If you have $99 available and want to make a statement of with-it-ness, there’s the iCarta - a toilet paper dispenser gizmo that hooks up to an iPod and plays it through speakers while you, ah, do other things.
Blogged live by Mike during news conference call
Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates plans to quit fulltime work for the software company he founded. In a joint press conference with CEO Steve Ballmer timed to begin after the Thursday markets closed, Gates said he will quit Microsoft fulltime in July 2008 to concentrate on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He said he will continue fulltime as Microsoft chairman until then, working part time for the charitable organization.
“I have been given great wealth and I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, to give back to society to… help those most in need,” he said.
Gates reiterated his promise to give away most of his personal fortune, estimated at well over $40 billion.
The two-year transition plan will involve a team of Microsoft executives, with Gates immediately giving up his role as Chief Software Architect to Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie.
He called the decision to step down difficult, but said the foundation’s charity work was one of his great passions and that he looked forward to devoting more time to it. “It’s not a retirement (but) a reordering of my priorities.”
Gates was followed by Steve Ballmer, who stressed that he will continue his role as chief executive and that the company was “ready and capable of making a smooth transition to a team of new leaders without missing a beat.”
In a question and answer time, Gates said he envisioned having a some sort of role with Microsoft “for the rest of my life” but that his charitable work would be the major focus of his life once the transition is complete.
“The value of my time there (at the foundation) to shape things will really be quite great.”
With more people turning to VoIP Internet calls every day, concern is rising that the U.S. government will press its case to be able to listen in on them as they do with traditional landline calls in certain criminal cases and terror investigations.
A report from the Information Technology Association of America, a Silicon Valley based computer industry group, says such a plan would require the entire structure of the Internet to be reengineered, resulting in major security problems and new vulnerabilities to every computer that is online.
The report concludes wiretapping the Internet and VoIP calls would be unlikely to be politically and socially possible and that foreign governments simply wouldn’t go along with any plan pushed by the U.S. and that such a move would “be the destruction of American leadership in the world of telecommunications.”
Further, says the report, “this would cause enourmous and very serious national-security implications.”
What do you think, should law enforcement be able to tap into Internet calls like they do regular telephones
Sometimes you need to know the location of the nearest tower or dead spots. My NBC-TV High Tech Talk segment this week looks at www.cellreception.com - an online guide to finding good mobile phone service.
And if that doesn’t help, we also check out a site called JDTeck, where you can buy a cell phone booster or repeater that improves cell phone reception in marginal areas.
And they swear AT those new digital phones, which many complain have more reception problems than the older analog models. I touched on some of this in my column today but have since been getting e-mail and talking to readers who are clinging to their old phones because…. they work.
“My phone has to be six years old,” one woman told me. “It’s so big and bulky that I’m embarassed to bring it out of my purse but it always works even when my friends’ fancy flip phones can’t get a signal.”
A man named Frank who lives near Alpena told me his son can’t connect with a new digital phone but his old analog clunker does every time. “New isn’t always better,” he said.
And Shari, who lives in subrban Detroit but read my column online while on vacation, sent an email about her expeiences with a phone that works on both analog and digital. “We are currently in Burlington, Vermont, visiting our son,” she said. “On the drive up here yesterday through the boonies near Lake George and Lake Champlain, my phone switched to analog regularly to maintain a connection, especially in areas where there was occasionally ‘no service.’ That’s our kind of territory — hiking trails in rural areas. My biggest concern is… who makes cell phones for that need? The hiker who falls? The camper who has his family at a remote site? The person who doesn’t live near an expressway?”
Good questions… and comments…all.
The popular Weatherbug service has launched a new feature today that provides severe weather alerts and warnings keyed to specific addresses and locations, instead of generalized and zip-code areas.
They call it the Smart Notification Weather Service and it can be programmed to be transmitted by phone-voice, phone-SMS, email or pager. It’s a subscription service being marketed for businesses, schools, recreational sites, government agencies, retail companies, transportation firms and public places that have strong needs to get severe weather information in advance of a serious threat.
Weatherbug has a network of 8,000 WeatherBug live, streaming data weather tracking stations and over 1,000 cameras primarily based at neighborhood schools and public safety facilities across the U.S and will use it, as well as info from the National Weather Service to deliver warnings and alerts of such things as nearby lightning strikes, dangerous winds and tornado and hurricane warnings.
You can see a demo of the new service here. It costs about $10 per user per month.
This just doesn’t seem right. Nintendo has plans to release an electronic version of the classic Monopoly board game.
Except instead of the board game’s original New York Avenue and Marvin Gardens, Nintendo uses icons like Mario’s hat and Donkey Kong’s barrel from classic old Nintendo games.
Guess Nintendo is capitalizing on the nostalgia of a generation raised on video games.
First it was Sprit Nextel with its Family Locator Service that uses a location based tracking feature to let parents pinpoint the location of their kids on a map.
On Monday, Verizon Wireless offers a similar product called Chaperone that will do the same thing. With the Verizon feature, parents can also set up geographic limits and receive text alerts if their children go too far from home. It uses the special Migo phone from LG Electronics that is being marketed for kids.
With both services, of course, the kids must be carrying mobile phones, something more and more children between 6 and 10 years are doing these days.
Makes you wonder how we all survived in those pre-cellphone days, huh?
Google has released a new plug-in extension for Firefox that keeps Web browser settings synchronized on multiple computer systems. The plug-in synchronizes bookmarks, the history list of Web pages that have been visted, passwords, and cookies.
This means that your Firefox settings on your laptop will be the same on your desktop.
There is a slight downside to this: Google advises that because the plug-in must update the browser settings whenever Firefox is opened, it will slightly increase the start-up time of Firefox (the time between clicking on the Firefox icon and loading the start page).
The company says it’s working on a fix.
A lot of events - concerts, author readings, cultural gatherings - happen locally that we wish we knew about ahead of time so we could have planned to be there. A new site called Eventful is hoping to make that easier.
Its main functon is that of an events search site and right now, the site is filling up with Detroit-area happenings, listing upcoming concerts and the like in a big online calendar. But it’s also a place to share events you know about.
There’s even a tool called Eventful Demand in which anyone in any city can create a request for an event. When a demand is created with multiple requests, the Webste promises to “go to bat and try to make that concert, sporting event, ballet, etc. happen in that city,” says spokesperson Hunter Haas.
Here’s the ultimate high tech gift for Fathers who are also golfers.
the RadarGolf Ball Positioning System implants a tiny radio transmitter in the core of the golf ball. Then, when Dad clobbers that ball into the woods, a handheld device detects a signal from the lost ball and sounds a tone when it’s pointed in the right direction. The closer you get, the louder the tone.
The system is being sold online and through Dick’s Sporting Goods’ new concept golf shop and The Sharper Image stores nationwide. Cost is $249. A dozen golf balls with the embedded radio transmitting microchip go for $39.95.
My NBC-TV piece this week looks at my favorite weather sites for making sure outdoor summer plans don't get turned around because of wet or stormy weather.
The sites I recommend include the National Weather Service site, Weather Underground, WX Nation and - for Webcams galore of beach and shore - Webcamplaza.
Click below to see this week's installment of my High Tech Talk NBC-TV report…