Category: News

HP’s got a new Multi-Touch laptop that they’re adding to their TouchSmart line for just under $1000. The new multi-gesture laptop offers a few nifty features in addition to a bunch of the same features as its predecessor, the TX2. The display is a bright 12.1-inch diagonal WXGA HD LED. The TM2, like the TX2, incorporates a swivel screen which allows for zoom, scroll, and rotate multi-touch gestures. HP did not skimp on the hardware for the TM2, which will be armed with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors and sport optional high multimedia performance ATI Mobility Radeon discrete graphics. Best of all the device runs the beautiful new TouchSmart software, which includes Twitter, an HP Music Store, and even Hulu! But what blew us away about the TM2 in particular is the special desktop that HP has included called BumpTop 3D desktop. You can drag and drop documents in a 3D like environment using your fingers. It’s absolutely the coolest touchscreen desktop interface we’ve ever seen.

 

Eco Factor: Low CO2 version of Porsche Boxster being planned.

Porsche is planning a new green avatar of its popular Boxster sports car, which would be the automaker’s weapon to fight climate change along with a possible electric 911. The company is planning a downsized engine for the vehicle, which will help reduce Porsche’s emissions ahead of a 2012 EU deadline.

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Famitsu is turning out to be quite a tease so early in the new year. The Japanese gaming publication announced that readers should be on the lookout for their latest issue next week as they will be

As you’ve probably heard by now, this morning Google finally officially announced the first Google Phone: The Nexus One. Plenty of reviewers and geeks are fawning over the new device, but some are proposing that it won’t even make a blip on the radar for your average consumer. In fact, earlier this evening the Wall Street Journal quoted one analyst as saying, “Unless [Google] gives it a big push with marketing dollars, which they are not, consumers aren’t going to know the phone exists.”

I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. Google is going to put its marketing muscle behind this in a very big way to ensure that consumer awareness persists long after today’s launch. Granted, the company says it is favoring an online strategy as opposed to television for its campaigns (which is why the analyst quoted above doubted its chances), but Google can still plaster the Nexus One all over the web.

It’s already started. Visit the YouTube homepage right now, and you’ll see a fairly prominent link to the Nexus One official YouTube Channel, which is loaded with how-to guides and video walkthroughs. Google is also running quite a few AdWords ads for keywords like “smartphones”, “phone”, “maps”, and “android”. That’s not hugely surprising, though it is worth pointing out that Google is purchasing ads that compete directly against some of its partners.

I suspect this is only the beginning. Don’t be surprised if we see ads for the Nexus One on Google’s famously spartan homepage (this would be a very rare move for the company, but it set a precedent with the Droid launch). Likewise, we’ll probably see small ads pop up on various Google products, the same way the company often prompts users to try out Chrome. And there will likely be a big push on third party publisher sites.

Google has a lot riding on this launch. Sure, it would be nice for the phone to be a popular device in its own right. But, as many have pointed out, it’s the disruptive distribution model that’s going to have the biggest impact down the line. Google needs to show that this new online distribution model is something that people are willing to actually use.

As it stands now, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Buying a cell phone online will be a pretty foreign experience to most people (at least in the United States). That isn’t to say it’s a difficult experience. It’s just different. And it’s going to require plenty of ads and hand holding to get people used to the process, because they won’t have a sales rep standing next to them to help.

Also, keep in mind that Verizon reportedly spent $100 million to market the Droid in 2009. I doubt Google anticipates that the Nexus One will actually beat Droid in sales in the short term (given Verizon’s thousands of retail stores versus Google’s online-only storefront that would be very difficult indeed). But if three months down the line the Nexus One still represents a very tiny sliver of Android’s market share, you can be sure people will start calling the ‘Google Phone’ a failure.

I reached out to Google to see if they’d offer any specifics about their upcoming marketing plans. Their spokesperson wasn’t willing to share much, but they did reaffirm that Google’s spending would be focused primarily online rather than on television:

Because the Nexus One is exclusively sold online, our marketing plan will heavily focus on online marketing to educate users on the benefits of the phone and the new way of buying it. We are using a broad range of Google online advertising tools, which we believe to be the best way to run targeted and measurable advertising / marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, we are not going into detail on our specific marketing plans for the future.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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LG and Panasonic will be adding Skype service to their internet-connected high-definition TVs, the popular web-telephone company announced today. The television companies are set to debut their new models on Wednesday, the day before the Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas.

Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls will be free, while video calls will require a webcam that is specially designed for the new televisions, with a price tag between $100 to $200. The webcam lets multiple users take part in a video conference and will be flexible enough to work in a living room setting, where the distance between the TV and user may vary. Embedded webcams, along with built-in WiFi and microphones, will likely become standard features if the new service strikes a chord with consumers.

Already, Skype claims that 30 percent of its calls include video, with the figure jumping to 50 percent during the holidays. Making the move to television is clearly intended to leverage this trend, while also catching the upcoming wave of internet-enabled TVs. As Skype’s CEO Josh Silverman put it, “TVs will no longer be just the center of people’s entertainment experience, but have the potential to be the center of people’s communications experience.”

Information Week has a little more detail about specific models, at least for Panasonic: “The Skype service is planned for Panasonics VT and G series TVs in the U.S. and LG is planning to embed the Skype service in a broad range of its high definition sets.”

In a related move, Skype announced that it will upgrade the resolution of video calls to accommodate 720p HD, enabling high-definition video conferencing for both personal computers and televisions. High-definition webcams certified for use with Skype will also be unveiled this year at CES.

Top quality video conferencing has become much more popular in the business world in the last year, with so-called telepresence services provided by big players like Cisco, Polycom, and others. Skype, already perceived to be the cheap and easy alternative to these offerings, now seems poised to bring high-def conferencing into the mainstream.

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I went through the annual ritual of CES Unveiled tonight, the opening reception where a hundred or so companies show off their award-winning gadgets to the press. It was a big crowd, inflated perhaps by the blogosphere that has more than made up for the dwindling numbers of traditional press. Here’s my impressions of some of the good gadgets. I snapped pictures with my new Canon Rebel XSi SLR camera.

The Pocket Radar, available in March for $249. This radar can measure just about any moving object. It can measure the speed of a baseball from 120 feet, and the speed of a car from a half mile away. It can measure anything moving from 7 miles per hour to 375 miles per hour, with an accuracy of plus or minus 1 mile per hour. It weighs just 4.5 ounces and measures 4.7 inches by 2.3 inches by 0.8 inches. Inside, it has a couple of microprocessors, high-speed digital signal processor technology, and other sophisticated radar gear. You just point and press the red button.

The Klipsch LightSpeaker is an audio speaker that you can hide on top of a ceiling light. So now you’ll never know where the music in your home is playing from. There are all sorts of invisible speakers, some hidden in walls. But this is a weird novelty, and some people might actually pay for it. It costs $599 for a set of two speakers with remote and other stuff. Additional speakers are $249. It will be available in March. It was developed by Kadence.

I happened to run into Charles Bellfield, the old huckster who was a spokesman for Sega in the Dreamcast days, God rest its soul. He is general manager for North America at Pure, a division of Imagination Technologies. The company was announcing the line of its Pure digital radio products for North America. It included this Pure Sensia, a round digital radio with Wi-Fi and a color touchscreen. It is available for $349 later this spring or early summer.

Zomm unveiled a Bluetooth wireless leash. It will sound an alarm if you walk away from your mobile phone, making it easier not to forget it somewhere. The Zomm device goes on your key ring and it is wirelessly paired with your mobile phone via Bluetooth wireless. If you walk out of range, Zomm will vibrate and flash lights. It will also provide you with a sound alert for incoming calls when your phone is out of sight. You can answer a call by pressing a button. Then you can use Zomm as a speaker phone. It will be available in the second quarter. It also has a security panic alarm that makes noise when you press it. It lasts three days on a battery charge. Price is to be determined.

Gigle Networks was their showing off what its customer, Belkin, can do with a powerline. You plug your Ethernet wire for a computer into the device, which plugs into a wall. It then sends the Internet data through the electrical wires of your home to another plug, which converts the data back into the form that can travel over an Ethernet wire. You can thus use it to extend a fast Internet connection– 200 megabits a second — into another room. That’s fine and dandy, and rivals such as DS2 and Intellon (now owned by Atheros) can do it too. But Gigle’s chips will be built into new unannounced devices coming in the first quarter that can become universal Internet adapters. That is, one device can be used to extend your Internet connection over the phone lines, coaxial cable (cable TV line), or power lines. This universal adapter is going to solve a lot of problems for people who can’t handle home Wi-Fi or want faster traffic lanes within their homes.

