USB 3.0 Enabled PCs

Most of the news about USB 3.0—the finalization of the spec, the first drivers, the first controller—doesn't tell us much about when we'll actually get to see a product hit stores. The answer? According to Nikkei, before 2010.

Their contacts in the Tawianese PC industry predict the first machines to include the hardware will start rolling off the line by the end of the year, citing rapid development in integrated circuits and the shipment of compliant controllers to PC manufacturers. The date is a bit earlier than the "early 2010" prediction that's been bandied around recently, and inline with initial predictions of a 2009 release.

A quick reminder of what this means:

With transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps, it'll dump a 25GB HD file in about 70 seconds, and the architecture has been beefed up with extra data lanes to make for more sustained, rather than bursty transfer speeds, making it better for camcorders and the like. Even though it delivers more power than USB 2.0 to charge gadgets faster (and it'll revive a completely dead one too), its new polling architecture makes it more efficient.

Unfortunately, full 5Gbps speeds won't be reached for some time.

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Outstanding Service Earns National Award

TOP TEN

MedCom Professional Services, Inc. Wins ATSI Award of Excellence

MedCom Professional Services, Inc. of Levittown, PA has been honored with the exclusive 2009 Award of Excellence for twelve consecutive years, earning a combined score of 96.9%. The award is presented annually by the Association of TeleServices International (ATSI), the industry’s trade association for providers of telecommunications and call center services including telephone answering and message delivery. MedCom Professional Services, Inc. was presented with the award at ATSI’s 2009 Annual Convention held at the Westin Convention Center Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA.

After six months of intensive testing, an independent panel of judges scored call-handling skills such as courtesy, response time, accuracy and overall service to their clients, the cornerstones of the call management industry. If a company scores 80% or better in ALL categories, they are presented with the coveted Award of Excellence.

“The ATSI Award of Excellence offers the industry the kind of quality testing and benchmarking that is essential to help us establish the service levels demanded by our customers. We congratulate MedCom Professional Services, not only for their TOP TEN achievement in 2008 but also for following up this year with another TOP TEN placement in 2009 from a field of 136 participating telephone answering services,” stated ATSI President Dennis O’Hara.

Now a twelve-time winner, MedCom Professional Services, Inc. has earned the Diamond Award for twelve consecutive years. ATSI congratulates the staff of MedCom Professional Services, Inc. on their proven quality service to their customers.

About ATSI
The Association of TeleServices International was founded in 1942 as a national trade association representing live answering services. ATSI now encompasses companies across the United States offering specialized and enhanced operator based services including: call centers, contact centers, inbound telemarketing, paging, voice messaging, emergency dispatch, fax, and internet services among others.

Multi-Device Wireless Broadband from Sprint MiFi

It's a MiFi, Sprint's new wireless broadband device, and it's geek gadget magic that'll realistically fit in your wallet. Disclosure! Sprint gave us a MiFi device to test. We tested it for a couple weeks and sent it back. We were sad to see it go.

We first tested the device with three laptops at a Facebook Vanity URL-Grabbing party. The host's WiFi connection was getting bogged down with traffic from about 20 other devices, so three of us picked a spot and huddled around the warmth of our own connection.

Sweetly simple and functional, the device easily accommodated the three users' surfing around. Multimedia uploads were as zippy as on a normal connection during the time we were test-driving the device.

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Today is the Digital TV Switch

Are you ready for the transition to the digiterized picture-box? We certainly hope so: Today, June 12th, we'll all be moving over to digital television and discarding the rabbit ears forever. Well, the few of us who need to, anyway.

It's been a long road, paved with delays, misunderstandings, and altercations with the rare Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel. We'd love to hear your experiences: Has anybody actually tried it out? Good experiences? Bad? Let us know in the comments. [DTV]