Personal Telco Monthly Meeting for May 26th 2004

When and Where

Urban Grind Coffee 2214 NE Oregon St. (take 22nd Ave. 2 blocks North of Sandy Blvd.)

Wednesday, May 26th, 6pm-9pm

Agenda

Speaker

Harold Vines holds a BSEE and MSCs from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley. At night he dreams of a large project manager bear coming around and scratching big red tree programmers. Currently he is the Manager of Mobile Technology Evangelism at Intel, where he has worked for 13 years.

7:30p Harold will present the features, benfits and new usages of the Intel 2005 Mobile Internet Concept Platform.

As always, our presenter is thanked for allowing my abuse of his bio.

Agenda Items

Meeting Notes


6:30pm: DarinEden welcomes everyone, introduces the mission of PersonalTelco and officers in organization.

6:40pm: NigelBallard takes mike for new member introductions. Update on PREN: currently running tests, has 2 pre wimax base stations one on Shriner Hospital and other on the downtown Ondine building by Portland State University. Updates will be on www.joejava.com Connection will be through 100 Meg fiber connection on Shriner and one on 10Meg on the Ondine. Is talking with city of Portland to potentially feed 6 rooftops with city. Mentioned that Willamette Week is doing a writeup. Asked for interesting anedotes. Second item, Intel's webcam at the UrbanGrind Coffee Shop (where this meeting is being held). Gave credit to Intel and the people from the Intel Social Research group.

Introductions: Husband and wife are working on non-profit group for delivering low cost WiFi for low income communities. Asked for technical help. Others; PSU CS student, works on IP law. The president of OakTree introduced himself. OakTree hosts the most popular hotspot in Portland, on the South Park blocks. Others, amateur radio operator, and several others.

6:50pm: DarrinEden: Brought out membership forms. Introduces Tom Fitzgerald. Tom is working at Intel and introduced Harold Vines with cool new toys. Harold now lives in the (downtown) Pearl district and uses the WorldCup PTP node daily. As mobility platform honcho, he's been 13 years at Intel and lately new architecture and usage models. Recap; Intel's Centrino launched year ago, since the initial launch growth exceeded all analysists expectations. Now working on next year's platform models- mobile entertainment is one push. Harold demoed the large mobile desktop that looks like a large laptop but with a different keyboard layout and, of course, may other differences. The machines have been demoed elsewhere (we'll make a link). The idea is home entertainment.

Three concept models were shown that they show to potential OEMs that can take the concept and build on it:

(1) The Florence looks like a portable, 17" flatscreen. You can watch tv, do PVR, or surf with 9 pound unit. Very portable with handle on top and battery powered. HDTV capable. Has fast user switching via biometric. Going for 3 hour battery life. Built-in camera, array mike, four audio simultaneous input streams for background noise reduction and point source locatization, handy for videoconferencing. Uses Xpress card (rather than PC card).

(2) Demoed the small battery owerated keyboard and mouse/bluetooth handset radio. The handset links to flatscreen via bluetooth and does VoIP.

(3) The 15" portable digital office. Similar to larger machine but with a focus on business. Working in cubes, campus, going to local or metro area. Road warriors on the road has a 12" model. The 15" portable has same internal components with biometric, print, password and or token/rfid. Integrated camera with array mikes. Artifacts can be corrected and background reduced - that is key to voice recognition said Vines. Hal-like lip reading have been studied to improved the accuracy of voice recognition. Also has GPRS cellular. Simplified network selection will continously monitor wireless options and connect with the network with your preferences.

(4) The 12" road Warror is a tablet with a difference. Lid can separate for use as slate. Same guts, arraymike, cam, etc. Much more portable.

A new usage model, closed lid computing, would display basic calendar and messaging info directly. Always on and connected. Also VoIP would be utilized with Bluetooth headset (or other). With the universal inbox, everything goes to one in box. It will find you.

Feedback from audience: Linux support was mentioned by many people, and the major complaint. Without Linux support, some said, the flexibility and utility would be limited. Also mentioned with a thin server model sharing media.

Lid display would initially turn off display and cache info in local memory that the user may want. HD spins up if required. Second phase would be embedded Xscale in lid with embedded OS and wireless and local HD.

Discussion on one bill roaming. Why not a free cloud as a viable business research pursuit?

8:00: Meeting break. Harold Vines available for Q&A.

8:15: Rob Peterson announcements; have a new node (didn't catch it), membership announcements and requirements were discussed. Rob philosophized that pay hotspots were good- they get the word out.

8:20: MichaelWeinberg talked about fund raising. The next fund raising is a raffle in September, tickets will cost $1 each and start in July. Looking for goods and services, Urban Grind Coffee Shop gave $10 in coffee, others include theatre tickets, etc. Contact Michael if you have ideas.

8:30: Bernard World Wide Wardrive: It's the 4th year, starts on June 12 through 19th to get as many nodes as possible. The idea: increases awareness of security. A website will exist to pubize the event and posted here on the PTP site.

8:40: Tom Higgins: Now the education coordinator. Project tracking. Since PTP is 501c3, we are keeping a wiki page where people can describe their project. Post your project and get together. Everyone can follow it. If you can place a monitory value on your project, post it. Then perhaps funding for grants, etc, could be found.

Playday; Breakout sessions include the public IP, Less Networks, other free hotspot hardware and software. Regularly schedule. Also a general discussion and meeting space.

Stats time...... With just 18 nodes worth of data the numbers are pretty amazing...Across those 18 nodes the PTP is averaging about 172.42 authentications per day.

Top ten nodes are:

Rank

Node Name

Avg Auths Per Day

10.

alder street node

9.62

9.

powells book

9.84

8.

ugly mug

10.5

7.

south park

12.5

6.

urban grind

15.4

5.

eco trust

15.46

4.

anna bannas

18

3.

backspace

20.88

2.

world cup nw

22.85

1.

pioneer square

24.3

Next month will be an open discussion forum.

8:40: DarinEden ajourns the June meeting.

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