I've seen a lot of scifi flicks that used "electronic insects" to scout - but I had no idea they were close to a reality:

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Every time I turn around, some scifi thing from a movie I've seen materializes...

Now this is funny - news seems to break mostly where the reporters happen to be.

Jeff Jarvis is connecting the dots on CBS moves in the news division:

The signs have been adding up: CBSNews.com did major layoffs and an aggressive retreat from news online. CBS stations made news layoffs aplenty. And now CBS is said to be talking with CNN -- again -- about outsourcing news to CNN. One imagines a one-woman-thick news operation: Katie Couric reading intros to CNN reports.

As Jarvis notes, this isn't a bad thing. I rarely watch one of the 30 minute national newscasts - why would I? I have CNN, MSNBC, and Fox running news 24x7, and CNN runs a headline service if I want something short. I also have the whole net to choose from.

The interesting question is what this will do to local news operations. Those have long been seen as the "farm teams" for the big networks, but that's not going to hold any longer. I expect to see more and more affiliation with the cable news networks, and for the bons between local stations and their "home" networks to loosen.

Technorati Tags: media

Spotted in Engadget:

So Aircell just nabbed itself the first and only approval from the FAA for air-to-ground mobile broadband for US domestic flights, meaning we're that much closer to in-flight internet. So far the approval just covers the Boeing 767-200, which means Aircell can start prepping equipment to cover the 767-200 fleet of American Airlines this year, but they're also prepping to cover the Airbus A320 fleet of Virgin America.

That's good news, but what about international flights? On a long haul flight to Europe or Australia, having a network connection would be really handy...

Boy, am I glad the SPA 2008 conference wasn't this week - just look at the problems in Heathrow with the new terminal 5 opening. It sounds like they planned nothing, and just expected everything to somehow work. The results - passengers without bags, passengers waiting for 6 (or more) hours to get bags, 1/5th of BA's flights at Heathrow cancelled. Meanwhile, the guy running BA says this:

'It's going to be a difficult day and we have got to put the problems we had yesterday behind us. We clearly learnt some lessons from yesterday. We have just got to be focused.'

You can read the article for the basic mistakes, but some of them seem really stupid, like not having enough parking for the T5 staff. How do you not know how much parking you'll need? Is the size of the staff a mystery?

This kind of mistake requires some simple PR: the head of BA has to take ownership of the problems, and either resign or issue a simple "mea culpa" - along with a commitment to get things fixed. For starters, they might want to move to a small number of flights in and out of T5 and use that to debug the problems - and only scale it up as they fix them. Based on what I read, that doesn't sound like the approach they are taking though.

Technorati Tags: marketing, pr

This is a great middle school level prank:

29 N.J. Eighth-Graders Get 2 Days Detention After Forking Over Nearly 6,000 Coins

They set up up a lunchtime prank via text messages, where a bunch of them brought in pennies to pay for lunch. Amusing, but here's the part that caught my eye: the reporting:

CBS 2 HD did the math -- Each student brought in 200 pennies. Multiply that by 29 you get close to 5,800 pennies.

"Close to"??? Never mind arithmetic skills; do none of these people have a calculator?

Technorati Tags: humor, stupidity

Jeff Jarvis relays a bunch of ideas from his readers about fixing the NY Times - which mostly involve something Laura Ries could have told them: Concentrate on their brand and ditch everything that is ancillary to that.

For the Times, that's national/international coverage: they aren't a "New York" paper anymore. For something like the Boston Globe, it's the opposite; they should go hyper local and ditch everything else.

Ultimately, any news outlet that wants to survive will have to find an identity that sticks. If I want AP level coverage, there's Google News - there has to be a reason to visit.

Technorati Tags: branding, marketing

I finally strung a piece of coax to my office, so I can use my EyeTV with it (instead of an antenna), and bam - I saw this:

My parents live near Melbourne, which is well north of the problem area - so no problems there. I'm glad I'm not flying through Miami today :) Some kind of issue with the power system took a few plants offline.