Podcast!

Podcast

Summary

The aim of this blog was mainly to focus on my reflection surrounding articles that talk about technology and basically anything related to my major, I talked about two articles that I found interesting. The first one was about evolving the process of money transfer in mobile phones, where any bank account user in the UK will be able to transfer money immediately using an app produced by Barclay's Pingit System. The second article demonstrated an interesting technique developed by Harvard University engineers, who clones of tiny robots that are inspired by pop-up books and modeled with features of a Bee. The advantage of this miniature flat shaped robots is that they can easily be multiplied into large numbers of robots.


Using blogger doesn't necessarily mean that you blog your interests, but also allows you to explore others' interests by following their blogs. As I followed my colleagues' blogs, I passed by an interesting article by Megan from http://megancastleton-icct.blogspot.com/ who talked about "Transplant jaw made by 3D printer." This article focus on the medical side of technology and revolves around a 3D printer which creates transplant jaw that can be fitted into a human using the laser technique in a shorter time interval than the original reconstructive surgery! what a development in my opinion! The success of this operation can lead to creating other body parts using the same method.


Link: http://megancastleton-icct.blogspot.com/2012/02/transplant-jaw-made-by-3d-printer.html


Moving on, I also agreed with what blogger Ali mentioned about mobiles being a vital gadget to an individual in his blog http://al-ba7rain.blogspot.com. It's true that mobile phones nowadays is such an important device to own, not only for calling but generally communicating to everything in this world. You can't be left behind if you own the latest technology, because you have all you need in the palm of your hand. This is because in today's world mobiles contain everything from cameras to numerous apps about weather, news, applications etc...as well as communicating by SMS or MMS or any other form of reaching out to another person.

Link: http://al-ba7rain.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-we-cant-live-without-our-mobile.html?showComment=1329439948489#c2957810408951240313

At last but not least, another appealing article was Jenna's "BYOD: Bring Your Own Device" in her blog http://icct-mobcomms.blogspot.com/ which discussed a case where employees are asked to choose their preferred device to work on whether it be a desktop, laptop, Mac or a tablet. Since the number of people who own tablets and smartphones have increased rapidly, this opened the path of for this situation to grow and this case to be more official. As Jenna said, this step is quite beneficial as it will encourage the employees to work at their maximum level since they are working on devices that they are most comfortable with.

Link: http://icct-mobcomms.blogspot.com/2012/02/byod-bring-your-own-device.html

Robotic Bee...

Engineers at Harvard University recently produced a technique that is inspired by the concept of pop-up books and origami which allows clones of tiny robots to be mass-produced in sheets. The reason why it's called the robotic bee as it represents the size of a bee, can fly and act exactly like the bee! Even though it's tiny and sounds simple, the process of making these miniature robots was prone to errors and hectic since the engineers manually did all the work. This is how it works: The 18 layers of different materials structure, which is built like a printed circuit board, flat shaped where in just one second it unfolds (like a pop-up book) by lifting the "assembly scaffold" using pins into a 3D model. To fold it back again all you need to is dip the model into a liquid metal solder to bond tiny brass together which locks the joints of the robot back in place. The size of the robot is small and so allows it to be copied numerous times easily! Here's the video to represent the process:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/16/pop-up-robot-production

Mobile Wallet in the UK?

Have you ever imagined your mobile replacing your wallet? Well, in todays world mobiles are doing so! According to Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent from the BBC, Barclays Pingit system have recently launched a person-to-person money tranfer app for their users. This app allows you to transfer up to £300 and watch it being transferred immediately. This may be resricted to Barclays account users for now, but from March and onwards, this app will be introduced to every bank account owner in the UK. This is actually a huge step in this field as mobile money revolution is pretty delayed in UK and Europe in general. The article says that money and mobile related ideas have been constantly popping out in Europe, however the Pingit recently launched system could be considered as turning point to this area.

In my opinion, there are both advantages and disadvantages to this, and it is certain that this not a perfect app to be used since it's only the start. Nevertheless I think that this a great idea to be done since it will save up time, secure your information by using your mobile number and finally ease the process of transferring money.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17057570
picture credit: http://stcr-news.blogspot.com/2012/02/mobile-wallets-and-more-ways-to-use.html

The Start...

Hello readers, my name is Jumana Al-Lawati, a first year student at Swansea university, studying Mobile communication and internet technology. Personally, I have always been interested in reading various types of blogs but never thought of creating one for myself. Creating this blog is part of an assessment of the practical module at uni called "Internet technology."

This blog will be a great opportunity to extend my knowledge in this area. It will include posts about random things that I find interesting. The reason behind the title "Its all about the details" is because, this is my idea of blog posts, details!

hope you enjoy it! :)