The AR.drone is a radio-controlled quadricopter. It’s a toy helicopter with four spinning rotors that can hover vertically and move around. You can remotely pilot the drone by holding a remote control (which could be your iPhone or iPod Touch). Just about anyone can control it. You can play games with it and fight duels with others on a Wi-Fi network. The drone is made by Parrot. There is no pricing or availability info yet.

Saygus was showing off the Vphone, a device that has been 12 years in the making. It has been designed to be able to do two-way video conferencing even when there is a low-bandwidth cellular connection. The video calls will run at 24 frames per second, all the way up to 30 frames per second. That’s as fast as television. It sounds impossible, but Sayers said the company worked on the proprietary compression technology to make it happen. Chad Sayers, founder of the company, said the company will launch it in the second quarter on a GSM cell phone network. The Android-based phone has no carrier and will be unlocked. It has a 3.5-inch screen and a Marvell PXA 310 624-megahertz processor. It can play standard video types such as MPEG-2 or H.264. Sayers said Fox News will show off the phone live on a video call on Friday. We’ll all believe it when we see it.

Liquid Image showed off its Wide Angle Video Mask for scuba divers. It has a video camera built into the face plate of a diving mask. It has an internal 16-gigabyte memory, or you can put in a micro-SD memory card into a waterproof compartment of the mask. Then you can snap pictures or shoot video by pressing a lever on a side of the mask. It sells for $200 and will be available in June. It has a five-megapixel camera with a 135 degree wide angle lens and can record video with a resolution of 720p at up to 30 frames per second with audio. There are versions for skiers, climbers, and others. A 16GB card can record up to 5.33 hours of video or thousands of still images. It operates on two AAA batteries.

Kempler & Strauss and the VNA Group showed off the W Watch Phone. You can use it as an unlocked speaker phone on a quad-band GSM cell phone network. You can also pair it with the company’s own Bluetooth headset. It has a touchscreen and can be as a camera, camcorder, music player, and sending text messages via a virtual keyboard. It costs $199 and will be available at the end of the first quarter. Compare that to LG’s watch phone which is big and costs $1,200.

Entourage Systems showed off an Edge eBook reader with two screens. It looked pretty cool. You could read a page in Digital Ink on the right screen and then make notes on the left screen. The right screen is a 9.7 inch black and white E-ink screen that you can use to read eBooks. The left screen is a 10.1-inch color LCD screen that can be used to write notes, surf the web, watch videos, draw upon or send messages with a virtual keyboard. The screens can be folded clamshell style when you aren’t using it. It will be available in February for $490.

The Tivit from Valups is a wireless mobile digital TV receiver that lets your smartphone or laptop get a local digital TV signal. It can receive Mobile Digital Television signals sent by local broadcasters. About 30 of them are using it now. It is based on a similar product sold in Japan that lets Wi-Fi phone users watch TV signals. The transmission standard for Mobile DTV was adopted in October, and it competes with a proprietary standard created by Qualcomm for FloTV. Tivit works with a Wi-Fi mobile device, paired together, to let you watch shows with the local digital TV programs. Tivit is two inches by 3.5 inches in size and it weighs 2.8 inches. It will debut in the spring for $120.

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It’s raining Hewlett-Packard products today. The world’s biggest computer company is announcing 20 new computer-related products today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

We saw them last month and the bottom line is that HP continues to design elegant products that give Apple and everyone else a run for the money.

One of the lead products is the HP TouchSmart tm2 (pictured at top), a fourth-generation touchscreen laptop. It has a swivel 12.1-inch screen that can be turned into a tablet. You can enter things with your finger, full-size keyboard, or a digital pen. It has a capacitive multitouch display that recognizes multi-finger gestures such as pinching or swiping. It has an aluminum case with a Riptide engraved illustration.

The Windows 7 laptop uses the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors and has options for ATI Mobility Radeon graphics chips. It has nine hours of battery life (using the somewhat discredited MobileMark 07 benchmark, which means actual battery life is less than that) on a six-cell battery. It has a fingerprint reader, and HP has packaged it with BumpTop, a user interface that gives your Windows desktop a 3-D look and feel. It also has DigiFish Dolphin, a 3-D screen saver with a touch-sensitive ocean environment. And it comes with Corel Paint it! Touch, which lets users paint with their fingertips. Other touch apps include Netflix, Hulu Desktop, Internet TV, Twitter and HP Music Store. This is one of HP’s environmentally friendly machines which doesn’t use brominated flame retardants or polyvinyl chloride, a couple of toxic chemicals. It is available Jan. 7 and starts at $949.

