Most business people carry cell phones and many use BlackBerries or laptops as well to keep up with e-mail while out of the office.
But as handy as mobile wireless communications may be, it’s still far from a perfect world. Tradesmen who depend upon cell phones to get calls from customers worry whether they’ll get decent reception at the next job site. To larger enterprises, even slightly inferior call quality can be a turnoff.
“When it’s your business, telecommunications is mission critical,” said Michael Voellinger, vice president of wireless services for Telwares, a telecom consultancy. “You won’t tolerate even a slight jitter that a consumer would barely notice.”
Wireless carriers are working to boost network quality, and they court enterprise customers with great care, pushing the notion that one day a business might cut the cord, much as young consumers increasingly do.
Earlier this month, for instance, Cingular introduced its next-generation network in Chicago with a product clearly aimed at the business customer: a radio card that goes in the back of a laptop to provide DSL-like speeds while connecting wirelessly to the Internet.
Sprint Nextel this month launched a new unit aimed at providing mobility solutions to enterprise customers. Gary Forsee, Sprint’s chief executive, said his firm is promoting wired and wireless networks for businesses. In some cases, Forsee said, Sprint has put devices on campuses to boost wireless signals.
Despite these efforts, Voellinger said most businesses are still a long way from opting to fully embrace wireless communications and forsake traditional wired connections.
“Wireless service just isn’t in a state where it makes sense to do it,” said Voellinger. “Everywhere you look, there are network limits, security problems and cost issues. There are a lot of obstacles to go through until you get to a level where wireless quality is at a level that’s acceptable to enterprise users.
“It’ll probably be 2009 or 2010 before this happens.”
Smile: Eventually, scientists figure a way to computerize just about everything, even Mona Lisa’s smile.
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Using a University of Illinois software program, researchers analyzed the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. They concluded that her smile expressed a great deal of happiness, scoring more than 82 percent, but there were also aspects of disgust, about 9 percent, and fear, nearly 6 percent. Add a smidge of anger, just over 2 percent, and you get the look that has beguiled millions over the five centuries since the painting was made.
Tom Huang, a professor at the Urbana-Champaign campus who headed the project to create the face-tracking software used in the analysis, noted that just six emotional states were included in the code: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. “If you’re interested in things like enigma or mystery,” he said, “maybe these six aren’t enough.”
The end: Most times when a doctor or nurse gives someone an injection in the rear end, it’s a futile gesture, an Irish researcher reported at the recent annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America held in Chicago. Using computerized tomography X-ray images, Dr. Victoria Chan and colleagues from the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin observed shots given to 50 patients.
In 58 percent of the men, but only 8 percent of the women, the injections did reach their target of the buttock muscles, Chan reported. The failures occurred, she reported, because the needles were too short and the bottoms too fat.
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