Top Costa Rica News

• Claro and Movistar are taking advanced registrations for the Samsung Galaxy S III. Kolbi just states that Samsung Galaxy S III is coming soon. With Samsung expecting to only ship 10 million Galaxy S III phones by July 1, the 9 million international pre-orders means there may be a delay. Although the phone ships with the latest version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the international edition is scheduled to receive an update to Jelly Bean in July or August.
• A total of 72 students from schools throughout the country will participate in youth camps sponsored by MICIT’s Science and Technology Club for Young Talent. There are three youth camps between July 1 and July 11. Students who attend these camps will be challenged to design a steamboat, identify the chemical structure of salt, or create a sensor that is sensitive to pressure or temperature. Volunteers from HP, MIT, and Costa Rican universities will guide the students in their projects.
• CAMTIC interviewed Ronald Chang and Robert Beck of Engineering & Scientific Services regarding software engineering and “hard” sciences as a potential lucrative niche for Costa Rica. Engineering & Scientific Services is one of the few companies that provide software engineering analysis related to the the “hard” sciences. Providing this service requires high-level software engineers working with scientists in the areas of physics, chemistry, and biology. Costa Rica has the talent. It just needs the entrepreneurs to invest in these technologies.

Top Mobile Device News

• Last week’s Technology News announced Facebook’s “Find Friends Nearby” project. The Web site was available for 24 hours, before Facebook removed it. According to a comment made to ABC News, Facebook claims that this was just an engineering test. Yet, this detail was not mentioned on Facebook’s Developer site.
• Without any notification, Facebook quietly changed the email address in your contact list to your Facebook email address ([email protected]). The new email address appears as part of your information, and is visible on your timeline. Your previous email address remains, but is now hidden from your timeline. While Facebook launched the email service several years ago, it never gained any degree of popularity. Somehow pushing a failed project on all users is not exactly going to make everyone happy. If you want to make any changes, you need to edit your profile information to hide the Facebook email address, and unhide your original address.
• At the keynote address for Google I/O 2012, Google announced Android Jelly Bean (version 4.1). Jelly Bean adds a lot of new features to Android. Using the results of Project Butter, the UI interface works as smooth as … Jelly Bean includes off-line voice recognition, including voice commands and voice typing. Jelly Bean provides enhanced support for international users by supporting bi-directional text for Hebrew and Arabic. With Jelly Bean, you can tap two phones together, and then transfer files between the two phones over Bluetooth. The first device to use Jelly Bean is the ASUS Nexus 7 Tablet.
• The Google I/O 2012 Developer Conference was four days of defining the future of Android. The keynote address was a continual stream of product announcements. It started with the statistics that there are now 400 million Android device worldwide, and that a million more were being activated each day. After the Jelly Bean announcement came the ASUS Nexus 7 Tablet ($199 USD from Google Play store) announcement, then there was the Nexus Q ($299 USD from Google Play store), which is one cool social network media center device in a sphere. Plus, there was Google Now, Google+ Events, 3D Google Maps, updated Google Store, and Google Project Glasses. Google took aim at every competitor in rapid fire announcements.
• There was a time when cellphones were used to make phone calls, and then text messaging became the hot alternative to phone calls. According to a report by the O2 mobile network in UK, phone calls and text messaging account for only 22.23 minutes of the smartphone usage per day. In order of usage, the respondents to the study spent 24.81 minutes of their time browsing the Internet, 17.49 minutes checking social networks, 15.64 minutes listening to music, 14.44 minutes play games, and only 12.13 minutes using it as a phone. Respondents spent more time with email than text messages. The total of watching TV, reading eBooks, and taking pictures was greater than phone and texting. Smartphones are just mobile computers that happen to make phone calls and send text messages.