NASA gets in on the app store action, keeps the pickins slim

Seriously, who is left without an app store at this point? Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, even the US Army has an app outlet to call their own. Now multi-national corporations and DARPA are being joined by NASA, which opened its own depot called apps@NASA over the holiday weekend. The goal is to provide employees and contractors with access to agency data and systems on the go. For the moment, there ain't much there. WebTADS is a time tracking app available for iPhone and BlackBerry, while NASA Contacts is, well, a contacts app for looking up the deets of your aerospace colleagues, but it's an iOS only affair. We expect the selection will be expanded soon and, fingers crossed, Android and WP7 will be added to the mix in the not too distant future.
Source:http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/30/nasa-gets-in-on-the-app-store-action-keeps-the-pickins-slim/

Brazil wants to build South American broadband network, says it will bring down costs

A pan-South American broadband network: It sounds rather ambitious, but that's exactly what Brazil proposed yesterday, during a meeting of the continent's communications ministers. In an address to his colleagues, Brazil's Paulo Bernardo called for the creation of "a ring of South American fiber optic networks" encompassing the entire continent. This "South American solution," he added, would lower the costs of internet and mobile access across the region, benefiting consumers and ISPs alike. "Connection costs for South American users represent on average between 35 and 40 percent of the total price of the service," the minister explained. "An Internet provider in South America pays, in the best of cases, three times more for the connection than in the United States. This situation must change urgently." Bernardo estimates that the initiative would cost about $60 million and could be completed within two years, though it'll likely have to jump through a few more hoops before nearing reality.

Source:http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/30/brazil-wants-to-build-south-american-broadband-network-says-it/