Botanicalls

A soil moisture sensor in each plant sends information to an Arduino board which then passes the information to a ZigBee network. An XPort is used to send data via PHP to a mySQL database and to Asterisk, which drives the phone calls.

The code on the chip averages the data and makes decisions about when a phone call request should be sent. There are set thresholds, unique to each plant, for minimum and maximum soil moisture.

The moisture sensor circuit is based on Forrest Mims. Read more here.

Indian Water Portal

"The India Water Portal is an open, inclusive, web-based platform for sharing water management knowledge amongst practitioners and the general public."

It includes multimedia training clips, video stories, case study, etc... to assist in training and sharing of knowledge about water management.

WiMAX

Called (or competing with) 4G technology or wireless broadband, it could theoretically provide up to 50km (31mi.) range, 70Mbps (shared)/268Mbps (peak); in practice it will probably provide only 2 to 4 Mbps. The first products certified in Jan. 2006; backed by Intel, Nokia, Motorola and others.

Service has already been rolled out in some US cities; 100 cities are expected to be covered next year (by Sprint Nextel).

Source

Second Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments

Matt Jones from VeSeL partner project StoryBank will be the invited speaker at this workshop in Singapore, September 9, 2007, part of ACM Mobile HCI 07.

Traditionally, voice-based applications have been accessed using unintelligent telephone devices through Voice Browsers that reside on the server. The proliferation of pervasive devices and the increase in their processing capabilities, client-side speech processing is emerging as a viable alternative. As in SiMPE 2006, we will further explore the various possibilities and issues that arise while enabling speech processing on resource-constrained, possibly mobile devices.

In particular, this year's theme will be SiMPE for developing regions.