To help with the mundane task of checking and managing your e-mail, this little tool might be worth considering:  ePrompter.  This program notifies you when you have new e-mail, allows you to retrieve messages from up to 16 accounts, and lets you respond to and delete those messages. For those of us who have come to juggle multiple work and personal accounts in an effort to stay connected, this program might be worth a look. www.eprompter.com

Tellme Networks uses voice recognition and is working with Cingular Wireless to offer a broader set of 411 services.  This capability is intended to provide more than the typical directory lookup information, including: movie times, locations, ticket purchases and driving directions.  The opportunity for location-oriented advertising is expected to grow significantly as the technology matures and other competitors (did somebody say Google again?) actively enter the market.

Tellme’s perspective:

“Speaking is faster than typing and looking is faster than listening,” said Jeff Kunins, the vice president for product management at Tellme. “That paradigm of voice in, data out is massively powerful.”

Imagine asking your cell a question and getting the necessary real-time information on how much it costs, directions on how to get there, and when to be there!  Sweet!  See article.

The Connected World report reviews location-aware advertising and information services in “Pervasive Presence and Location” (p. 58).

An interesting context for WiMAX:

“Hanna, Alberta, has 2,996 people, 16 restaurants, 10 churches, seven motels, and six WiMAX towers.“

An early deployment of WiMAX’s fixed broadband wireless capabilities (IEEE 802.16d) can be found in this small and very rural Canadian farming community.  In this area where alternatives such as fiber and 3G wireless are costly and problematic, fixed WiMAX is finding an early North American niche.  With good line-of-sight, subscribers can access base stations up to 15 miles away using outdoor mounted 12-inch-square units.  Data rates vary from 512 Kbps to 3 Mbps and plans are priced from $35 to $150 (US).  Besides residential customers, a few oil and gas companies are giving this technology a try.

In this region, “last mile” access remains an issue. Fixed and upcoming mobile WiMAX offers an alternative for the community to get on to the connected world’s fast lane. See article.

How long will it take for our behaviours to catch up to the potential of the connected world? Not in the sense that we leverage the connected world at all times, but that we know where it helps and where it does not—that we don’t believe it feeds us, takes care of our relationships, does our exercise for us and so on. I have many examples around me, including an increasing pile of magazine cut-outs, of people plugging out. It seems that the more severe the case of being “sucked in” the more serious the “plug out.“

One of the tenets of the connected world is that eventually we will reach wireless nirvana, where all wireless networks converge into interoperable, high speed, video-friendly 4G networks.  Are we there yet?  No, but a recent agreement between Intel and Nokia gets us a step closer.

In the alphabet soup that is the cellular world, HSDPA (3.5G) is getting a boost from a deal between Intel and Nokia that will include Nokia’s HSDPA module in the next Intel Centrino Duo chipset. This will spread cellular connectivity in laptops, providing broader coverage than Wi-Fi and, with HSDPA, better download speeds than 3G.  It also serves as a precursor to WiMax capability, which Intel has been investigating and hopes to deliver via an integrated Wi-Fi/WiMax chip by 2008.  Despite the HSDPA move, WiMax, with much broader coverage and speed, is seen as “the jewel of the crown of wireless” for Intel.  (See article.) 

So the cellular world pushes forward alongside progress in the WiMax arena.  The two may co-exist, compete, or one cannibalize the other; the jury is out on that.  But in the world of 4G networks, as envisioned, the two will provide seamless network services, which is good news for users.

P.S. T-Mobile should be announcing HSDPA in the USA soon.