About Ryan Deal

Ryan Deal is into vanilla soy chai, soft surfaces, useless facts, and solving problems. He'll freestyle battle rap anyone, and secretly and ashamedly can't get that damn Miley Cyrus song out of his head.

Ryan is a contributor for Mashable.com, TheNextWeb.com, TopCultured.com, and is a social marketing consultant for companies large and small.

He lives in Baltimore, MD and has only had his car broken into or stolen three times.

Ryan Deal's Post Reel

Autos:

Start Your Car With Your Fingerprint

By Ryan Deal posted October 14, 2010, 10:37 am | 0

Paranoid about getting your car stolen or just generally hate using keys? Well now, you can get this biometric vehicle starter that will start your car after reading your fingerprint. Maybe it’s overkill, but come on, if you can’t get girls with a biometric car starter then you’ve got bigger problems.

When your fingerprint is identified by the system it then looks for pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature. Finally it scans the capillary patterns under the skin. The entire process only takes milliseconds to complete, and the system has verified the input was made by an actual living person. Advanced features of the Fingerprint Starter include Access Control, Ignition Interrupt, Computer Override, and Fuel Pump Cut-Off. Only those drivers with enrolled fingerprints can start the engine or enable/disable system features.

Smart:

Why It’s Hard to Crash the Electric Grid

By Ryan Deal posted October 13, 2010, 9:46 am | 0

Last March, the U.S. Congress heard testimony about a scientific study in the journal Safety Science. A military analyst worried that the paper presented a model of how an attack on a small, unimportant part of the U.S. power grid might, like dominoes, bring the whole grid down.

Members of Congress were, of course, concerned. Then, a similar paper came out in the journal Nature the next month that presented a model of how a cascade of failing interconnected networks led to a blackout that covered Italy in 2003.

These two papers are part of a growing reliance on a particular kind of mathematical model — a so-called topological model — for understanding complex systems, including the power grid.

And this has University of Vermont power-system expert Paul Hines concerned.

“Some modelers have gotten so fascinated with these abstract networks that they’ve ignored the physics of how things actually work — like electricity infrastructure,” Hines says, “and this can lead you grossly astray.”

For example, the Safety Science paper came to the “highly counter-intuitive conclusion,” Hines says, that the smallest, lowest-flow parts of the electrical system — say a minor substation in a neighborhood — were likely to be the most effective spots for a targeted attack to bring down the U.S. grid.

“That’s a bunch of hooey,” says Seth Blumsack, Hines’s colleague at Penn State.

Devices:

Microsoft to Launch New Phone with AT&T

By Ryan Deal posted October 11, 2010, 9:44 am | 0

Microsoft Corp is set to unveil a new line of phones running its Windows software on Monday, as it attempts to pull back market share from Apple Inc’s iPhone and Google Inc’s Android system in the fast-growing market for multi-featured ‘smartphones’.

The world’s largest software company is hoping that the new phones, from handset makers such as Samsung, LG and HTC, will propel it back into the mobile market, which many see as the key to the future of computing.

The new phones, initially available on AT&T Inc’s network, have already been shown off in prototype form, and are much closer in look and feel to Apple’s iPhone, with colorful touch-screens and ’tiles’ for easy access to e-mail, the web, music and other applications.

Some analysts say they represent Microsoft’s last chance to catch up with rivals, which overtook them in the past few years. Handsets are not expected to appear in stores for a month, so their success may not be judged until the new year.

Microsoft has just a 5 percent share of the global smartphone market, according to research firm Gartner, compared with 9 percent a year ago. Google’s Android system has a 17 percent market share, jumping from only 2 percent a year ago.

Devices:

Report: Verizon to sell iPhone from early 2011

By Ryan Deal posted October 7, 2010, 9:06 am | 0

Apple Inc plans to begin making a new iPhone by the end of the year, and Verizon Wireless will begin selling them in early 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

AT&T is the sole U.S. carrier for the popular smartphone, and investors and consumers alike have long speculated over when Apple will expand distribution.

Verizon Wireless and Apple representatives were not immediately available for comment on the report.

A recent study by Deloitte found that close to half of Apple iPhone users would be interested in switching over to Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone, if that option were available.

Energy:

Walmart to Install Thin Film Solar Panels

By Ryan Deal posted October 5, 2010, 1:16 pm | 0

Prominent corporations are paying special attention to go green and create a conducive environment for clean and green energy. Walmart too is taking appreciative steps in the field of alternative energy. In the year 2007, Walmart entered into a partnership with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to provide a thrust to the photovoltaic technologies. It was related with thin-film solar. They aimed for taking it out from labs to the real world.

In the practical world, products should be commercially viable, consistent, and cost effective. Walmart is already installing the solar panels in its stores in southern California, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Now they made it public to install more solar panels to another 20 to 30 outlets in California and Arizona. With this step they are moving towards their pledge of going 100% green in future.

Devices:

iPad Light Painting: Making Future Magic

By Ryan Deal posted September 30, 2010, 11:54 am | 0

The digital and mobile landscape has certainly been changing rapidly, in certain part by the Apple iPad. While the iPad is certainly practical for some, for others it is solely a device used to bring entertainment, and as some may succumb, to waste time. However, in all the creative things we’ve seen come out of the iPad, the iPad Light Painting by BERG is surely one of the most creative.

Mobile Device Boom Sparks U.S. Net Address Shortage

By Ryan Deal posted September 29, 2010, 9:26 am | 0

The United States could run out of unique Internet addresses to assign to new devices by the end of next year, a telecommunications official said on Tuesday.

Internet Protocol version 4, known as IPv4, provides the dominant architecture for the Internet. It requires devices to have unique identifiers, known as an IP address, but it only has space for 4.3 billion of those addresses.

The recent profusion of mobile devices like Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPad, and the expansion of Internet services to more homes have quickly depleted available addresses.

An upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol with more space, called IPv6, is available, but adoption in the United States has lagged behind Europe, China and other countries.

“We now face an exhaustion of IPv4 addresses,” Lawrence Strickling, administrator of the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said at a meeting of government and industry stakeholders.