major technological breakthrough has arrived in computing world--- Quantum Computing is a reality. Recently a Canadian company D-wave demonstrated a viable quantum computer in Silicon Valley. Quantum computing get is name because it uses quantum mechanics rather than the conventional physics associated with digital processing, to drive the computation. The quantum chip which is at the heart of quantum computing was designed by D-wave and built by NASA. Quantum chip is a processor built from the superconducting materials aluminum and niobium, chilled in a tank of helium. It achieves supercomputing speeds because its basic data units-called qubits , can hold both values “0” and “1” at the same time and also share those values with other qubits . The demonstration had a chip capable of running at 16 qubits and by end 2008 they are planning to reach 1024 qubits . Quantum computers are not just faster than conventional computers. They change what computer scientists call the computationa...

While we are still waiting for the iPhone to hit the market, let us see which smart phones are the favorites with the users. As per Wirefly Top 5 Smartphones are 1. Cingular BlackJack 2. BlackBerry Pearl (for Cingular and T-Mobile) 3. BlackBerry 8700 series (for Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon) 4. Cingular BlackBerry 8800 5. Motorola Q for Verizon Wireless It looks like BlackJack smartphone by Samsung Electronic has taken over the most popular Research In Motion- BlackBerrys for the top spot in just three months. I wonder what is happening with their trademark lawsuit? BlackJack has every right to take the top spot,it is a quad band and operate on GSM 850/900/1800/1900; EDGE; UMTS; HSDPA, it has full QWERTY keyboard, and it has screen with a 65,000-color output and 320x320 pixel resolution; images and video look great, colors are bright, and text is extra sharp. Only disappointment is that it is not Wi-Fi ready.

In today’s wireless market place besides the well-established facilities-based wireless network service providers like Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, we have many Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and regional operators like Metro PCS, Cricket Communications etc., which gives customers hundreds of service plan options. In the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) group, we have Discount MVNOs that provide cut-price call rates to market segments. Discount MVNOs include Fresh Mobile, MobileWorld and Virgin Mobile, their strategy is based on cheap prepaid or postpaid tariffs with basic voice and SMS services. Then we have Lifestyle MVNOs focusing on specific niche market demographics like Helio, Boost Mobile and AMP'D Mobile. With so many options, it is a difficult task to choose a right service plan and you are better off taking on some external advice. I have found that Wirefly is an excellent website, that can come to your rescue. On this website you can view a...

Continuing on my earlier post on advances in VOIP recently concluded VoiceCon Spring 2007 saw VOIP vendors trying to get into the corporate and mobile subscriber areas as well. One the most impressive product announcements was Unified Communication Manager Version 6.0 by Cisco - with new mobility and collaboration features as well as a VOIP server package for small and midsize companies. Unified Communication Manager Version 6.0 will support up to 10,000 users on its servers. Right now, the application is going to run only on Linux operating system and Windows based application will come in the next twelve months or so. They also introduced Unified Mobile Communicator client software for cell phones and smart phones, which lets these devices tie into Cisco based VOIP infrastructure. This software supports devices with operating systems like Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberries.

The last two years have seen phenomenal growth in the uptake of voice-over-IP subscribers and you can’t believe it was only a few years ago voice-over-IP was a play thing for only Internet nerds. Clearly voice-over-IP technology is advancing and Vonage is the obvious market leader not only in the market share but in advancing this technology as well. Again voice-over-IP is the technology used to transmit voice conversations over a data network i.e. Internet or a corporate Intranet using the Internet Protocol. New gateways and VOIP-based CO switches are more modular, enabling service providers to add features - like interactive voice response (IVR), database support for pre-paid calling cards, support for Signaling System 7 (SS7) and redundancy at all levels. On voice quality even though virtually all voice-over-lP products use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and the Real-Time Protocol (RTP), over IP. This means that voice-containing packets that are lost aren't retransmitted, whe...

It was in the summer of 2000, while on a trip to Ericsson headquarters’ in Stockholm, Sweden, I was first introduced to the concept of “wireless wallet” whereby consumers could use mobile phones at retailers for payments/ fund transfer. As a matter of fact they showed a live demo in the lab environment. For the next nearly seven years, nothing seemed to happen and suddenly we have a renewed interest in eCommerce. It was largely because of the questionable business models and inadequate technology or I should say lack of will by the involved parties. Now several companies are trying to get a piece of this lucrative pie. Looks like “wireless wallet” is finally going to a viable payment method as some of the leading solution providers are Obopay Inc., Sapphire, VISA, PayPal Mobile etc. and financial institutions are coming together like never before. Obopay Inc., is currently running trials with Citi customers for sending and receiving money from their mobile phones, track and manage mo...

While we are still trying to figure out if we should go for LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) television or a Plasma television, soon we will have another competing technology. And who know that it may deliver the knockout punch to both LCD and Plasma technologies.Laser technology which uses laser to provide display may surpass the plasma technology which uses electrically charged gases to cause materials called phosphors to glow in producing better color and crisp accuracy in its display. Laser technology, in comparison to plasma and LCD flat panel, is also economically scaleable to larger screen sizes, enabling mass adoption of very thin, very large high-definition displays. Also Laser technology will take advantage of the latest extended color space standard for video applications, xvYCC, to produce the widest color gamut ever available in video displays. It was only recently that lasers were miniaturized enough to fit in displays and projectors and then Novalux found out that by adding ...