BizTalk RFID Mobile

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the general availability of the latest addition to the BizTalk Server RFID platform - BizTalk RFID Mobile, an RFID platform for mobile devices based on Windows CE and Windows Mobile. BizTalk RFID Mobile consists of a runtime engine as well as tools and components to develop, deploy, and manage RFID solutions on mobile devices.

Developers, independent software vendors and systems integrators can build device-agnostic mobile applications utilizing RFID and sensor data on devices running Windows CE or Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0, and 6.1. Events and data can be stored on the mobile device using a SQL sink service, and then communicated to the BizTalk Server RFID platform for further analysis. Mobile devices can be discovered, queried, and managed from the BizTalk Server RFID platform. Support for industry-ratified standards like the Low-level Reader Protocol (LLRP) and the Tag Data Translation (TDT) library provides a standards-based approach to discover, provision and troubleshoot RFID devices, in addition to surfacing business-relevant attributes from RFID tags

For more information on the product, capabilities, and evaluation versions, browse to: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid-mobile.aspx.

The documentation on how to build applications using the BizTalk RFID API can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351599.aspx.

More Mobile Phone Makers back Google's Android

Fourteen of the world's largest mobile phone and chip makers, including Sony Ericsson, Vodafone Group Plc and ARM Holdings Plc, joined the Open Handset Alliance on Tuesday to support the Android mobile device platform developed by Google Inc.

Reuters reports the new members' pledge to back the Android software is a significant feat for Google in the mobile phone industry, as its T-Mobile G1 phone takes on rival Apple Inc's popular iPhone 3G.

10,000 iPhone apps?

Apple watchers have been ruminating on the overall tally and on the counting methods following a report on 148Apps, a site that keeps tabs on iPhone applications.

MacRumors.com meanwhile, quibbles with the overall number, even as it says the actual 10,000 active app mark should be reached "in the next few days".

The biggest category of iPhone apps, according to 148Apps, is games (2,333), followed by entertainment (1,122), utilities (1,015), education (737), and productivity (517). The average cost of the apps is listed at $3.12; about one-quarter are free of charge, while one is listed at $899.99

This One is Kind of Personal......

Google iPhone voice-recognition tool baffled by British accents!

According to The Telegraph Google's voice application for the iPhone has hit a stumbling block - it does not understand British accents.The high-tech program, which was launched this week with much fanfare, allows users to search Google for cinema times, bring up pictures and information and convert currency and measurements with one tap of the screen.

But British iPhone owners who eagerly downloaded the new software to their phones were left baffled after it responded to requests with bizarre titbits of unwanted information.

When asked to search for "iPhone" the results varied wildly. A user with a Scottish accent found his phone opted to search for the term "sex" instead, and suggested a link to an adult web site. On a second attempt, the search engine looked for "sledding"!

A few words of note about Android, iPhone and Flash

"Speaking of, here’s what Wired has to say today. In an article called “Why Apple Will Never Permit Adobe Flash on the iPhone, Brian X. Chen posits that Flash is so rich and full featured that it could ultimately create apps that take run through the internet, in turn, take away from Apple’s bread and butter, the App Store."However, Android is not proprietary so.......Andy Rubin Demos Flash on Android - Now We Wait!

Klem

Teens Text Themselves Thin

A new study has shown that sending and receiving text messages can help obese children lose weight.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina found teens using mobile phones to monitor their diet and physical activity levels were more likely to stick with weight-management programs than those using paper diaries or nothing at all.

Recent studies show that approximately 19 percent of youths aged 6 to 11 are overweight, and that 80 percent of overweight adolescents become obese adults.

“Self-monitoring of calorie intake and expenditure and of body weight is extremely important for the long-term success of weight loss and weight control,” said Jennifer R. Shapiro, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry in the UNC School of Medicine and principal investigator of the new study, which is published in the November/December 2008 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

“Unfortunately, both children and adults who are trying to lose weight often do not adhere to self-monitoring,” Shapiro said. “They tend to be good about self-monitoring at the start of a weight-loss effort, but then their adherence drops off over time.”

Traditionally, paper diaries are the tool most often used for self-monitoring. People trying to lose weight write down how many calories they consume, how many calories they burn in exercise and how much they weigh. While a paper diary can be very effective, Shapiro and her colleagues had a hunch that the same concept might work better in children if they could report their self-monitoring via cell phone text messaging – and receive feedback messages in return.

“Cell phone text messaging is something that’s very familiar to most children now, since they’ve grown up with it,” Shapiro said. “By using this technology, we were hoping to make self-monitoring seem more like fun to them and less like work.”

Fifty-eight children aged 5 to 13 and their parents participated in Shapiro’s study, which was conducted at UNC Hospitals, and 31 families completed the study. The families took part in three group education sessions (one session weekly for three weeks) which aimed to encourage them to increase physical activity, decrease “screen time” (time spent watching television) and reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. All of the children were given pedometers to track the number of steps they took each day, as well as goals to meet for the number of steps taken, minutes of screen time and number of sugar-sweetened beverages consumed per day.

The participating families were randomized into three groups: one that reported self-monitoring via cell phone text messaging, another group that reported self-monitoring in a paper diary, and a no-monitoring control group. The text messaging and paper diary groups answered three questions each day: (1) what was the number on your pedometer today?; (2) how many sugar-sweetened beverages did you drink today?; and (3) how many minutes of screen time did you have today?

Each family in the text messaging group was given a cell phone to be used only for study-related messages. They were instructed to send two messages per day (one from the parent and one from the child) reporting their answers to the three questions. Each time a message was sent, the sender received an immediate, automated feedback message based on what the sender reported. The researchers generated hundreds of feedback messages for the study. One example was, “Wow, you met your step and screen time goals – congratulations! What happened to beverages?”

The study results show that children in the text messaging group had a lower attrition rate from the study (28 percent) than both the paper diary (61 percent) and the control group (50 percent). They also had a significantly greater adherence to self-monitoring than the paper diary group, 43 percent versus 19 percent.

The study concludes that cell phone text messaging may be a useful tool for self-monitoring of healthy behaviors in children, and suggests more broadly that novel technologies may play a role in improving health.