Adventure Ausrama Blog

There isn't much doubt that all future purchasing and banking will done with a smart phone. New tech being tested like no pin number or signature payments are just "fill ins" until the final technology is perfected An old idea that has fallen by the wayside is having a picture of a card holder on the card itself. Just why this concept was dropped is unknown. The only card now with your photo is your driving licence. Paying with a finger print is also something thought about, tested but never marketed. Retail at the moment is a mishmash of different methods of payment including the old fashioned cash payment. Older people still like to draw cash from an ATM. They like the idea of having cash on them so they can pay immediately. Immediacy will be even quicker using a smart phone. Bendigo Bank has developed a system where a phone app generates a random code to finalize a transaction. They have been using such a system in the UK for many years now.

Telstra is claiming to have boosted mobile network speed to 450Mbps over LTE. Technological improvement is a good thing, but it should get its house in order first. About every three days one cannot access account details notably broadband usage. Customer service is disgraceful. One thing that stands out about Telstra is that sales and payment web pages are "never" down. Even a child can see its priorities are on making money not providing a decent service that customers overpay for. It is about to bring out new packages at higher prices. Its monopoly is all-consuming. Telstra can do what it likes. Increasing mobile speed by three means increased charges for consumers. There is no doubt about this. Furthermore, faster broadband means allocated usage will be used up much sooner so Telstrs will gain there as well. With more users not using PCs multiple channel broadband data flow means greater profit. The overall deal for Telstra is more money not customer be

We hear from many sources that the cashless society will be here "next week". Apart from Singapore which is very close to its taxation office getting everything legislation permits, other countries are a long way from it. Australians still have cash in their pockets purely because shops are not investing in appropriate technology. A test was done with "equipment" provided by Westpac. The bank app had Mastercard debit and Visa credit cards linked to it. At the first coffee shop the fast pay worked via the Mastercard. The second payment using the linked Visa showed only $1 for a $24.95 bill. Linked Mastercard solved the problem. Another payment made at the next shop worked with Visa. Shop owners and assistants for the most part had not experienced immediate payment yet and certainly did not have the new technology. Westpac will go ahead and launch its payment app whether shops are ready or not. Terminals will be set up across the country. It does

Australia is testing technology that is intended to stop prisoners from using mobile phones to communicate with the outside world. Prisoners deserve to be locked up safely away from the community but don't they have some rights? This is like throwing then into the "cooler" and separating them from other people for days on end. Relatives are not prevented from visiting them. It just seems that blocking communication is extreme. This is an added punishment like introducing legislation retrospectively. When people committed crimes that led to incarceration they had no idea that they would be cut off from the outside world in such a draconian way. It is known that some criminals use mobile phones to continue crime on the outside. But is this grounds enough to stop communication for everyone in prison? Clearing prisons of mobile phones is an ongoing problems with hundreds of them being confiscated each year. When jamming is used it stops emergen

Will Mankind survive the technological change? Since the year 2000 the world has changed extremely quickly. Our social lives have altered forever. At the turn of the century only a quarter of Australians were connected to the Internet. Now three quarters have Internet access with two thirds of these having broadband. Only a third of Australians had mobile phones in the year 2000. Today, just about everyone has one, including children. Verbal communication faded in favor of texting.  Even this is now declining in favour of voice and video.` We bought newspapers, magazines and books for news, general information, instruction and direction mapping. Now we do this over the Internet or by using direction indicators that speak to us. Relationships now begin on the digital information highway. We pay bills without even using a card or cash. And take our favorite music with us everywhere we go. Even ordinary emailing has been somewhat superceded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype.  Th

There isn't much doubt that mobile devices will soon outnumber the fixed PC. It is surprising that it has taken so long. People are tripping over each other to make pre-orders on the iPhone. There will probably be a rush for Microsoft's new offerings. In recent years Google's Android products have been racing forward, generally at the expense of Microsoft, not Apple. Web developers are slowly making a change as well. Old "easy" website building is a thing of the past. It seems websites have to provide a "traditional" PC type website and have another built-in for mobile devices. There must be an automatic link in the main website so that only the smaller site is sent to mobiles. Though many users have said they prefer looking at traditional sites with a small handheld, even though it means moving around a page to see all the info, download times are just too long for this to continue. HTML5 was envisaged to make it easier for developers, standard

Despite many tests there is no agreement on whether mobile phones cause brain cancer. Findings point to a trend in heavy phone users. Advice is given to use mobiles as infrequently as possible. It is clear that the skulls of children are much thinner than adults and youngsters receive twice as much microwave radiation from cell phones as adults. Three times as much radiation is absorbed into children's hippocampus and hypothalamus. Other regions of their bodies in danger are the eyes and bone marrow. Tests have mainly been carried out on adult males who have the thickest skulls of all. Scientists believe children and woman are in greater danger of getting brain cancer. One in four Australian women have reduced time spent on making calls in fear of brain damage. It is recommended that tests on children be used as the certifying method for phones. While many scientists are not convinced, research shows that heavy phone users have a 40 per cent higher risk of getting gliomas, t

People are jumping on the Internet without realizing that their action is leading to potential disaster. Many countries are leaving Internet investment to the private sector but such companies are only interested in short-term profit. Unless a monopoly exists it is just not worth while investing large amounts in Internet infrastructure. Communication is at the center of everything we do today. Soon mobile devices will outnumber PCs. In some places Internet speed is slowing down due to overload. To meet future demand Governments will have to get involved in telecommunication infrastructure investment. In some cases this will mean government take-over of information systems. Advanced technology requires very high speed and wide bandwidth. It takes up to ten years to build adequate optic fiber information networks. Soon poor countries will be measured by the quality of their Internet. Even some currently advanced nations will be left behind if they don't act in the near futur