IP World Canada is a Canadian telecom show focused on IP that is going full steam ahead this week in Toronto.  Regretfully, due to a last-minute contingency, I was unable to be there this morning to attend a great tutorial about SIP by Henry Sinnreich (the father of SIP and Distinguished Member of Engineering from MCI), but I will be there tomorrow to catch Mr. Sinnreich and others present various interesting sessions.

Jake Gordon, the conference organizer, has assembled a great lineup of telecom executives (truly a who's-who list of the telecom world in Canada), including the likes of Michael Sabia (President and CEO of Bell Canada), Joe Natale (EVP and President, Client Solutions at Telus), John MacDonald (Allstream President), Don Smith (CEO of Mitel), Isabelle Courville (President, Enterprise Market for Bell Canada), Frank Panza (Director, IP-One Marketing), Phil Edholm (CTO and VP of Network Architecture for Enterprise Networks at Nortel), and Ibrahim Gedeon (CTO Telus Communications), among others.  These and many other speakers will be able to give a good pulse of the true adoption of VoIP thus far in Canada.

The agenda includes several tracks, including technology solutions, enterprise/SMB solutions and customer case studies.  The show definitely looks promising and is generating a lot of attention.  I am therefore pleased to have been invited to speak in a couple of sessions (one is an analyst roundtable discussion on the current state of the industry, and the second one is a longer session on the evolution from TDM to IP PBXs).

It's official - SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize today, breaking through the Earth's atmosphere to the edge of space for the second time in five days.  The US-built craft is the world's first privately built manned spacecraft to have completed its third round-trip journey to space (besides the two over the past week, it had previously achieved the feat earlier in the summer).  Hopefully, the Ansari contest will further bolster dreams of private space exploration and open the final frontier to tourists at large.

Note: The da Vinci Project, one of the Canadian entries in the contest, is planning to still go ahead with the launch of its rocket from Kindersley, Saskatchewan later this month.  It is nice to see the Canadians involved in this venture persevere, and I hope they achieve their goal to soar past the Earth's atmosphere.

NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have teamed up to develop a prototype micro fuel cell for 3G FOMA phones.  [Ed. note: FOMA is the name of DoCoMo's proprietary 3G network in Japan]  The logic behind the move is to cater to the power demand by heavy-duty 3G cell phone users.  But even normal users will also benefit, given the increasing power consumption of cell phones (which can be also used to play games, store information such as photos, play different music ring tones depending on the caller ID, etc.). 

The greater power capacity is due to the micro fuel cell, which is able to store 10 times as much power per unit weight as a conventional lithium-ion battery.  The fuel cell generates electric power through a chemical reaction by mixing hydrogen and methanol.  CNET reported that Fujitsu was able to increase the methanol concentration in the fuel cell by developing a better membrane.  The prototype unit measures 152mm x 57mm x 16mm and weighs 190g. 

The charging device is shaped like a normal cradle used to recharge handsets, and it meets all the specs of other FOMA mobile phone rechargers besides being compatible with all FOMA handsets as well.  Both companies anticipate that the prototype will be further refined, with development being completed by the end of 2005.  The key question is when the prototype will become commercially available - thus far, the jury is still out on some of these fuel cell initiatives in terms of products actually launched in the marketplace.

Note: TechTree (an interesting Technology Daily from India, which I enjoy reading) also mentions that Fujitsu apparently has another prototype power unit that incorporates the technology.  Perhaps this work can be extended to other devices, such as PDAs and laptops.  A 300 ml. methanol solution can hypothetically charge a notebook for close to 10 hours.