Author: Serkadis

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has big plans: It wants to conquer outer space to generate solar energy by 2030. The idea is to collect solar power in space and beam it down to earth, in the form of lasers or microwaves. The so-called Space Solar Power System project is led by big corporations such as Mitsubishi, NEC, Fujitsu und Sharp.

As a first step, JAXA wants to deploy photovoltaic elements in outer space where they will be assembled in the form of dishes several square kilometers in size. Solar energy in space is about five times stronger than on earth, and the solar enery will be transformed into power in space.

The dishes are supposed to zap the lasers and microwaves to gigantic parabolic antennae located on earth, probably in remote areas such as dam reservoirs, for example. JAXA wants to begin conducting feasibility tests with a 100-kW demo system before eventually boosting that number to 1 Gigawatt.

“In an aggressive new effort to influence the congressional health care debate, UnitedHealth Group this week e-mailed its 75,000 U.S. employees, urging them to contact their senators and providing two form letters attacking specific legislative proposals,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. The company also asked workers to write to local newspapers and send copies of letters to their lobbying wing. The workers were urged to attack two reform proposals that insurers strongly oppose: A “public insurance option” and cuts to the Medicare Advantage program (Yee, 11/13).

“Consumer Watchdog, the California-based advocacy group that obtained the documents, says the letters are full of misleading GOP talking points, such as the claim that millions will lose coverage,” The Washington Post reports. “The group also says the campaign amounts to intimidation of employees of UnitedHealth Group and its main operating division, UnitedHealthcare.” The Post adds that “at another major insurer, Indianapolis-based Cigna, two executives sent a staff e-mail Wednesday criticizing the health reform package approved in the House last weekend and urging Cigna employees ‘to act as emissaries for our company and reach out to your elected officials to educate them’” (Eggen, 11/13).

Microsoft has officially launched the UK version of its search engine Bing, taking it out of beta where it has been since late May.

During the past several months of beta testing, the Bing team has been working on making its search features more relevant for UK users.

"Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the Internet proving very popular," said Ashley Highfield, vice president of Microsoft UK’s Consumer and Online Business.

"Features such as Categorized Search, Twitter and Visual Search are providing a different and intuitive experience, and are enabling us all to make informed decisions and discover more of the web – faster."

Key features of Bing UK include:

•  A localized UK homepage, with unique imagery and ‘hotspots’ – click through information boxes provide users with a wealth of information. A tool for discovery and inspiration.
•  Visual Search, helps users search (maybe for a new purchase) using visual images and meta data without having to type in keywords.
•  More Instant Answers, created to give users a quick response options to a search question, such as how is Liverpool doing in the premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend
•  See who or what is being chatted about with global live Twitter feed searching, pulling up Tweets in Bing searches in real-time.
•  Looking for the best deals? – an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK searches the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability. Bing supports making the best shopping decisions based on community feedback – not just advertising.
•  Not sure how to get there? Bing Maps is based on insights from our Multimap users. Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes.
•  Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match.

"We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant," said Highfield.

"Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines."

Related Articles:

>Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

>Bing Maps Gets An Upgrade

>Bing Managed Big Gain In October

Earlier this year I caused quite a stir when I predicted the death of taxonomies. Taxonomists worldwide told me I was an idiot, nuts, completely delusional. Some were deeply concerned that their jobs were threatened, as if employers would change org charts based on my prediction. Others secretly told me they agreed.

Of course, as so often happens in these dark days of 140-character tweets, my prediction was often taken out of context. I had predicted the death of traditional, monolithic, and single-hierarchy taxonomies, as well as the death of what I’d call the typical turn-of-the-21st-century taxonomy project (which I did dozens of times, as a former taxonomist), where librarians and/or linguists spend a few months in an organization determining how enterprise content should be categorized, so content technology could use it optimally. This project would usually be followed by an even longer period when people would admire the taxonomy, nod knowingly, saying “that’s exactly what we need!” – but not tag anything, despite the roadmap and project plan saying they should. 