Among the most interesting of HP’s new offerings is the Mini 5102 (pictured), the company’s first touch-enabled netbook. You can use multi-finger gestures on the capacitive multitouch screen, which doesn’t require a lot of pressure to make something happen. You can tap or swipe to navigate through applications and menus. It has a 10.1-inch LED display with a two-megapixel webcam coupled with face-recognition software. Once it recognizes you, it will log you into the computer, and it will do the same for web sites as well.

The 2.6-pound machine is less than an inch think and has a lightweight anodized aluminum enclosure that comes in black, red or blue brushed finishes. There’s an optional handle that you can use to carry it. The keyboard is about 95 percent the size of standard keyboards. The chip has the Intel Atom N450 processor, multiple connectivity options, and it can play high-definition video content at 720p or 1080p resolutions. The battery life is 4.5 hours with a four-cell battery (using the MobileMark 07 benchmark, which means actual busy-usage time is less than 4.5 hours) and 10 hours with a six-cell battery.

It runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system or Windows XP Home. It comes bundled with Corel Home Office, and with QuickWeb, you can access the web, your email, or other features without waiting for a bootup. It takes just 5 seconds access the web or your email. You can even edit your calendar now in QuickLook 3 mode. It is available this month for $399 in the U.S., and there’s a student option with the machine with an optional handle and other bundled items.

HP is also offering two new laptops for both consumers and small businesses. The HP Mini 210 and the HP Mini 2102 weigh 2.7 pounds and are less than an inch thick. The Mini 210 (pictured) is available in black crystal, silver crystal, blue or red, while the Mini 2102 comes in black. They feature the latest Atom processors and have 10.1-inch screens that can handle high-definition video.

They come with optional 3G broadband and global positioning system (GPS) navigation. The keyboard is 93 percent of typical size, and there are no screws in the laptop’s enclosure.

Battery life is up to 10 hours, and swapping batteries is easy. The machine supports Adobe Flash 10.1. and comes with HP’s QuickSync (for wireless synching), QuickWeb, CloudDrive and MediaStream software. The CloudDrive service lets you store 2 gigabytes of data for free, and MediaStream lets you access your files remotely at home. The Mini 201 is available on Jan. 7 at $299 and the Mini 2102 starts at $329.

HP is refreshing its line of HP EliteBook notebook PCs for those who are thinking of computing in a combat zone. The HP EliteBook 8440w and 8540w mobile workstations, as well as the HP EliteBook 8440p and 8540p laptops, come with ruggedized features that meet the specifications of the military. They have durable cases, dust-proofing, metal hinges with steel pin axels and a reinforced display latch. They can tolerate heat up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 60 degrees.

Among the features: HP Skyroom, a video conferencing app that can connect people via high-definition video. They also share a lot of the features of the above laptops and use the latest Intel Core i7 processors. Prices are $1,099 for the 8440p, $1,249 for the 8540p, $1,299 for the 8540w, and $1,499 for the 8440w. They will be available in January.

HP’s entry in the small projector market is the HP Notebook Projector Companion. This small box measures three inches by four inches and weighs less than a pound. But it can project an image up to 60 inches diagonally from a distance of up to 8.5 feet. It has a light-emitting diode light source that can last 10,000 hours, and it has a brightness of 100 lumens. It’s clearly not the most powerful projector on the market, but it will do the job for most presentation purposes, and you can’t beat the size. It comes with an option for a $99 battery adapter. It is available Jan. 15 for $499.

On the environmental front, HP is offering the Compaq 8000f Elite Business PC. The machine is HP’s first Windows-based desktop PC that doesn’t include the previously mentioned BFRs or PVCs, from the wall to the mouse — meaning everything that comes in the box. It has an 87 percent efficient power supply and runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The inner paper packaging for the machine is made from 100-percent recycled molded pulp packaging, and the box is recyclable as well. It sells for $849 starting Feb. 1. When idle, the machine runs on 24 watts, which is about as much as a lot of laptops. In standby mode, it consumes 3 watts, and it has a hibernation mode that doesn’t use any power. If you took out the hibernation mode, it would use about $12.31 in electricity per year, compared to $4.76 per year with hibernation mode. By 2011, all of HP’s desktops will have similar environmentally friendly features, the company says.

