e-con Systems Receives the “Windows Embedded Partner Excellence Award” from Microsoft
On the 22nd of April, 2009, in Bangalore, India, Microsoft presented the most-coveted “Windows Embedded Partner Excellence Award” to e-con Systems. Not much of a surprise, e-con Systems has a track record of coming up with successful Windows Embedded products.
Microsoft Presents “Windows Embedded Partner Excellence Award” to e-con Systems
What exactly is e-con Systems? It is an embedded product developer that makes end-to-end product development. It provides services on systems integration like development of drivers and solving Windows CE BSP problems. Furthermore, the company offers reference designs that operate on Windows CE 6.0 R2 that are totally optimized for BOM. This gives the customers the ability to customize their own products. This is done through the BSP that are supplied with reference boards that will create production-ready products.
Aside from the above description, e-con is also part of the joint endeavor called Spark Program between Microsoft and e-con Systems. The Spark Kit is a multi-board system that features everything in the eSOM270 like a carrier board, a computer on module, and a VGA interface board that has the full version of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and even the Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
e-con Systems received the Gold level partner category for successfully putting forward the System Integrated services of Windows Embedded and a diverse selection of OEM deployable single board computers that run on modules that come with production-ready BSPs.
Some of the e-con Systems products that have done well in the tech-market are the billing automations systems, sale terminals, lottery terminals, digital picture frames, handheld data loggers, process control systems, and digital signage terminals. To perfectly fit the needs of customers, all of which are based on Windows Embedded.
The President of e-con Systems, Ashok Babu, accepted with honor the award and stated that the award further motivates the company to develop even better products that would make the world a better place to live. He further added that now e-con Systems is better positioned because they are now recognized to belong to a niche group that has special expertise in Windows Embedded.
Besides embedded product development, e-con Systems likewise offer other services such as hardware design, board design, firmware design, Linux, VxWorks-Board Support Packages, and WinCE/Windows. The company is truly a force to reckon with in terms of tech-specialization.
OpenShaspa, an Application Which Makes Life Easier
What if I told you that there was a way to manage your energy consumption through your computer? It may sound too good to be true, but there actually is one such software; it is one of OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit’s applications. It is now available from the startup a man named Oliver Goh co-founded also known as Shaspa. It was created with open source components such as Arduino circuit boards. The kit itself comes with a system which can monitor and control of your home’s power output with sensors that connect to mobile phone and internet applications. The sensors are wireless. Sensors for both gas and water, together with a few other utility resources, could be included in the system too.
Once the kit is installed to your computer, and the sensors have been put in place, you could start managing your home through the virtual world. You could click your avatar and make it turn on or turn of the power supply. You could command your avatar to check how much your daily water consumption is. You could even go to your other friends’ houses that also use OpenShaspa and help them manage their power consumption. OpenShaspa has so many uses that even users like you can make their own functions since it uses an open-sourced software.
There are other energy management systems which can be controlled through mobile phones and through the internet. But OpenShaspa has an edge over these systems; it can be hooked up to virtual world. This virtual world was created with OpenSimulator, an open-sourced spinoff of Second Life. It creates a simulation of your home which is then connected to the sensors that come with the kit. It’s a really cool widget by itself but Shaspa’s developers say that modeling your home’s energy consumption in 3D could make it easier to manage and make it more comprehensible. Goh also noted that you could ask a friend to look after your home when you’ve gone through the avatar your friend has in this virtual world.
OpenShaspa is a very useful application. This application will make your life a whole lot easier. The kit will include something called a “Social Energy Meter” which makes all the energy consumption data available to the public through the internet. The data could be tracked and evaluated through online websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, to name a few. Power management has never been this fun.
Convert PDF Files and More
PDF files or portable document format files of Adobe is here to stay. It is widely used globally because of its cutting edge security offering. Whatever text content a document has, writers are ensured that their work will remain “uncopyable”. Another great thing is, publishers can actually use complex formatting for whatever purpose they want. Also, there is no compromising the sharing of information since Adobe Acrobat Reader allows viewing of PDFs to be viewed by practically anyone.
No matter how good the Adobe program is, there are still questions that users ask. Reading on will reveal the answers you have always wanted to know. The first question would be how to convert a PDF into text that can be edited or altered. Actually, there are several ways to do this and one is by scanning the document first followed by using special applications that enables you to edit the text.
The special application you are looking for is an optical character recognition (OCR) package. The scanner, of course, is a requirement. Flatbed scanners, at the minimum, would cost only $25. The OCR package can easily be found in any installed Microsoft Office. Having this program means that you also have the Microsoft Office Document Imaging which has the function of scanning a printed document and doing optical character recognition then sending it to MS Word. Although the result is not as accurate as OmniPage, a high-end OCR package, it can function enough to save you time from encoding long text documents.
Another way to convert PDF to text file is to buy the full version of Adobe Acrobat or even Nitro PDF Professional. This is easy since you just have to save the PDF as a text file. Nitro PDF Professional seems to offer better features than Adobe Acrobat.
What exactly can Nitro PDF do? It can create PDF files from over 300 kinds of files and with just one click, you can automatically convert common file types like Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, WordPerfect and others. The converted PDF file can be viewed through Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
What’s more is that you can edit the content of the PDF file anytime you want. You may replace, crop, resize, insert, downsample, and change the text. You can also put in footers or headers, numbering, and even watermarks. An in just one process, you can copy the text or take shots of the page and paste it in other applications. For better work capabilities, you may use the to comment, add feedbacks, and markups as much as you want for your co-workers to see. What a great product! It can do anything to any PDF file.