Road Warrioring with Blackberry: Email Access in Kyrgystan
Later today my family will be celebrating the marriage of my son, a computer engineer and medical doctor, to his fiancé, a materials engineer and MBA by training, and now employed in the financial division of a resources company. Talk about how to win over the heart of her future father-in-law -- she recently traveled to the Kyrgyzstan (also known as the Kyrgyz Republic) in central Asia. She has a story to tell about how she downloaded her Blackberry email in Krygyzstan, where Rogers has no roaming agreement.. So the steps are:
- Be employed by a company with a mining operations at a 13,000 foot (4,000 meter) elevation.
- Drive up to the mine over a mining development road from the 1,500 foot elevation of the main plain (and I'm told it's a very scenic drive from the capital city, Bishkek, to where the mining road starts, along the shore of Krygyzstan's largest lake.)
- Get out and look north; pull out the Blackberry and search for a network.
- Check a few minutes later and you'll find your email updated.
The secret: a few miles/kilometers north of the mine is Kazakhstan where Rogers does have a roaming agreement. At a 13,000 foot elevation there is enough residual signal from the Kazakhstan operator's towers to do a download. I have not asked about the resulting roaming data charges...??
But it speaks volumes about the sensitivity of the rf engineering in the Blackberry where even weak signals can be picked up and carry the data stream. For those who ask, it was a Blackberry Curve.
Now off to the wedding celebrations; I'll be back next week.
Tags: Blackberry, Kyrgyzstan, Rogers, Kasakhstan
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free calls to any designated phone within the designated territory for the plan
The Tungle client for meeting organizers has a single-click install as an Outlook plug-in. Upon installation it then searches your Outlook for both Contacts and your availability according to your Outlook Calendar. If it finds other Contacts who also have installed Tungle it marks them with an identifier "T" logo. You may then invite individual contacts to "share" their availability; those are the ones identified with the "T" logo on a solid purple background. Select one of those contacts and you will see in the Calendar screen that contact's availability.
The example on the left shows the sharing of availability across an organizer and three other contacts, shown by the different colors, who are also on Tungle. (Were the organizer not attending the purple slots would go away.) The organizer would then "paint" in blank potential time slots for the proposed meeting. Upon completion of this information, click on the "Create Space" button and another window pops up where you can see a summary of the invitees and proposed time slots and as well as enter more detailed information about the potential meeting such as an agenda. Click on the "Send" button and an email, from the meeting organizer, about the prospective meeting goes out to each invitee, incorporating a link.
The link is to a "Tungle Space" which is a dynamic web page, viewable in any web browser, that shows all the meeting information and allows invitees to select which of the proposed time slots s/he prefers. If the invitee reads the email on a Blackberry, the Tungle Space is reformatted for appropriate display on the Blackberry. Note that, until a final meeting time is set, the Tungle Space is updated with any changes in availability of those who have a Tungle client installed.
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