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You should make the link between David Reed and Open Spectrum a little more clear. His writing on the subject is worth reading anyway. You might also mention Vanu Bose and his little company, which has been mentioned here along the founder's advocacy of Open Spectrum .

I've thought abt this, since it wud become an ideal solution for communication in rural areas (forgetting the spectrum issues!), with handset costs at an all time low !! Well, Vanu http://www.vanu.com/ has come up with a good solution, wherein high performance commodity PCs are used for software DSP. In the open domain, we have GnuRadio http://www.gnuradio.org/trac/ doing great work in developing algorithms. Also a project is underway for decoding GSM signals off the air http://www.thc.org/gsm/. May be someday, it can build up into a really working opensource BTS !! Cheers..

Do you think the year has already come to the end?
A year is quite long for technology advances and we are just at the very beginnings!
Well, iPhone is actually another cell phone.
It's by Apple, it has touch screen, plays MP3s and videos etc. etc.
Nonetheless is yet another cell phone, a 20+ years old technology and dozens of cell phones can do the same things as the iPhone does!
I'd rather say that Vanu's (claims for) new radio technology could be more interesting.
Let's wait some more weeks before talijg about "year's biggest tech launches".

Check out http://www.vanu.com/

Is it really so hard to use tags?

Software radio or SDR - an intresting subject where mathematical formulas become radio.

See for a high level overview.

Good reading is Understanding digital Signal processing by Richard G. Lyons. Prentice Hall, 1st ed: ISBN 0201634678 (amazon.com, search). 2nd ed: ISBN 0-13-108989-7 (amazon.com, search)

VanuBose 's company Vanu Technology demonstrated a software radio based on an iPAQ with a digital radio "backpack", in May 2003. Here are some links:

Slashdot article

Linuxdevices.com

Vanu.com

Vanu.com

Here's a note on the future of software defined radio

Several relevant pointers available here

Is it really so hard to use tags?

Software radio or SDR - an intresting subject where mathematical formulas become radio.

See for a high level overview.

Good reading is Understanding digital Signal processing by Richard G. Lyons. Prentice Hall, 1st ed: ISBN 0201634678 (amazon.com, search). 2nd ed: ISBN 0-13-108989-7 (amazon.com, search)

VanuBose 's company Vanu Technology demonstrated a software radio based on an iPAQ with a digital radio "backpack", in May 2003. Here are some links:

Slashdot article

Linuxdevices.com

Vanu.com

Vanu.com

Here's a note on the future of software defined radio

Several relevant pointers available here

The poster should have included this link (pdf) - much more interesting.

Funny.... I've had reliable keyword recognition since way back in '95 via my P133 and IBM via voice on OS/2 and the Mwave dsp addon board. Keyword isn't that big of a deal (relatively that is) if your selected vocabulary is relatively small. Keyword voice recognition is an almost solved problem and is used often from automated phone systems with amazing accuracy given poor signal quality. The automated collect call system's come to mind as a simple example. I have seen more complicated systems in work which are currently in research and some of the toolkits are open sourced if I'm not mistaken (would have to check to be sure)

As for difficulty.... that's not difficult at all seeing that the goal of the project is to ultimately provide that functionality.

from they're website
"IS-136, IS-95, GSM
A complete cell phone implementation"

All some interested party has to do is take they're freely available cell phone friendly code when it comes up make some modifications so that the signal is piped through a keyword recognizer instead of the speakers and poof... Its not as hard as you claim when sooo many people are willing to give you what you need.

"It would cost a lot more than $14K to do this over 100 channels."

As for cost, first of all I was using fictitious numbers as I stated... but seeing that you've brought up cost as unrealistic... I'll bring more realistic number and now overestimate. First, the paper associated with the article states that a dual 2Ghz machine could handle upto 32 GMS channels.. so.. lets see... lets say it costs $100 (which is probably being conservative) in Radio shack hardware to make the hardware to support 1 channel seeing that they say it only requires fairly inexpensive hardware... that's 3200 for 32 channels. Now add an overpriced Dell dual CPU server @ 3,444. now to get 96 channels it would cost you $19,932. Now, the average person could dig up a dual machine for less than 2000 with similar spec (minus scsi)... so realistically.... It be more like $15,600 which isn't that far off from my original $14k fictitious guess.

"Now targeted scanning could be a problem, but then maybe I can get my freaking cellular provider to turn on basic GSM encryption (phone supports it but none of the cell sites in the US do AFAIK)."

Unfortunately encryption won't end up being much of a stopping stone. It however will probably be the hardest part to deal with. There's a couple of ways that could be thwarted. 1. with so many distributed system for encryption breaking, a brute force could be used, not elegant... but hey... it works... 2. social engineering could be used to gain access to the information... Its certainly not the first time that a provider's phone password has popped up on the net. 3. if the original purpose of the system trickles down to the cellphone/pda... then you could simply walk up to your service provider and ask them to set it up, and voila you know have the encryption key.

I could keep circumventing different ideas all night.... And that's what's scary... cell phone scanners currently exist but are really pricey. Adding the cost of one sc

Done by Vanu Inc. Vanu Bose of MIT founded the company. See: http://www.vanu.com Has quite a bit of technical information of software radios.

How does this compare/relate to commercial efforts such as ParkerVision's Direct2Data and Vanu Bose's company Vanu? ParkerVision has a number of patents on their technology, will this be a problem for you?

Have you seen www.vanu.com?

this is nothing new, check out Vanu