As 2010 fast approaches, I’ve never been more sure of my prediction. Metadata continues to be vital, but technology is constantly getting better at mining and organizing it. As an example, this week I visited three organizations in Paris using Sinequa (one of the vendors we evaluate in our Search & Information Access research) on their intranets. In an approach similar to Endeca’s, entity extraction and semantic analysis create multi-faceted categorizations by people, country, city, language, companies, and other topics. Most of the content was unstructured; no taxonomy or tagging projects were undertaken.

“In over a hundred categorizations, we only have found two small errors in the past year,” said one implementer, from one of France’s largest wireless service providers. “We refine categorizations, but it takes very little time,” said another implementer at a systems integrator. “We wouldn’t have undertaken an enterprise taxonomy project because we never could have spent the time and money to write scripts or manually tag everything afterwards.”

Taxonomists might decry this as foolhardy; the fact is these companies achieved the results they wanted and increased the productivity and efficiency of their knowledge workers. These examples are not to say the technology is perfect — far from it. My point is to reiterate that taxonomists need to adapt and work with technology to improve the results of what they can achieve for enterprises.

Also, the title “taxonomist” should die – as it pushes people into the mindset of fixed hierarchies and navigations, despite over a decade of efforts to change that. Evolve the title, I say, into a metadata architect, or an information cartographer. Those are far more descriptive of what this role must be — and for the more savvy, already is — as we move into the next decade.

Metadata architects can no longer get away with being topic generalists, they must be specialists in the industry content they’re refining and understand the end-user: what are the specialized topics that perhaps aren’t contained in content, that can’t be extracted, that would make knowledge workers more efficient? Another customer I met with this week, a large French government agency, pointed out the main thing their search tool couldn’t extract meaning from was acronyms. “We had to make a list of all the acronyms we use,” said the IT director. “Once we spelled out the acronyms, what they stood for and their synonyms, the software worked beautifully.”

Taking taxonomies beyond what technology can achieve on its own is the metadata architect’s challenge for the next decade, because technology is at the point where it achieves what taxonomists were doing a decade ago.

For buyers of technology, remember that different entity extraction and search tools are often geared towards different kinds of content; we detail this in our Search & Information Access product evaluation research. There’s also higher and lower-risk scenarios for allowing technology to do more vs. less work. Legal firms should have more categorization checks from a metadata architect or a content specialist, less so than a news agency where topics are more wide-reaching and less fraught with risk if an end-user doesn’t find something.

As I’m based in Europe this quarter, I’ll be missing Taxonomy Boot Camp in San Jose, CA for the first time in several years. Last year, the opening session devolved into a debate as to how to define a taxonomy and a taxonomist. This year, I propose embracing a new era of metadata architects, ones that work with technology rather than be willfully ignorant of its inner workings. It’s only by studying the “how” of technology just as much as the “what” of the content that we’ll get to the next stage of content management, search, and information access.
 

As you’ll recall, the C64 emulator for the iPhone was shut down by the App store for being too awesome. Apple has approved the app but took off the BASIC support. Not great but not bad, either.

You can download the app here and this time there is no secret back door for enabling the BASIC emulator right in the app, which caused the emulator to run afoul of Apple’s draconian “no fun” policy.

Here is a cheerful Australian man running you through the app. It allows you to play classic games including that Kung Fu game that you remember but don’t quite know the name of but had a picture of the Sydney opera house in the background (it was called International Karate). It comes with eight games.

Short Version: The Alesis DM6 drum kit is a full set of electronic drums that is extremely accessible, yet just as difficult to master as the real thing. In un-packing the box it came in, one thing was immediately clear; this is no kid’s toy. This is a nine-piece set (10, if you include the drum module that makes the magic happen), weighing in at around 40 pounds.

The setup is easy enough, thanks to a simple, yet functional parts guide. I had it done within 30 minutes or so. I was struck by how much space this thing takes up. You might expect an electronic set to be smaller than its “real” counterpart, but you’ll still need to clear out some space for this one.

