Vision gained with WiFi

Residents of remote villages in southern India have easy access to eye care due to a specially designed, low-cost and long-distance WiFi network. The network allows specialists at Aravind Eye Hospital at Theni, in the state of Tamil Nadu, to interview and examine patients in nine remote clinics via video conference, reports BBC News.

The new technology has been developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and at Intel in collaboration with the Indian hospital.

One of the scientists` first priorities was to develop inexpensive and robust wireless networking technology which would stand up to the demands of developing regions.

Leaf Networks, a software company founded in 2005, unveiled the official public release of its "Leaf" network technology, says Emediawire.

Leaf technology aims to fill the void for typical home and business computer users between their private physical local area network (LAN) network and its devices, and remote users who aren`t directly connected to their network but need to access those devices.

"Most people use one of two networks to access information and services, namely the public Internet and their private home or office LAN," explains Dr Jeff Capone, founder and CEO of Leaf Networks. "For most users, the use of these networks has remained distinct."

Sun Microsystems CEO and president Jonathan Schwartz this week disclosed in his blog that the company plans to combine its storage and server product organisations into a new group called Sun Systems. The realignment comes almost two years after Sun paid about $4.1 billion to acquire tape vendor Storage Technology, reports Computerworld.

The new business unit will be responsible for aligning the company`s server, storage, virtualisation and networking technologies, Schwartz said.

Schwartz suggested in the blog post that the decision to combine the units comes as IT executives struggle to manage increasingly integrated system, storage and networking environments.