We’re looking for bright, ambitious people to join our team — people who don’t just know how to work with or design technology, but people who are thrilled by the pace at which the world is changing, who realise that we’re living in a digital revolution, and who burn to be part of it.
There’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in the web and mobile technology space. Also, across the world, Universities seem to be places where great ideas and businesses are born. Did you know that Google, Time Magazine, Facebook, Dell, reddit.com, FedEx and Microsoft were all conceived while their founders were still studying? The friends you make at varsity may be the perfect partners in your future career, so it’s worth carefully considering your place of study.
At the MIH Media Laboratory at Stellenbosch University, we believe that putting the right team together and giving them lots of creative space and resources, is the best way to breed innovation. We aim for both research innovation (pushing the boundaries of web and mobile technology) and applied innovation (finding ways in which tech can create great businesses, or improve our lives in some or other way). The team currently consists of 20 postgrad researchers doing their Honours, Master’s and Doctorate degrees, from a wide variety of disciplines (Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Commerce and Socio-Informatics). We plan to grow our team to 30 people in 2011, which means that there’s a great opportunity for you to join us!
Read the rest of this entry »
For the last few decades, companies generally relied on the power of brands for marketing, mostly because there were fewer tools that could be used by consumers to communicate their experiences to a broad audience (Pajuniemi; 2009). Since the emergence of different web communication tools (e.g. online social networks, blogging platforms and chat rooms), consumers have found a wider range of communication technologies that allow them to communicate their opinions in online groups by engaging in electronic word-of-mouth communication (Riegner; 2007). Electronic word-of-mouth communication (eWOM) can be defined as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet” (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh and Gremler; 2004). The easy accessibility of these online social tools lead to basic changes in people’s online behaviour patterns to share their information and opinions with a now much larger audience.
Read the rest of this entry »
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a special case of Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where vehicles are the nodes. Vehicles or nodes share data among themselves in an ad hoc fashion termed Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) or Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication. They also communicate with external networks in infrastructure mode termed Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. This data sharing happens through the use of wireless networks, which are formed by moving vehicles equipped with wireless interfaces.
In this experiment, the short-range IEEE 802.11g/ Wi-Fi (ad hoc mode) was used to determine the connection duration time, data rate and the amount of data that can be transferred between two nodes moving at different vehicular speeds. But because only the relative speed matters here, one node was held stationary while the other was moving at: 40, 60 and 90 Km/h on each test. The video shows a demonstration of how the experimental was carried out and the graph shows the results obtained.
Demonstration Video: vanet_test
Results:
Since the Wifi operates on an unlicenced band, the interference causes the results to vary hence one cannot rely on a single test set, hence the test needed to be performed a number of times and use the average of the results recorded. In this case for example, at 40Km/h the experiment was performed 3 times; that is, the car drove 3 times past the stationary node (laptop) that was placed on the road side and the total sum of the bandwidths was divided by 3 to get the average.
From the graph above, the results show that as speed increases connection time decreases hence so does the amount of data transfered, even the bandwidth gets lower.
Interest in 3D displays has increased drastically over the past few months. These displays range from small screens such as the Nintendo 3DS to the huge Panasonic’s TH-152UX1 152” 3D Plasma display. Most of these require that the viewer wears glasses which are either eclipsing shutter or polarised glasses. However, some screens such as the 3DS’ auto-stereoscopic screen does not require the viewer to wear glasses.
Read the rest of this entry »
