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With more and more gadgets comes the need to get rid of some of them sometimes! But no more just dumping them in the trash -- recycle, now that's the ticket!
CloudBlue offers a suite of services that enable its customers (think corporate -- and you can too at your workplace to clear room for more stuff) to maximize the financial value of their electronic assets while exceeding strict environmental standards. In other words, they help assist in proper equipment disposal.
What's nice is their reach -- facilities in Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and Virginia. Customers include leading OEMs, VARS, IT consultants, schools and corporations.
So once again, think about recycling being greater than just those gadgets at home.
Always loved the smallest of the small laptop PCs, but seems they never really took off for a number of reasons -- form factor is limited by keyboard size (chiclets anyone), features tend to not be pushing the envelope and price is high (smaller means pricier -- MacBook Air anyone).
Now Acer and Dell seem to both be getting into the act. Read more about Acer's latest offering (with photos) here on the UMPC Portal.
Ah, if we could only carry one gadget that could do it all ... will it be phone, computer or wrist radio (Dick Tracy, anyone) ...
That's one of my favorites pictured above -- Compaq's Contura Aero -- note the trackball location (thanks to the Home Computer Museum)!
Sony has joined forces with six of the top cable companies in the U.S. to adopt tru2way technology in its TVs, thus eliminating the need for a set-top box when accessing television and other interactive services. and anyone else working on a set-top box should be nervous. Read more about it here.
Apple, Netflix, Sezmi
Get ready to rock!
When the house lights go down this fall, a new generation of axe shredders, drummers and fearless frontmen will come together and rock with Guitar Hero World Tour, the latest installment from the #1 best-selling video game 2007 (but not 2008 based on what we know so far).
Guitar Hero World Tour is slated to transform music gaming by extending Guitar Heroâs exhilarating guitar frenzy into a "cooperative band experience that combines the most advanced wireless instruments with revolutionary new online and offline gameplay modes."
The game will feature a slick newly redesigned guitar, a genuine electronic drum kit and a microphone as well as an innovative Music Studio music creator that lets players compose, record, edit and share their own rock and roll anthems, along with online Band Career and eight-player âBattle of the Bands.â Read more from the Red Octane press release at CrunchGear here.
Predicting the new gadgets that Apple might throw at us is a favorite parlor game of the technology industry, Wall Street and the blogosphere. The latest chatter is that Steve Jobs will reveal at a developer conference beginning June 9 a new version of the iPhone that can surf the Web over fast 3G wireless networks.
But the Wall Street Journal reports that it's more fun thinking about what gadgets Apple might be making in five years.
Forrester Research is the latest to look into the crystal ball in a new report that imagines the Apple products of 2013. But rather than predict Apple jet packs or other outlandish new directions, the research firm uses the company's recent history as a guide to forecasting.
Forrester's conclusion: While much of Apple's great successes have been mobile products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home
Just what sizes, shapes and forms those colonization efforts will take can be seen here.
According to this report in BetaNews, Sprint is planning to implement data usage caps on its mobile broadband service. Sprint will put a 5 GB per month overall use cap and 300 MB per month for off-network roaming.
Sprint states that "the use of voice and data roaming by a small minority of customers is generating a disproportionately large level of operating expense for the company. We are enforcing the existing terms and conditions for phone plans. We are placing a limit of 300 MB per month on the amount of data use allowed while roaming off network as well as a 5 GB per month limitation on total wireless data usage for Sprint's connection and phone as modem plans."
Now I don't remember seeing those usage limits in the existing terms and conditions, do you?
Nice to see Roku back and how about hooking up with Netflix in the announcement of a $100 set top box that streams free movies (for Netflix subscribers) to the living room.
Instead of wading into a losing battle over cheap downloads and rentals (see Vudu, BlockBuster, AppleTV, Google, etc., which charge for each movie), we now see somebody getting the magic four-letter word right -- "free." That's what I'm talking about!
Of course, the service isnât really free. Users have to buy the $100 box, and continue to keep a Netflix subscription active ($18/month). There are 10,000 movies available on on the box, which is significantly less than the 100,000 or so titles on Netflixâs DVD mailing service (and itâs old titles, not new releases).
