Tag: COMMUNICATION

According to Yahoo, 82-percent of those who use its Instant Messenger service like to portray feelings with emoticons in their correspondences. The other 18-percent probably loathe those little winks and smiles. If you've ever been on a message board, or used instant messaging, e-mail or text messages, then you've seen the little buggers, and at some point you've probably used one yourself. This ...

While we aren't exactly old-timers here at Switched, we all vividly remember those revved-up heartbeats that inevitably preceded the first time we dialed those seven digits that we'd miraculously gotten from a cute acquaintance. We remember, too, the disappointment of an answering machine and the nervous wait for a returned call. As the years have passed, though, we've taken -- sometimes ...

How exactly this slipped through without getting picked up by the media we're not exactly sure, but it appears that southern San Jose, California and the surrounding area recently fell victim to a cyber-attack that crippled some of the city's infrastructure. Just after midnight on April 9th, someone (or a small group of someones) climbed down four manholes and cut fiber-optic lines serving the ...

Now that we have more communication devices and methods than we can handle, perhaps we should look to the college kids to show us the way forward. Indiana's Ball State University recently surveyed about 300 college students, and found that text messaging is their favored form of telecommunication, becoming more popular than e-mail, instant messaging and calling. 94-percent of the students ...

digg_url ='http://digg.com/celebrity/How_World_Leaders_Call_Each_Other'; Some seemed to think it was embarrassing when Sarah Palin was fooled into believing that a Canadian radio shock jock was French president Nicolas Sarkozy shortly before election day. Many people (including some commenters on this site) defended Palin, asking how she could have known (ignoring the obvious clues such as ...

If you spend a lot of time – maybe too much time – trolling around social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, you may forget to drop the occasional line to your family and friends who aren't connected to the Internet. Save yourself a trip to the post office with Touchnote, an English company that lets you upload images to its Web site, craft a message with clever dialog or ...

Have you ever wanted to feel like a secret agent and send a message that self-destructs? Well, now you can: Privnote lets you send messages to friends, family, and colleagues that destroy themselves after they've been read. It's good for a joke, and great for information you want to share, but don't want to have archived and held against you later (we bet the White House was wishing it had ...

If there are any of you out there who are avid scuba divers, then we're sure you're well acquainted with the dangers and difficulties that go along with such a hobby. Most difficult of all when exploring what lies beneath the waves is maintaining a line of communication. So UTC (Underwater Technology Center) has developed the Underwater Digital Device or UDI. The UDI is a wrist-wearable ...

Mobile, instant, always-on access to everyone you know is the new obnoxious forefront in communications technology. A new start-up calling itself Trumpia, has decided to take the obsession with constant communication to its absurd illogical extreme. Sign up with Trumpia, then betray your own sense of decency by inputting all of your friends' contact info ... and we mean all of it. Input, e-mail, ...

Way back in the day (a whole four years ago) the Internet was primarily a tool of communication -- e-mail, message boards, instant messaging. Then somewhere along the way things began to change. Content became king. A study conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings over the past four years has shown that almost half our Internet lives are now spent devouring content (like this blog). Since 2003, the ...

Ah text messaging, what would us phone shy individuals do with out you. This month marks the 15th-anniversary of the debut of the life changing service. Text messaging is part of the new wave of communication that is quickly destroying more traditional methods, like e-mail, and phone calls... and of course snail mail (a.k.a. the kind that come from the U.S. Post Office), which exists only to send ...

It seems our addiction to communication and connectivity is manifesting itself physically. People have been complaining about "phantom vibrations" from their cell phones for years, but scientists are just now starting to take notice. You may have even experienced it yourself. You're sitting on your couch or at the dinner table when you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket. You take it out to ...