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Google launches Hispanic coding initiative in eight US cities
The Hispanic Heritage Foundation's (HHF) president, Jose Antonio Tijerino, thinks that "seeing a latino programmer shouldn't be akin to seeing a unicorn," so his group is trying to do something about it. Together with Google, it launched Code as a Second Language (CSL) courses in eight cities, including New York, Las Angeles and Miami. The idea is to introduce students to coding through 1-2 hour sessions, then steer them to the LOFT (Latinos on Fast Track) network for ongoing online instruction. Students who complete that training could later be granted internships and possibly full-time positions with Fortune 500 companies.
Hong Kong's CSL demos 300Mbps LTE Advanced service, due early 2014 (video)
It was only about four months ago when CSL, Telstra's part-owned operator behind Hong Kong's one2Free and 1010 networks, showed off its 150Mbps LTE Cat 4 upgrade; but why stop there? Today, the same company gave us a glimpse of its upcoming 300Mbps LTE Advanced service, which is enabled by aggregating its 20MHz carriers at both its 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands. "The announcements in Korea and the announcements in Australia around LTE Advanced... the theoretical speed that they're delivering is 150Mbps. What we're talking about today is LTE-A300," said Phil Mottram, CEO of CSL. "It's definitely a first for Hong Kong, and it's potentially a world-first in terms of being able to deliver these theoretical, maximum download speeds at 300Mbps."
Hong Kong's CSL preps network for LTE Cat 4, offers Huawei's 150 Mbps mobile hotspot (video)
With Hong Kong boasting pretty much the fastest average internet speed on this planet, it's no surprise that the city is also one of the first to launch commercial 150 Mbps LTE Cat 4 service -- just right after SingTel's launch in Singapore earlier this month. Announced yesterday by CSL (who operates both one2free and the more premium 1010), its FD-LTE network takes advantage of the recently acquired 5MHz extended spectrum, in order to increase the capacity of 2600MHz from 2 x 15MHz to 2 x 20MHz. This upgrade is what enables Cat 4 download speed of up to 150Mbps on compatible devices, and it went live yesterday. The company's 1800MHz spectrum will also get an upgrade from 2 x 10MHz to 2 x 15MHz in June, followed by another jump to 2 x 20MHz towards the end of the year. You'll find a live demo video (courtesy of RingHK) showing the performance difference between Cat 3 and Cat 4 after the break, with CTO Christian Daigneault claiming he's seen a speed increase of up to twice as fast in the lab.
Sony makes floating-head telepresence avatars a reality, Sean Connery digs out gun and red speedos
The real world just got a little more Zardoz thanks to Tobita Hiroaki and his colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, who've built a telepresence blimp that projects the operator's face across its meter-wide surface. The looming, translucent face can float about like any other blimp; an interior camera allows the user to see where it's going. The whole thing is ominous in a completely different way from, say, a tiny googly-eyed robot perched on your shoulder, but something about its nearly silent movements still gives us the creeps – and unlike the Anybots QB, it's not going to pick up your scone from the café. But if your dreams include having others bow before your god-like visage, you'll have to wait awhile, as the technology's still in its early stages. In the meantime, you can practice intoning "Zardoz is pleased!" while watching the video above.
CSL's $500 Spice Mi700 DroidPad runs Froyo, looks awfully familiar
Seen this fellow before? Look closer. Seeing any similarities? For all intents and purposes, CSL's new Spice Mi700 DroidPad is just a rebadged Viewpad 7 / Camangi FM600, and given that CSL was also responsible for manufacturing the JooJoo, we'd say these guys know a thing or two about building a tablet. The device ships with Qualcomm's 600MHz MSM722, stock Android 2.2 (Froyo), the same nasty widgets that ship on FM600, a total lack of Flash support and no access to paid apps via the App Market. There's also a 3 megapixel camera on the rear, a VGA webcam on the front, WVGA capacitive touchpanel (7-inch), inbuilt WiFi / WWAN / Bluetooth, a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It's said to be available starting this month for $500, but early reviews aren't exactly giving it two thumbs up -- crank 'er down to $250 and we suspect those views will shift.
Joojoo tablet now in production, will support full Flash at launch
That other tablet that was announced just a week ago sure doesn't seem to be setting Fusion Garage's Joojoo off course. Not only did it see an increase in orders after the iPad announcement, but Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishna just told us that production of the 12-inch tablet has kicked off and that the product is on target to start shipping this month. And it doesn't sound like legal fees from fighting the TechCrunch lawsuit over the product are depleting Fusion Garage's bank account: Chandra told us it's teamed up with OEM CSL Group of Malaysia, which will be footing the bill for manufacturing in exchange for a "low single-digit" percentage of product revenue. We have our doubts about the math, but we'll see how happy everyone is if and when the Joojoo starts shipping. (We'll also see if James Cameron notices that Fusion Garage keeps using unlicensed Avatar images in its promo pictures.) Chandra still wouldn't budge on revealing what's powering the device, but he was more than happy to confirm that the tablet will support full Flash at launch, and HD Flash content once Flash 10.1 is officially released -- YouTube HD will play right now using a separate player plugin that takes advantage of GPU acceleration. "We have a bigger 'app store' than Apple because we have the full Internet," he told us. Nevertheless, Fusion plans to launch a "web store" that will allow people to find web applications on the Joojoo. Speaking of Apple, Chandra was quite blunt about the iPad: "Imitation is the greatest form of flattery." No really -- he told us everything from Steve Jobs calling the iPad a "magical product" to the couch being on stage during the keynote to the $499 price point was a nod to the Joojoo, since "juju" is an African word for "magical" and the Joojoo was positioned as a couch computer when it launched in November. Uh, sure. Trash talking aside, we're very excited to see what this thing can do -- a 16:9 720p tablet that can play Hulu sounds pretty interesting to us. Check the full press release after the break.