OCZ Technology has announced a new spin on an old product: the build-it-yourself notebook PC. Yes, you really do build it yourself ...
According to a report in ExtremeTech, OCZ's DIY Gaming Notebook (part number OCZNBIAS15DIYA on the company's Web site) includes the basics: a 15.4-inch WXGA display, an Intel PM965 chipset, an Nvidia GeForce 8600MGT/512 Mbyte video card and an 8X DVD±R/RW combo drive capable of reading and writing four-layer discs.
However, buyers have to buy and install the CPU, memory, hard drive and operating system themselves, either from OCZ or somebody else.
However, "building" the notebook consists of four steps: installing the hard drive, installing the memory, installing the CPU and attaching the bezel. (Some easy, some a bit hard, unless you've been under the hood of a desktop PC.
The new notebook will be the first of a family of products, the company said, but pricing has not yet been determined.
According to reports in today's Wall Street Journal and on CNBC, pesky Research In Motion (RIM) plans to introduce a touch-screen version of its BlackBerry to thwart the challenge posed by the popularity of Apple's iPhone. (And no wonder we are seeing so many RIM TV ads ...)
Apparently dubbed the Thunder, the new BlackBerry is among RIM's strongest moves so far to appeal to the increasing number of consumers jumping for multimedia phones, a market that is increasingly turning to touch-screen devices for their ease of use (and cool factor). Easy integration with iTunes and the iPhone's sophisticated touch-screen were key features that made the iPhone such a big hit.
According to National Technology Scan, a forthcoming study from Parks Associates (an annual phone survey of U.S. households) found 20 million households are without Internet access, representing approximately 18% of all U.S. households.
According to Parks Associates, nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document, underscoring the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer.
Age and education are factors in this divide -- 50% of those who have never used e-mail are over 65, and 56 percent had no schooling beyond high school.
National Technology Scan found just 7% seven percent of the 20 million âdisconnectedâ homes plan to subscribe to an Internet service within the next 12 months.
Maybe it's time to get a new telescope or upgrade for the future in another way?
According to a report in today's New York Times, the skies may be the next frontier in travel, but not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.
But those far, far away places and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a PC, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery.
The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting today, at www.WorldWideTelescope.org.
In case you wanted to know, the WorldWide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope â bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.
Here's CNET's take on it here. Happy trails to you ...
I've had the great pleasure to try out the sleek, portable nüvi 350 from Garmin for a while now. It takes GPS into a wider world than just GPS navigation, offering an all-in-one travelerâs reference and digital entertainment system . It's really a pocket-sized personal travel assistant, and it's rechargeable lithium-ion battery makes it convenient for navigation by car or foot.
The nüvi 350 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps, including a robust points of interest database with hotels, restaurants, gas stations and ATMs for instance.
What's a major telco to do when it can't make up its mind?
Put things on the website one day and then remove them the next?
Here ya go? AT&T has flip-flopped again on whether iPhone customers can get free access to AT&T hotspots.
Do we really need another online storage company?
Apparently, HP thinks so and has launched Upline, a data storage service that lets you put your data in a more secure, online headquarters location.
As we should have learned by now, automatic backup makes securing data simple, not just one time, but as often as you choose. And with any Internet connection you can easily access, share, manipulate and store your data from anywhere.
Really concerned about their rising churn - not good. Interesting move with Covad.
Sure do wish I could show you a picture ...
For all of us that want installed sound in every room of our nest, but don't want to see speaker panels all over the place, a company called Onsia is offering what it calls the first truly concealed flat panel speaker system. Designed to blend invisibly into any living space or office setting, (according to the company) only their remarkable performance will remind you theyâre there.
The speakers integrate material science and NXT transducer technology to produce a flat panel speaker that delivers evenly distributed, rich, acoustic sound.
However, the loss of the long-time telephone number often means that the incumbent phone operator loses the relationship with the customer entirely. Why? Because the consumer can buy access for his VoIP service such as Skype from another source, such as cable modem, 3G cellular, WiMax, or a competitive DSL/fiber carrier.
Let's see ... I've been on Sprint, AT&T and Verizon over the years, and the problem is that service reliability seems to come and go. One company is better for two years, then another, then another ...
