Cambridge

Jennifer Wunder, an associate English professor at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Ga., says she likes to keep her college-provided cell phone handy to send text messages and e-mails to students.

Wunder, 38, says her interaction with students is way up because she's reaching students on the same device they use.

"It's an incredible educational opportunity," she said.

On Jan. 7, she'll join about 75 fellow employees who will unplug their office phone and go wireless for good, said Lonnie Harvel, the school's chief information officer.

With the holiday season approaching, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child is looking to use advertising and an alliance with Amazon to provide more low-cost laptops for children in developing countries.

To promote this year's version of its Give One/Get One (G1G1) program, the Cambridge, Mass.-based OLPC has arranged for donations of television time, billboards and magazine ads by such major media companies as the News Corporation, CBS and Time Warner, according to a story in Sunday's New York Times.

Amazon Fulfillment

On the third day of its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft cranked up the "wow" factor by showing off some projects under development in the company's research wing. Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft research, delivered the day's keynote address and used the opportunity to talk about Microsoft's ideas for dealing with a variety of technological and social challenges.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is helping start a new foundation with the aim of supporting the Web as a tool that's open and accessible to everyone.

Exactly what the World Wide Web Foundation is going to do hasn't been decided yet, but Berners-Lee pointed to some possible areas of focus, like making the Web better suited to people in emerging countries.

"I understand that 80 percent of the planet don't use the Web, but quite a large number ... may have signal from a cell tower," Berners-Lee said.

Computer-industry giant IBM announced at the Interop conference in New York on Wednesday that it is has established the IBM Center for Social Software (CSS) in Cambridge, Mass. The new facility is part of the company's ongoing Tomorrow at Work program, an initiative IBM says is designed to "anticipate what the next work world will bring -- and prepare for it today."

Someday you may be reading this on paper-thin, high-contrast, electronic paper technology. That's the promise of new technology shown Monday by Esquire magazine and Plastic Technology.

For its 75th anniversary issue, Esquire features a first-ever digital cover with moving electronic imagery. The inside of the cover has an electronic ad for the Ford Flex crossover, and the cover flashes "The 21st Century Begins Now."

E-Ink's Technology

The cofounder and chief technical officer of iRobot, the company that brought robotic vacuums to the homes of millions of consumers, is leaving to start another venture.

Rodney Brooks launched Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot in 1991 with Colin Angle and Helen Grenier, his former students. The roboticist plans to spend time with his new startup, Heartland Robotics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based industrial robotics company.
Heartland is not considered a competitor, according to iRobot.

People share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share graphs, charts and other illustrations they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, users can upload the more technical data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays.

These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barrack Obama.

Intel Corp.'s low-cost laptop initiative is set to get a boost Wednesday from Portugal's government, which is pledging to provide elementary school students with 500,000 computers based on the chipmaker's Classmate PC design.

The announcement brings Intel's rivalry with the One Laptop Per Child organization into the spotlight once again.

In May, the nonprofit OLPC group said its green-and-white XO laptop computers would work with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows in addition to a homegrown Linux-based operating system.