AT&T reports that smart phone users, which make up 3% of their market, are eating up nearly 40% of the data bandwidth on their mobile network.

To no surprise, AT&T is considering ways to free up network bandwidth so that everyone without a smartphone, isn’t effected.  So what does this mean?  It means AT&T might be giving a screw j_b to iPhone users. – by far the biggest consumers of bandwidth from smartphones.

iPhone users on average consume five to seven times more data per month than average wireless subscribers, according to analyst firm Sanford Bernstein. And all this usage is clogging the network, causing many iPhone users, especially in large cities such as New York and San Francisco, to experience dropped calls, slow 3G service, and issues connecting to the network at all.

So what is AT&T considering?  I would think upping the usage fees, but this might not work for those who don’t care about monthly fees.  Another approach are incentives.

“We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites,” said de la Vega according to a transcript of the conference. “And you’ll see us address that more in detail.”

Either way, I have a strong feeling AT&T will be limiting or slowing data usage for iPhone users. 

Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces v2 of Sugar on a Stick with Improved E-Book Readers, Recycles Any USB Stick Into Learning Environment for Children; Partners with Nexcopy, Inc.

PARIS, December 8, 2009 — Netbook World Summit — Sugar Labs(R), volunteer-driven nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for over one-million children around the world, announces the release of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Available for download at http://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and automatic backup to a Journal. The latest version of Sugar offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and Read, suitable for reading e-books.

“Sugar on a Stick is a great way to experience Sugar”, commented Walter Bender, Sugar Labs executive director. “In this holiday season, we wish to remind parents and teachers that e-books are not only for costly reader units for the well-to-do, but freely available as part of the open-access to knowledge movement to help children everywhere develop critical learning skills and to bridge the digital divide wherever it exists.”

SuperTalent announce their USB 3.0 flash drive in November of 2009.  Today we have a short video of that drive in action.  You can see the performance of the device is much greater than any 2.0 device.  How would you like to copy files at 78MB per second?

I spoke with SuperTalent last night and still no word on official price or official launch date.

Source: SuperTalent.

How to turn off autoplay XP home edition for USB flash drives.

Windows XP Home edition requires a different method to turn off the USB autoplay function than XP Professional [which we reported on earlier].

It’s not difficult to turn off the USB autoplay, just a couple easy steps.

Note:  We are going into the Registry so be careful not to do anything other than what we suggest.

Got to>  START > RUN > type “regedit“

Navegate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
+ software
+ Microsoft
+ Windows
+ CurrentVersion
+ Policies
+ Explorer

**The “+” are the registry hives you must expand.

Now click the + Explorer directory just once so it is blue.  On the right side you will see “NoDriveTrypeAutoRun“

Right click that and Select “Modify“

Here you most likely have b5 listed in the “Value data” field.  Simply replace that value with 95.

Click OK.

Close out of the Registry and reboot your machine.  Done!

You learn something new every day.  Today I learned that Sony has been working on a new bio technology that reads vein structure of a human hand.  The project is called “Mofiria.”

Object behind this project is taking the biometric finger reading technology one step further, and using vein structure as the authentication code [after all we have all seen movies where a fake silicon finger gets the burglars in].

So now the biometric technology is all buttoned up, Sony developed a USB vein reader that users could implement in the field.