Etc.

“And that’s the way it is”
The Radio Club of America plans to honor Walter Cronkite and John S. Belrose with its achievement award, the Armstrong Medal, at its November banquet at the New York Athletic Club in New York City. The group is celebrating its 98th anniversary. Andy Rooney is scheduled to give the keynote speech at the banquet, said RCA.
——————————-
TravellingWave, a mobile speech technology firm, said it won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II award from the National Science Foundation for further development of mobile device input methods that can minimize background noise. The company has developed technology for speech-to-text input for mobile devices that combines predictive text technologies with speech recognition. The award gives the company $500,000 for its development efforts and builds on the company’s work completed last year under Phase 1 and Phase 1B awards.
——————————-
Calling out for home cooking
Meredith Corp., publisher of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine, is offering a new mobile recipe service for tech-savvy cookers and grocery shoppers. Better Homes and Gardens’ Recipes-on-the-Go provides recipes from the publication’s test kitchen directly to mobile phones. The recipes include a complete list of ingredients and nutrition information for each item. Using their cellphones, customers can enter a keyword or browse the publication’s recipe collection by main ingredient, preparation time or special considerations such as low-fat offerings or kid fare. The new service will be available initially for AT&T Mobility customers.
——————————-
Still smiling after all these years
The now-familiar digital smiley face is a quarter-century old, according to an Associated Press report. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman claims he was the first person to put a colon, hypen and right parenthesis together to form a horizontal smiley face. Fahlman and his colleagues marked the 25th anniversary of the smiley by launching a contest, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., that awards a $500 prize for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication, said AP.