Monitor -- Engadget Mobile

monitor posts

TeleNav's GPS Vehicle Tracker comes to AT&T's enterprise services

by Darren Murph posted Dec 10th 2008 @ 4:59AM

Vehicle tracking is an old trick at this point, but that's not to say there's no demand out there in the enterprise space. Announced today, the TeleNav Vehicle Tracker has been added to the carrier's portfolio of enterprise mobility services. Said GPS-enabled device can be hard-wired or embedded onto a vehicle to provide "companies of all sizes with a hassle-free method for monitoring and managing fleet operations." Specifically, it can log and report via email or SMS (on AT&T's network, obviously) when an employee violates an established policy (speed, stop time, mileage, etc.) and provide "detailed information about vehicle activity, including whether the engine is turned on or doors are open." The tracker will run customers a whopping $399, with a monthly service fee of around $34 (yes, for each device). In other words, you better be really suspicious before diving into this.

[Via RCRWireless]

E911 actually works, finds transplant patient at jazz festival

by Michael Caputo posted May 27th 2007 @ 11:01PM

From listening to your phone calls to reading your text messages, Big Brother will always find a way to keep up to date with our lives. For a 10 year old boy from Pennsylvania who was waiting for a heart transplant, it was an indispensable technology that saved his life. While waiting for a phone call notifying him a donor had been found, they boy was out with his family and unreachable. Luckily for him, his mother had a Sprint celly and the authorities where able to locate them while at a local jazz festival using the phones integrated GPS. Soon after being located, the boy was rushed to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh where the surgery was a success.

UCSD's Squirrel puts pollution monitoring on your mobile

by Darren Murph posted May 7th 2007 @ 5:05PM

Giving an animal a phone to tote around and monitor pollution is one thing, but hooking up a critter to your cellphone sans wires sounds like a much more viable solution to keeping track of filthy surroundings. UC San Diego's Squirrel -- which sounds an awful lot like a project UC Berkeley was working on -- is a Bluetooth-enabled, palm-sized sensor that currently measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually will be able to "sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity." After sampling, the device then utilizes a software application dubbed Acorn to allow the user to "see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cellphone's display." Furthermore, the program can periodically upload the captured data to a public database operated by the "California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is funding Squirrel's development." Of course, cleaning up the mess that these monitors will inevitably find is an entirely different matter.

[Via MedGadget]

Japanese government to track kids via mobile handsets

by Darren Murph posted Jan 8th 2007 @ 11:55AM

Here's a tip: don't relocate to Japan unless you're entirely down with being monitored practically everywhere you go. Sure, things aren't that serious quite yet, but with RFID tracking going on in schools, prisons, airlines, and now, um, everywhere else, you can pretty much rest assured that big brother is indeed taking notes. The next step in mass monitoring involves GPS, RFID, and cellphones, and the service is intended to track kids' whereabouts and alert parents whenever they enter potentially "dangerous areas." Reportedly, RFID readers will be setup in various areas (like school gates and electric polls) and track tags carried by (incredibly obedient) children, or better yet, simply monitor the GPS locator in the youngster's handset. Of course, we've no idea where these "danger zones" could be, nor how long the crime lords of the area will actually let that pole-sitting RFID reader remain in tact, but the system is supposed to be piloted in "20 regions across the country" real soon.

[Via Textually]

Big Brother is SMS savvy in some countries

by Chris Ziegler posted Jul 4th 2006 @ 5:47AM

It's no secret that China is rockin' some serious server power dedicated to filtering its SMS airwaves of unthinkable topics like Taiwan, democracy, and pornography, but other countries are getting in on the action, too. Belarus and Iran have both been called out in recent months for listening to its citizens' texts, and in Belarus' case, sending them as well. Although the technology for real-time filtering by keyword is largely homegrown (or so we hope), predictive text manufacturers like Tegic (disclaimer: Tegic is owned by Engadget's parent company's parent company, AOL) are receiving pressure from handset manufacturers to double- and triple-check their dictionaries for words that could be considered distasteful in countries with more oppressive governments than our own. Personally, discovering a word missing from T9 has never prevented us from typing it manually, but nonetheless -- between this and M-Track, we're about ready to head down into the Engadget bunker with a year's supply of Spam and just ride this whole thing out.

[Via textually.org]