I recently went to India to work with the local office on some internal business processes.  Before leaving the states, I had arranged to bring a nifty little device called MiFi from the guys at Xcom Global.

This device acts as a portable wireless hotpot anywhere there is a cell tower signal.  Lucky for me that India is pretty well covered with cell towers, with Vodafone being the most common provider.

Once ordered, the package arrived at my house via Fedex. There was a leather pouch with everything I needed inside, manuals, step-by-step guide and even international plugs for Europe, Asia and of course India.

I’m so glad I brought the MiFi with me.  I ended up using the MiFi receiver everyday at the office because my laptop was not configured to work on the local network.  The speed was not the best (Vodafone India download speeds were about 236Kbps), but it was adequate for my needs.

MiFi supports up to 5 devices, so my colleague and I were able to connect our laptops and sync our smart phones too.

The MiFi device is available for use in 26 countries at a low rate of $17.95 per day with unlimited data usage.  I highly recommend this to anyone traveling overseas.

Bonus: Once the MiFi is fully charged, you don’t even have to plug it to a wall socket.

A huge thanks to Mike Schilling from Xcom Global for hooking me up with this device.  I’m telling everyone about it!

Check out the Xcom Global Facebook page and visit their website http://xcomglobal.com

I’ve been working on a GIS project for the last few years, and the one challenge that doesn’t go away is how to easily collect Latitude & Longitude coordinates for locations.  Today I discovered LatLng Marker within Google Maps Labs.  Here is a description from the tool author:

Adds an option to the context menu that lets you drop a mini marker showing the latlng of the position that the cursor was pointing at when the context menu was evoked

Thanks Marcelo C for creating such an awesome tool.  I’ll be using this in my GIS projects.

flip video

Today I had the opportunity to attend Cisco tech days to get the inside scoop on network technology straight from the network experts. One interesting thing I learned is that Cisco puts back 12% of their revenue into research and development (R&D) each year; this translates to approximately 5.2 billion this year alone.

The hot topics were voice over IP (duh), virtualization, unified communication services and TelePresence. What exactly is TelePresence? think of it as video conferencing on steroids! Imagine a conference room table with seating on one side and 3 large 60 inch screens on the other.  The idea here is that you can see the people you’re meeting with in high-def. (it allows you to see their face reactions when you propose your new plan). Overall, it was a very informative session and I even walked away with a little gadget. a flip video.

thanks Cisco!   BTW Peter did a great demo