NetStumbler.com

Skype renders a virtual classroom for people wanting to learn a new language. London-based stand-up comic Tommy Campbell sits down for Mandarin lessons, three hours every week, with Lily Huang, a mother of one and a qualified English teacher who resides in the Chinese province of Hainan.

Huang charges $20 per hour of lesson, which her students pay via Paypal. Her lessons are customized — Huang asks her students what they want to learn next and she sends them her lesson plan a day ahead of the tutorial session. Skype also allows her to examine the spelling of words and draw characters through a digital whiteboard. Following a lesson, Huang “Skypes” an MP3 recording of the material covered during the class.

Because her work relies greatly on technology, Huang said her teaching business was paralyzed following a powerful earthquake in Taiwan last December. That disaster immobilized undersea Internet cables, thus disabling services in Southeast Asia.

Eric Atherton of England’s Oxfordshire county, one of Huang students, cited the difficulty of finding a local private Mandarin tutor and the technology for taking up Chinese lessons online. “Although you don’t have someone in the room with you, face to face, you are actually talking to someone in China right now, that is the compensation.”
Via [taipeitimes.com]

For 11 weeks through June 15, Motorola is running a program that will enable early-adopter cities to receive credits for exchanging their wireless gear for Motorola’s “HotZone Duo” products. Under the Superior Wireless Access Program, Motorola will pay $500 for each old unit exchanged with a single-radio HotZone Duo node and $750 for those wanting dual-radio HotZone Duo as a replacement for their gadgets. Customers can swap as many as 10 units.

Motorola launched the initiative following an Uptown Services study showing that actual performance by mesh networks in three Californian municipalities — Lompoc, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale — failed to reach the industry benchmark of 90 percent outdoor coverage. According to Paul Mueller, Motorola’s VP for wireless broadband distribution, “many of the early customers in the mesh network space have run pilots with older, first-generation mesh solutions that simply cannot perform or scale to meet the expanding needs of a metro-wide network.”
Via [informationweek.com]