In its latest victory over inefficiency, mobile technology is making coffee breaks quicker for some students at North Carolina State University.
The university’s library staff has created a new Web site that lets students with mobile phones decide whether to sneak off for a coffee break by watching a live video stream of the main library’s café. Users of the site can also browse a catalog of library materials and search for available public computers.
In the future, students will also be able to reserve study rooms and make book requests, said Mick Kulikowski, a university spokesman.
Other universities also have created applications or sites for library services, but North Carolina State says its mobile Web site is more broadly accessible than applications made only for iPhones.
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3 Responses to New Mobile Site Makes Coffee Breaks More Efficient
uibranch - November 30, 2009 at 5:19 pm
How fitting! This news item appears on the tenth anniversary of the first coffee-webcam to appear on the World Wide Web. That, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot at Cambridge University, was also the first browser image to be viewed around the world. Worth a chuckle about the Web’s “good old days” at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.htmlDave Rogers
uibranch - November 30, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Correction to #1… this month is the sixteenth anniversary, not tenth, of the webcam for the Trojan Room Coffee Pot.Wikipedia has a nice writeup also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
mikeprovance - November 30, 2009 at 6:34 pm
And, actually, MIT students used network technology to track inventory in vending machines in the 1980′s, before the Trojan Room Coffee Pot