Cell phones to warn of earthquakes in Japan
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Japan's cellular operators say they plan to send earthquake warnings to the mobile phones of their subscribers.
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Japan&#39;s major electronics companies had found no serious damage to their facilities after a series of powerful earthquakes shook Niigata prefecture, northwest of Tokyo.
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A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.2 has shaken northern Japan in the same region that was hit by a deadly tremor last month, but there are no immediate reports of serious injuries or damage.
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A magnitude-6.6 earthquake struck just off the northwestern Japanese coast Monday morning, triggering a tsunami warning for the area, Japan's Meteorological Agency reported.
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Tokyo was shaken by an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 5.8 late this morning, Japan&#39;s Meteorological Agency said on its Web site.
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Aftershocks kept striking northern Japan on Sunday, hours after a powerful earthquake killed at least 14 people, injured more than 700 and knocked out power and phone services to at least 278,000 homes.
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TOKYO : A powerful earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale has injured 13 people in northern Japan in a new sign of seismic activity a month after the country&#39;s deadliest tremor in a decade.
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Motorola and NTT DoCoMo plan to target Japanese business travelers with a new 3G handset next spring that will run on W-CDMA and GSM networks.
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Japan&#39;s prefecture of Niigata, struck on Saturday by the country&#39;s deadliest earthquake since 1995, was rocked by fresh tremors strong enough to sway buildings in Tokyo, more than 100 miles away.
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India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives issued tsunami alerts after a massive earthquake off the west coast of Indonesia&#39;s Sumatra island, officials said.
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Second powerful earthquake in as many days triggers regional tsunami warning.
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Other nations could learn from Japan's well-established tsunami warning system, writes Jamie Miyazaki.
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An Israeli company plans to distribute free to Asian countries hit by last week's tsunami a device that uses land and water sensors to measure seismic activity and wave motion that could indicate tsunamis.
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Text messages could soon be at the heart of a system to help people cope in the aftermath of disasters.
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A strong earthquake measuring 6.8 on the open-ended Richter scale shook western Japan on Sunday and officials issued tsunami warnings, broadcaster NHK reported.
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Japan is planning government-backed exams for phone guides  who will help users navigate their increasingly complicated  mobile phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Governments seeking inexpensive technology to warn of tsunamis could be interested in a free software application that monitors vibrations in the hard disks of computers in an attempt to detect the underseaÂ earthquakes that cause tsunamis. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector is the brainchild of Michael Stadler, who demonstrated the prototype system earlier this week at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz, Austria. As part of their operation, hard disks measure vibrations in order to keep the read-write head of the disk on track. These measurements can be read from some hard disks. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector captures this vibration data and shares it with computers in other locations connected via a peer-to-peer network to determine whether an earth tremor is occurring. In the p-to-p network, several participating computers act as supernodes, which analyze the data received from the other "sensing" nodes. The supernodes are able to ignore vibrations generated by a computer being kicked or shaken, by recording how many computers report the same vibrations simultaneously. If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the p-to-p network can then warn of such events. The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour, Stadler explains on hisÂ Web site. The speed difference leaves time to evaluate tremors and, if necessary, warn of a tsunami. On his Web site, however, Stadler points out that his system is still in the experimental stage with some inherent problems and can't be fully relied on to provide a "serious prediction" of a tsunami risk in its present configuration.