ReadWriteWeb

It is easier to seek forgiveness than it is to get permission according to Verizon, which has once again shown us what large corporations should not be doing when it comes to customer service.

David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the more recent Everything is Miscellaneous received a letter today from Verizon. A "legalistic pamphlet" that informed him he has 45 days to opt out of 'agreeing' to let Verizon share his personal information.

A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.

The "internet of things" is a concept that describes a wireless network between objects. In a way, it parallels the current network of addressable web pages (aka the "world wide web"), except "the internet of things" would include addressable inanimate objects that could be anything from your home's refrigerator to the shoes on your feet. Although this world of web-connected things has been much discussed for years, we've seen little movement pushing the concept forward. At least, until now.

Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. Computing is changing, too. Cloud computing will move applications and storage away from the desktop to remote servers. If anything, this drive to push data off the PC and onto the web has been in some part driven by the increasing mobility of internet users. Mobile access to the web is pushing internet adoption rates up while also providing more people the opportunity to work away from a stationary PC. So who is going mobile? Some new studies from PEW Internet & American Life Project and iPass shed some light on this topic.