The Crunch: Data pigeon, mobile VMware and Telstra's T-Hub

A pigeon transferred 700MB of data faster than a car or a Telstra ADSL connection.

The bizarre experiment, conducted in rural New South Wales, was prompted by a comment by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Parliament last week whilst attacking the Liberal Party for its opposition to the bill that proposed to split Telstra.

At the VMware Virtualisation Forum 2009 in Sydney this week, the company's CTO Steve Herrod shared his vision of enabling mobile phone users to run any smartphone application - whether for a Blackberry, Android, Windows, Symbian or Apple handset - on one device.

VMware also demonstrated PC over IP (pcoip), a protocol designed in partnership with Dutch firm Teradichi, which intelligently compresses and prioritises data over slower connections to reduce any lag experienced by the user.

Herrod demonstrated how pcoip could remove lag when using a virtual machine, even when working with complex files over a relatively slow WAN.

We have also published a photo gallery from the VMware event.

And finally, Telstra unveiled its latest hardware product - coined the T-Hub - at its annual investor day on Wednesday.

The T-Hub is a seven-inch tablet device with cordless handset and is still in very early development. Telstra CEO David Thodey said the company had been conducting a pilot of the product.

"We really want to make sure it's a great user experience when you get it so that all the bugs are ironed out and so it works well," he said. "[There's] just a bit more work to be done on that".

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