Briefly: Chorus van, 256 GB compact flash, Dell, Box Notes

Bill Bennett -
Chorus market development manager Hamish Girvan and the van.

Chorus uses vans to help its branding. Now the network company says it has a new van that can improve efficiency. The Chorus van comes with built-in communications technologies and a link to the cloud.

Among other things this means workers can give customers a clear idea of when the van and the service person driving it will arrive. It can also send a picture so customers know the person knocking on their door is genuine.

The van tracks inventory, if a tool or a part is missing drivers can find a nearby van to fill the gap. It can also tell workers tools were left at a job or even stolen.

According to Chorus market development manager Hamish Girvan, the smart van saves time and that quickly translates to money. The van was developed by Chorus, US-based Apptricity and Alcatel-Lucent’s ngConnect programme.

  • If you’ve got the money, Sandisk has a 256 GB Compact Flash card which should meet most of your needs for the immediate future. The  card comes with something called VPG-65 certification. No, I’ve never heard of it either. However, according to Sandisk that makes it optimized to capture 4K and Full HD video. Apparently these are all the rage in well-heeled photography circles. I say well-heeled because the card is on sale at US$1800 – that’s more than $2200 in our quaint Middle Earth currency.
  • Lots of fuss in the international technology press over the weekend about revelations Nokia was toying with running Android on its wonderful Lumia smartphones . Well duh. Of course Nokia was checking out Android. Windows Phone is a great phone OS, but it isn’t exactly flying out the doors. The Finnish phone-maker would have been negligent if it didn’t at least explore the possible alternatives. Now if Nokia was checking out BlackBerry, that would have been a news story.
  • After winning a bruising battle to take the company private, Dell says the next steps include sticking with PCs and tablets while pushing harder into what it calls the ‘enterprise solution’ market and building partnerships. (I call this ‘sell stuff to big companies‘.) In other words, what Dell has been doing for years. The difference this time is that Michael Dell can now act faster when opportunities to sell or buy business units come along.
  • Lots of excitement in the international technology press overnight about Box and the limited private release of Box Notes which some see as taking the company into the same territory as Microsoft Office and Google Apps. If you want an intelligent local take on the news turn to Ben Kepes’ Diversity Blog. He nails the story and asks the right questions.