News

techtree: Intel has marked its foray into solid state drives with the Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive (SSD) based on Nand flash memory.

With industry standard USB interfaces, the Z-U130 Value SSD offers cost-effective, high-performance storage for a wide variety of computing and embedded platforms.

Intel says its SSD delivers faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access, and low-power storage alternatives for value PCs, routers, servers, gaming, and industrial applications.

Randy Wilhelm, Vice President and General Manager of Nand Products Group at Intel, said, “Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives, including improved performance and reliability. The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel’s industry leading quality, validation, and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications.”

With fast read speeds of 28 megabytes (MB) and write speeds of 20 MB per second, this SSD is a faster storage alternative The drives will be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks, and low-cost, fully featured PCs, as well as in embedded solutions like routers and point-of-sale terminals.

Moreover, the Z-U130 Value SSD will have extensive validation, including more than 1,000 hours of accelerated reliability testing. It is also expected to meet an average mean time between failure (MTBF) specifications of five million hours.

Intel believes that the product can be easily integrated into original design manufacturers’ designs because of its USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces, 2×5 USB connector, and standard single-level cell Nand in thin small outline package (TSOP).

techtree: Train journeys may never be the same again… Thanks to the technological advancements introduced by the Indian Railways, the world’s second largest rail network after Russia.

Amongst a slew of initiatives undertaken by the Indian Railways, the one that draws most attention is the issuing of tickets through the Internet. Although this service has been there for the past few years, 2007 onwards, the railways intend to expand the service reach to all parts of the country. As such, e-tickets will be issued through e-seva of state governments, post offices, petrol pumps, and ATMs.

And to make online reservation more accessible to customers, Indian Railways have tied up with Internet service provider, Sify, to enable customers book tickets online against cash payment.

A common Web site integrating more than 50 different Web sites of Indian Railways is also being developed, with built-in facilities like e-payment and e-tendering. A commercial portal will be developed in the next three years for yield management, especially to attract traffic for returning empties and filling up vacant seats.

Then there will be train enquiry call centers, which will start functioning in all four zones of the country from the second half of this year. By dialing the telephone number 139, passengers will be able to obtain information about arrival and departure of trains, seat availability, etc, at local call rates from any part of the country.

A proposal to provide hand held computer terminals to TTEs in reserved coaches is on the anvil. How it will work is that the TTEs will feed in the current vacancy position, coach wise and berth wise in the hand held terminals, which will be directly linked to passenger reservation system (PRS) to enable allotment of vacant berths to wait-listed passengers at ensuing stations

techtree: Geodesic today launched the latest feature-rich version 4.0 of its mundu IM, with a view towards improving mobile communication.

Mundu IM enables users cross conference with friends and family across AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! IM services, through a single chat window on Palm and Windows Mobile smart phone platforms. With Mundu, users can stay connected on popular IM services on a single user-friendly interface.

An improvement over its predecessor, version 4 Mundu IM features: instant photo and video sharing with contacts across popular IM services; sending of files and music; email notification for Yahoo!, MSN, and Google accounts on the move; and support for major mobile platforms, including Palm OS, Windows Mobile smart phone, and Windows Mobile Pocket PC, and Symbian Series 60 platforms in future.

Speaking at the launch, Kiran Kulkarni, Managing Director of Geodesic, said, “As Internet enabled smart phones emerge as vital tools for today’s consumer, instant messaging (IM) on mobile devices is becoming a standard mode of communication for consumers and professionals alike. Mundu recognizes that users are spread across different IM services, and aims to unite them with a single interface across services, and mobile devices.”

Users can download a free 5-day trial version of mundu IM v4 from http://messenger.mundu.com.

As a promotional offer, mundu IM v4 is available for a one time charge of $11 (Rs 495). Besides, there is no charge per message, allowing users chat more often.