By Paul Thomson :: 9:08 PM
The Silicon Valley, California city of Santa Clara rolled out free public WiFi across the city this week as part of an electric meter and infrastructure update.
Santa Clara’s new WiFi network spans across 19 square miles, offering covering for the 118,000 residents of the city. It is intended for more casual web browsing and e-mail checking rather than data-intensive tasks like video streaming or online gaming. The city has capped speeds on the network to about 1 Mbps.
The city joins another Silicon Valley in offering free Internet access. Earlier this month, the city of San Jose announced the launch of a free WiFi network that will cover its entire downtown.
“This is just one of the major benefits our community will enjoy as a result of our advanced metering technology,†said the director of the project, John Roukema. He expects that there will be over 5,000 connections to the public WiFi network each day.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:28 AM
The iPhone 4 may not be so new and shiny any longer, but it remains at the top of the list of mobile devices when it comes to ad serving online.
In a report released earlier this month by mobile ad company Velti, the iPhone 4 was responsible for receiving 14.5% of the mobile ads served in January and February of this year. Of the top ten devices on the list, 8 were Apple devices, and the top 6 all belonged to Apple. Android devices didn’t make an appearance until the number 7 slot with the Samsung Galaxy S II at just 2.8% of mobile ads served. [See chart below]
By Cynthia Herbert :: 9:37 AM
A group of Russian adventurers and photographers visited the Great Pyramids of Egypt last week, outside of Cairo. Waiting until the cover of darkness, they bypassed security guards at the monuments, and scaled them to take these breathtaking pictures.
They had to wait for four hours to find a good time to sneak past the guards, and were careful to stay low once they were on the pyramids. Punishment for climbing on Egypt’s national treasures can range from 1 to 3 years imprisonment.
See below for some of the breathtaking images that they were able to capture. Disclaimer – don’t try this yourselves – it’s dangerous, illegal, and could damage one of the great wonders of the world.
By Paul Thomson :: 8:42 AM
If you’ve been on Facebook and Twitter over the past day, you may be seeing a stream of your friends’ profile pictures looking a lot like the red and pink equality symbol to the right.
The symbol is an variation on the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) logo, which is usually a yellow equals sign on a blue background. It was adapted to red and pink to signify the hearings currently under way at the Supreme Court on the legalization of gay marriage.
The HRC posted the image online on Monday afternoon this week, and it quickly went viral, being shared across social networks, and also adapted by social network users as their profile picture. The image was so popular that the HRC’s website was down due to a traffic overload for a short time yesterday morning.
According to data from Facebook, one of the top terms on the social network yesterday was “equality.” Yesterday was the first day that the Supreme Court heard arguments on Proposition 8, a law that was passed in California prohibiting same-sex marriages.
Wednesday was the first day of two days of hearings on the matter, and activists from both sides have taken over Washington D.C. and the area around the Supreme Court building.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 10:23 PM
Red Medicine, a Vietnamese restaurant in Los Angeles, is turning to Twitter to shame patrons who make a reservation for dinner, and then don’t show up.
The restaurant’s owner told an L.A. dining magazine that he made the decision to out the no-shows after a particularly long string of reservations went unclaimed.
While many restaurants these days shy away from taking reservations, or require a credit card deposit to hold a reservation, Red Medicine’s tactics seem to be a new one in the dining industry. The restaurant uses restaurant reservation service OpenTable to field reservations through its website.
Below – screenshots of Tweets from Red Medicine, directed at diners who skipped out on reservations.
