Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Today, GPS is a beautiful thing. A receiver in your car can learn its own location from 24 government owned satellites overhead your tax money at work. You're guided to a destination with colorful moving maps on a touch screen and an authoritative voice. But good GPS models must fulfill three requirements. First, each must be tiny, self contained and battery operated, so you can take it hiking or biking. Second, each must display live traffic and accident data - and offer to reroute you as necessary. And finally, each must pronounce actual street names not just "Turn right," but "Turn right on South Maple Street." That feature makes an enormous difference when you're flying blind in a new town. Here are a few top notch GPS models: Magellan Maestro 4250 ($450): Like any gadget in a car, GPS receivers are a distraction, and therefore a safety risk. So it's amazing that speech recognition didn't arrive in these units sooner. On the Magellan, it...

India: This year Railways will be able to run seamlessly through dense fog with the help of signals from the sky, literally. A Geographical Positioning System, or GPS, device will connect trains with a satellite orbiting the earth and tell drivers about foggy conditions ahead and direct their actions accordingly . The "Fog Safe Tech Device" is a high-tech kit of an antenna, a monitor and a few consoles installed at the train's engine. It shows in the monitor visibility conditions up to four kilometres ahead. Moreover, it also alerts about obstructions on the track. "This device lets a driver know what lies ahead even if he cannot sight them. There is also a gauge, which shows the level of visibility and the position of the tracks. Therefore, trains can run even in zero-visibility," said a Northern Railway spokesman. For Railways this is a quantum leap, considering that until last year, drivers used to rely on small explosives called detonators to explode ahead t...

The mobile TV broadcast market is expanding as services were commercially launched in more countries in 2006. A few more launches are expected in 2007, but unavailability of spectrum is the largest barrier to more mobile TV services, according to In-Stat, a high-tech market research firm. Over the next few years, the situation will change. The standards for mobile TV broadcasting continue to expand. There are commercial services that use DVB-H, DAB-IP, ISDB-T, TDMB, S-DMB, and MediaFLO operating today. Other possible standards for the future include DVBSH, an improved version of ATSC, and DMB-T/H in China. With so many standards and no clear leader it is difficult for equipment vendors to achieve economies of scale as they currently offer multiple versions of products to serve the market. Most of the mobile TV broadcast services offer only linear TV content. Future plans from service providers include datacasting weather and traffic information, broadcasting to storage on the phone for...

In a blink of mere months, the mobile “smart” phone has been transformed from pricey corporate gadget to an affordable alternative for ordinary folk. Cingular Wireless has unveiled three devices priced as low as $200. The shift began in May with the ‘Q’ from Motorola that Verizon Wireless introduced for $200 and now sells for $100. But no carrier has gone as wild with consumer-friendlier smart phones than Cingular, which rolled out four such devices since September. I tried out three of them: Nokia E62, the Samsung BlackJack and the Palm Treo 680. Samsung BlackJack: The BlackJack stands out among the three devices, if only because it is compatible with Cingular’s new high-speed wireless Internet network. It’s small and weighs 3.5 ounces. Despite the size constraints, the phone features a slot for removable memory to store music and photographs, as well as a 1.3 megapixel camera. One omission is GPS satellite capability for location-tracking. Nokia E62: The E62 is the first mass-market ...