One of the first things that impressed me was the modularity of the kit. I had set it up according to the recommended instructions (a high-hat, crash cymbal, dual-zone snare, and tom on the left, two toms and a ride cymbal on the right), but it’s clear that you can put each piece wherever you like. Each piece comes with its own clamp that you can attach to anywhere to the aluminum rack. There is also a second clamp that allows you to adjust the angle of the piece.

There are two pedals, one for the bass kick, the other for hi-hat control. Both of these are extremely sturdy and well-built. The only small complaint I had about the kick pedal was that, for as heavy as it is, it still moved ever-so-slightly after just a few minutes of drumming, even on carpet.

Once your kit is set up, it’s time to plug it into something and turn it on. You’ll see your standard jacks, like headphones, 1/8″ stereo, 1/8″ mix in, and USB. There is also a very tiny switch to change the kick type from the pedal to a pad. I used a 1/8″-to-1/4″ cable to connect the drum kit to my 8-track for immediate recording, and had my 8-track connected to stereo speakers so I could play without headphones.

So, how does it sound? In a word, authentic. I was expecting to hear something good, but not great…..something more along the lines of a synthesizer. Instead, I was very pleased to hear sounds that could have come from a regular set of drums. When you hit each piece, a light blinon the module, indicating the hit. The pads themselves are rubber, and are generally very quiet. The only exception would be the cymbals and hi-hat, as the sound of you hitting them with your stick is pretty noticeable. So, I played and recorded a bit. Then I tried out some of the other kits. There are 10 preset kits and five user kits available. Each are fairly distinct, and give you a nice variety.

The pads respond dynamically to the force you exert on them. Hit them lightly, you’ll get a softer sound. Or, you can bang on them as hard as you like to make it louder (and they are no worse for it). This is a nice feature, but I often found myself missing beats if I didn’t hit it exactly right, or with just the right amount of force. The snare was the biggest culprit, and even if I focused solely on it by hitting it with a solid rhythm, there seemed to be some loss of sound every so often. You can set the volume on each individual piece, so I experimented there, but wasn’t able to completely alleviate the issue.

If you don’t like any of the preset kits, or wish you could change part of it, you can. By selecting the VOICE button, and then hitting the piece of your choice, you can then change the sound of it to pretty much whatever you want. When you’re done, you can save your custom kit to any of the five user kits. There are 108 sounds to choose from, so you’ll really only be limited by your imagination. You’ll also find a metronome with a variety of sounds and can select any time signature you wish. The kit also comes with 40 patterns that you can play along with. You can change the tempo, and this feature can be a helpful practicing tool.

If you don’t have an external recording device, not to worry. You can actually record directly to the module and then export that out if you like. There is a 5,000-note limit for recording, so depending on what you’re playing, the length of recording time could vary greatly.

Bottom Line
With a street price of $499, it’s a hefty investment for the casual musician. But if you’re serious about playing and possibly recording, this is a great value. The amount of customizations from the hardware to the software, is impressive. All of the pieces are very sturdy, so the only chance at breaking something would be to tip the whole thing over…..but even then, you’ll probably be okay.

The Washington Post: “The National Institutes of Health and the D.C. Health Department are preparing to launch a study in the District with an ambitious goal: to determine whether aggressive treatment of every adult with HIV could eliminate AIDS.” In conjunction with the study, NIH will provide experts to the city health department to help modernize clinic record-keeping efforts and to improve the tracking of HIV-infected people. “Experts will also show social workers how to monitor patients to ensure they take their medication, even when they feel well.” But the study, which is slated to begin “on or around World AIDS Day” will face many hurdles. “Researchers must first determine whether testing every adult for HIV is feasible. Then they must determine whether people who test positive will opt for treatment” (Fears, 11/13).

