Archive for May, 2006

Saw an interesting article in CNN.COM about how Wal-Mart and other big retailers are reducing costs and improving efficiency using RFID tags on merchandise.
They have gotten their biggest suppliers to add RFID chips to pallets and cases shipped to stores. Now, rather than having people with bar-code scanners walk around to take inventory, RFID readers in warehouses can automatically tally items on the fly.
This helps not only in the warehouse, but when they move merchandise to the store, and ultimately when they throw away the cases.
According to studies, one of the costliest problems in retail is when a consumer goes to a store to buy an item, only to find that shelf empty – although replacement merchandise is sitting in the warehouse. With RFID, you get the chance to replenish items much quicker than in a “manual” fashion by looking at the shelves.
So when are we going to find RFID tags on that box of cereal, or that coke-bottle? Not anytime in the near future. RFID is still too expensive for single item marking (tags cost between 5 to 7 cents today). There are also privacy concerns regarding the use of RFID for monitoring people’s buying habits. And then there’s the security problem regarding the frequencies these tags use and the ease of interference or “hacking”.

…as I said before, I like looking att cool DIY projects, like the ones found at MAKEZINE or POPULAR SCIENCE. Just now, I was browsing the webiste of the latter, and there they have a section called HOW 2.0. I found a really cool photo frame made with an old laptop that downloads pics thru WIFI from FLICKR – now, how cool is THAT? Check it out HERE

I’ve been reading up a little bit about Google Pagerank, search engine optimizing and stuff. Google ranks its’ pages not by content or keyword occurrences, but by the number of external links that link to a page. In my specific case, no other pages link to my blog (yet), which means that my pagerank is really low, like “0″ at the moment. The “weight” of the website that links to your website is also important, so if you get someone that has a high ranking website to link to your site, your pagerank will increase and thus you will appear higher up on Google’s list. Interesting, huh?

A friend of mine, Drasko Markovic is about to release a search engine analyzer tool, and you can read more about it on his blog. It’s a pretty cool tool that can help you optimize your page, and give you some understanding as to how the search engines work. Tho official web address is SEARCH ENGINE ANALYSIS

Hopefully the pagerank of this page will soon be increasing as I will try to link to other blogs, etc. All in an effort to understand how this works. If you read this blog and like it, feel free to link to www.lekare.com!

Today, Mexico’s largest newspaper, REFORMA had a special supplement called ‘Internet in Mexico’. This supplement, as usual full of ads and ads disguised as real articles, gives some interesting statistics about the state of Internet penetration in Mexico:

17% of all Mexicans (17 million people) have Internet access
59% of Internet users are male
71% of all Internet users connect to the Internet through a broadband Internet connection

This leads me to think that Mexico is a country steadily advancing (albeit too slow) in the IT sphere. I believe this has many reasons:

The poverty / lack of education is of course the biggest culprit here. No money = no connection. Although there are zillions of Internet cafées spread all over the country, charging no more than 5-10 pesos (around 40-80 cents) an hour, which is good.
The monopoly that Telmex has on the broadband connections in Mexico. Telmex owns the physical phone lines, so there is essentialy no competition. Sure, there are cable companies offering “broadband access” that starts at 64kbps, and some companies offering Wimax-like connections. The absolute majority of the broadband community in Mexico are connected through Telmex. They keep their prices fairly high, and their connection speed fairly low, the fastest available connection is a 1.3 mbps downstream (384 kbps upstream) connection for around USD 100 / month. Comparing to US ISPs and European ISPs, the prices are extremely high, for the low speed they offer. There are rumours of raising the speed to 8 mbps or even 24 mbps in some areas, mostly to try to provide IPTV services and thus to push the cable companies out of the market. Mexican anti-monopolistic laws are really flawd and easily manipulated by companies like Telmex, that use these laws to it’s own benefit. This leaves us consumers wanting more for our money, but receiving less and less.
It sucks.

This looks like a really cool gadget…. is it? It will be running Windows XP Pro, Wifi, Edge, it has a fingerprint reader, screen resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, touch sensitive screen, port replicator, VGA, Ethernet, 3 USB2.0 ports, video out, etc. Now, with it’s 1.2 GHz Core Solo processor, 512 MB RAM and 30GB HDD, it looks like a pretty decent desktop machine… And the price? USD 1800 according to Sony. With Edge-connectivity, this could be a real spiffy little car cadget. Read more at NEWS.COM

I have to admit, I’m a big fan of magazines like Popular Science, where they talk about new cool gadgets and stuff. I have just found out about a new, even cooler magazine. It’s called Make: technology on your time. The magazine focuses on people that have a heavy technology addiction, pretty much money, a well equipped toolshed, and far too much time to spend. It shows you how you can build small robots out of cheap motors and even cheaper microcontrollers, and lots and lots of other pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately, the online version of the magazine is password protecting the content, but you can still browse around the “public” projects and find so many cool things to do!