NPR profiles retired General Eric Shinseki, the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and his efforts to measure the scope of veterans’ mental health issues. In his first nine months in this position, he “has spent hours just listening to veterans talk. Shinseki tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep that he feels a strong obligation to ‘give back’ to the men and women he once served with.” NPR reports on the task Shinseki faces: “Since 2001, more than 1 million new veterans have come into a system that is being stretched thin.” One of Shinseki’s missions to improve the care and resources available to these vets is to work with the Department of Defense to “create a computer-driven system that will track service personnel through their careers — including when they become veterans. The idea, he said, is to use automatic enrollment to create VA health records for service members when they join the military. ‘So when the uniform comes off, we have all the evidence we need to make faster, better, smarter adjudications,’ Shinseki said” (Inskeep, 11/13).

Meanwhile, in other VA news, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on legislation being advanced by Rep. John Adler, D-N.J., that would increase oversight at VA clinics. Adler “announced yesterday that he hopes to require the Department of Veterans Affairs to report to Congress the quality of all the small programs in its hospitals and other medical facilities. The goal is to prevent a repeat of problems that plagued prostate cancer care at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center as well as programs at other VA hospitals.” Adler’s measure focuses on three specific concerns: “small programs, where medical errors and poor care are most likely to avoid detection; radiation safety; and contracts with private doctors and hospitals” Goldstein, 11/12).

Last Thursday, at around 8.30am, I sat in the queue at the Sir Sanusi Hospital waiting to see the doctor. There were 15 of us in the women’s queue and about the same number in the men’s.

Two men came in suddenly carrying an old man. They sat him on the floor as there was no space on the bench. A man in the queue asked if others would let the old man see the doctor when the next person is called in. The old man said that it wasn’t an emergency and he would wait his turn. He said he just had difficulty walking and his companions would not go at his pace, so they carried him.

Waiting at the hospital

One woman grumbled that some people exaggerate their illnesses so they get ahead of the usually long hospital queues. Another woman pointed out that she had seen a woman actually passing away in the queue at the very spot where we sat. The women then went on to discuss how, if they had a choice would go to a private hospital, where they won’t have to spend the day on the queue, or see people die while waiting.

They went on to discuss how hospital staff ill-treat people, how the doctors are in a hurry to write a prescription even when the patient has not finished listing the symptoms. They concluded that if you could afford private hospitals, very good health care is available.

DFID Nigeria has 3 Health Programmes currently running in Northern Nigeria. As the Social Development Adviser, I work with the Health Adviser who manages from the ‘demand side’ – getting the right approach for helping people, and supporting communities to actually demand for better public services. A lot has been done in this area through earlier DFID and other donor programmes.

However, there is still a lot to be done to get people to start expecting some positive response from the state. As a local person, I know that the challenges are not as overwhelming as they seem and with the constructive input of service users, we can make the changes they see as current problems. There is also a need to get the state to start improving its service delivery so people have the indication that the state is trying at its own end. The demand side and supply side need to be pursued from their different ends to have an aggregated push towards reform.

Two publications looked at the problem of rising health costs and ways to try to “bend the curve.”

In a cover story, BusinessWeek reports: “None of the health-care reform bills on the table in Washington do anything meaningful to address that wasted $700 billion.” The magazine lists 10 ways to cut costs, including: “develop a healthy workforce,” “coordinate care through family doctors,” “get patients to take their medicine,” “discuss options near the end of life” and “use insurance to manage chronic disease” (Arnst, 11/12).

Meanwhile, The New York Times writes: “Which should we trust to rein in health care costs: the federal government or the private sector?  Seeking to make the case for less government involvement in health care, a brief analysis (PDF) by the Joint Economic Committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas … concluded that countries with primarily government-run systems often do a worse job controlling cost growth than does the United States. The conclusion is that giving government more control over health care here would be a big mistake.”

It is an idea with wide appeal, but these data, at least, do not support it. ‘They extrapolate from one statistic to make conclusions about how comparative systems work that are at odds with what the broader evidence shows,’ said Richard Saltman, a professor of health policy at Emory University, who has published an online critique of Mr. Brownback’s memorandum”  (Andrews, 11/12).

Frank Browning reports for Kaiser Health News on how the health reform debate is playing out in rural Kentucky. “From a strip-mined bluff at the edge of this famous mountain town you can see one of the most concentrated and diverse sets of medical facilities in rural America: a general hospital, a psychiatric hospital, a university-based rural health care center and clinics for primary care, cancer, urology, cardiology, addiction and ear-nose-and throat problems. Yet Hazard, which for 40 years was a coal boomtown, rests at the center of the worst health care region in America” (11/13). Read the entire story. This story has four related videos featuring local health care experiences and perspectives: Cathy Nance, Gerry Roll, Annie Fox and Beverly May.

Industry advocates say health reform could place a disproportionate burden on children’s hospitals, because they will face cuts along with other hospitals, but do not stand to benefit from expansions in insurance coverage, USA Today reports. Children’s hospitals “serve a high share of patients on Medicaid, which pays hospitals less than private insurance. And, because of past government efforts to insure children, most of them already have coverage — meaning children’s hospitals have less to gain from an increase in the number of people with insurance.” The planned cuts, which hospitals agreed to in meetings at the White House, would include so-called disproportionate share hospital payments that help facilities that treat the uninsured and Medicaid patients make ends meet. Children’s hospitals are now lobbying Congress to block such changes they say could cost them $876 million (Fritze, 11/12).

Meanwhile, due to budget crises, some states are already cutting payments to hospitals. The Gary, Ind., Post-Tribune reports “Indiana Families and Social Services Administration announced Tuesday it would cut the state Medicaid match by 5 percent — an estimated $10.6 million — to Indiana hospitals. Indiana Medicaid paid the state’s hospitals $524.6 million for inpatient and outpatient care, with the state contributing approximately 25 percent of that total and the federal government the remaining 75 percent. The 5 percent cut would come from the state. Local health systems said the Medicaid cuts will hurt their ability to deliver care to poor and uninsured patients and those Medicaid recipients” (Taylor, 11/13).

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.

We’ve seen convincing and not so convincing screenshots of Chrome OS over the last several months. The good news is the speculation is about to end, and you can try it out yourself. If you have one of the supported devices, that is.

Roll Call reports that President Obama’s eight-day trip to Asia “will have little effect on Democrats’ ability to move health care legislation through the Senate, according to Senate and White House aides.” When news first broke that he would be gone for an extended amount of time, many Democrats met the news with “consternation,” but it now appears that Obama won’t be missing the “crunch time.” The Senate is still preparing to take up debate on the bill. “And he is unlikely to make any public pitches for health care while in Asia” (Koffler, 11/12).

T-Mobile Android junkies that aren’t digging the carriers current offerings from HTC might want to go through their desk, grab a Sharpie and circle November 18th on their calendars  for that’s the day T-Mobile has officially announced the Samsung Behold II will go on sale. Pricing is still a sekret, but we sincerely hope for T-Mobile’s sake that it will keep the price on this sucker really low, say under $199.99. For all we know that’s why pricing hasn’t been announced, they’re probably still negotiating the subsidy with Samsung. Hit the jump for the press release.

T-Mobile USA Launches the Samsung Behold II on November 18

Multimedia Powerhouse Joins Broad Selection of Android-Powered Smartphones for T-Mobile Customers

BELLEVUE, Wash., and DALLAS — Nov. 13, 2009 — T-Mobile USA, Inc., the wireless leader in offering the broadest selection of Android™-powered smartphones in the United States, today announced that the Samsung Behold® II will be available beginning Nov. 18. The full touch-screen Behold II is a multimedia powerhouse with fast Web and data supported by Wi-Fi® and T-Mobile’s high-speed 3G network.

Available exclusively from T-Mobile USA, the Behold II is the first phone from T-Mobile to feature a 3.2-inch AMOLED screen for crisper colors and wider viewing angles, which is paired with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, zoom, flash, five shooting modes and video capabilities. Samsung’s intuitive cube menu also provides quick access to six top multimedia features: music, photos, videos, the Web, YouTube™ and Amazon MP3 for music downloads.

“With its first-rate multimedia capabilities front and center, the Samsung Behold II adds an exclamation point to T-Mobile’s already impressive Android lineup for the holidays,” said Wendy Piñero-DePencier, vice president, brand and calendar marketing, T-Mobile USA. “The combination of 3G speeds, its high-resolution touch-screen, and access to loads of entertainment features is sure to make the Behold II into a holiday hit.”

The Android-powered phone is equipped with Samsung’s innovative TouchWiz™ user interface for easy customization through movable widgets and one-touch access to commonly used features and applications. The Behold II offers three different home screens to organize multiple workspaces with favorite widgets and application shortcuts.

“The Behold II raises the bar to the next level to create a rich, customizable set of different user experiences,” said Omar Khan, senior vice president of strategy and product management for Samsung Mobile. “Combined with Samsung’s advanced AMOLED display technology, innovative TouchWiz user interface and the Android platform, users can create and enjoy a mobile experience unique to their needs.”

The Behold II features built-in Google™ mobile services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, YouTube and Google Talk™, as well as thousands of applications and games available for download from Android Market™. The Wi-Fi-enabled Behold II also supports personal e-mail and corporate e-mail with Exchange ActiveSync, as well as instant messaging, and text, picture and video messaging. Additional features include assisted GPS, Bluetooth® 2.1, visual voicemail that allows for easier access and response to voice mail, support for up to 16GB of external memory, and includes a 2GB microSD memory card.

With support for T-Mobile’s rapidly expanding 3G network, Behold II customers can take advantage of a reliable wireless connection and fast download speeds when browsing the Web or downloading applications from Android Market. T-Mobile’s 3G network is currently available in 240 cities across the country. By the end of 2009, T-Mobile USA expects its 3G network to be available to reach approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population.

The Samsung Behold II will be available nationwide at T-Mobile retail stores, select authorized dealers and online at http://www.T-Mobile.com beginning Nov. 18, 2009.

We were just noting that the IFPI thinks it’s going to start seizing computers directly to get evidence of unauthorized file sharing, and wondering how that would work. At least in the UK, they may have just received some legal support. Over the summer, we wondered why an anti-piracy group in the UK was given access to and allowed to keep computers from a criminal investigation into an online service, called Surfthechannel, accused of unauthorized file sharing. The police seized the computers, but decided not to pursue criminal charges. It never made much sense that private, industry-backed anti-piracy group FACT was a major part of the criminal investigation, as they’re quite the biased party. They were given seized computers as a part of this investigation — and once the police decided not to pursue criminal charges, FACT kept the machines, saying it was considering a civil suit. However, the lawyers for Surfthechannel noted that the police and FACT had no right to keep the seized machines after the decision was made not to pursue criminal charges.

Apparently (and unfortunately) a judge disagrees. A reader alerts us (via comments on a totally separate story, rather than a submission — not sure why) to the news that the judge in the case has said that police have every right to retain seized computers, even after they’ve decided not to pursue criminal charges. The judges noted that the law allows police the retain anything seized “so long as is necessary in all the circumstances” and then ruled that the potential of a civil suit from FACT was one of those “circumstances” that qualified. It’s difficult to see how that makes any sense, but so ruled the court.

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BlackBerry App World isn’t perfect. It’s sometimes slow, sometimes not intuitive, and sometimes makes it difficult to find certain applications. (For instance, a search for PressReader came up empty yesterday from my handset, but it was there on the website.) There was even an issue yesterday where it was not working for a while. The main complaint I’ve heard, though, is that PayPal is the exclusive purchasing platform. Some people just don’t like PayPal, or otherwise don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up an account and adding funds. Thankfully, that will soon change. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference, co-CEO Jim Balsillie noted that carrier billing is coming in 2010. Soon you can make all the impulse purchases you want, and you won’t see the bill until the end of the month.

* Usually we save newsy posts for News From The Wire, but I didn’t see this until after it was posted and thought it was worthwhile. Stay tuned. The BBGeekcast is coming up soon.

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

BlackBerry App World will offer carrier billing

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

BlackBerry App World will offer carrier billing