Other new desktops include the 8100 Elite Business PC ($849, starting Feb. 1), and the Compaq 8000 Elite Business PC (available now, $799).

Other products being introduced are the HP Pavilion Elite HPE desktop consumer PC, the HP Z200 Workstation (available in February at $769), the HP ZR22w monitor (available February at $289) and the HP ZR24w monitor (available February for $425), the HP Compaq LE19f monitor and HP Compaq LA22f widescreen (February, $179), and the HP Compaq L2105tm 21.5-inch widescreen touch monitor (available now at $299).

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Doxie is a cute and portable document scanner that makes it easy to share and archive documents on any PC or Mac. Doxie scans directly to the cloud: send paper and photos directly to popular web apps like Google Docs, Evernote, Scribd, Backpack, Acrobat.com, and Flickr. Doxie also scans directly to desktop apps like iPhoto and Picasa, and offers the exclusive Doxie Cloud PDF hosting service for instant document sharing via e-mail, chat, and Twitter. And Doxie’s intuitive, integrated design offers seamless scanning with one press of Doxie’s Multi-Tap Heart Button – yes, folks, it’s a button with a heart on it! Doxie will retail for $129.99.

The Usb Body Mass Scale from Ion is the most efficient way to keep tabs on your weight and mass. The device operates as a regular weight scale, but it also connects to your computer so that you can track your weight, bmi, and body composition over time. Pricing TBD.

Weigh and measure yourself any time with USB BODY MASS SCALE. This USB medical device connects to your computer’s standard USB jack and transmits a host of information including weight, body mass index, and even body composition. Track changes over time with the easy-to-use tracking software.

It’s official! The Speedy USB 3.0 hard drives are starting to arrive. Seagate’s new BlackArmor PS 110 3.0 Performance Kit promises delivery speeds up to 3x faster than USB 2.0 drives. But what makes this kit especially unique is the fact that the kit comes with everything you need to upgrade your laptop to USB 3.0, including cables and a PC card adapter. The drive comes with a complete backup software suite, and the software also protects backup files with AES 256-bit encryption. Pricing for the BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 Performance Kit begins at $179.99 for the 500GB version.

Eco Factor: Zero-emission motorcycle powered by an electric engine.

Roehr Motorcycles is set to unveil two electric motorcycles before mid-year and an all-electric 96bhp motorcycle with race level performance. Dubbed the eSuperbike, the motorcycle will be powered by high energy discharge 10KWh lithium iron phosphate battery pack.

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Although the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance ruled against the lifetime ban imposed by the International Automobile Federation (FIA) to former team manager Flavio Briatore, the legal saga between those two parties doesn’t seem to be over just yet.

In a press release on the FIA official website, the international racing body takes note of the Court’s ruling yesterday afternoon, but confirms that the court’s decision is not enforceable until the FIA’s appeal options have been exha… (read more)

Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” In our very early testing it’s a pleasure to use, but we’re going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.

Is this the next Facebook?
Probably not – but it does look pretty fabulous. The service is still in closed beta (we’ve been trying to get in for months) but here’s some screenshots that show some key features.

Update: We’ve got a limited number of invites to offer. See this post for details.

Sponsor

Quora is a little like Aardvark, the social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google’s acquisition sights, and it’s a little like Stack Overflow, the carefully crafted Q&A site for programmers that’s shot through the roof with reader interest.  It’s definitely different though.  

Co-founder Charlie Cheever says it’s built on Tornado, the real-time infrastructure built by FriendFeed, then bought and open sourced by Facebook. That’s a nice touch.

Here’s what we’ve seen so far. Click these screenshots to get a bigger view of each of them. There are more coming up. We’ll do our best to offer invites tomorrow morning.

Discuss

The swanky vehicles lined up at the Delhi exhibition are aimed to be rolled out on India’s crammed roads and crumbling infrastructure. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, the country produces more than a million cars a year, a figure that currently is growing at 11 percent a year.
Many cars from brands like Chevrolet will launch its compact car Beat, Mercedes to launch Mercedes GL, Tata Motors to launch its concept luxury saloon model Tata Prima, Indian car major Muruti will launch Eeco.Audi will showcase Audi A7. Skoda to showcase Yeti in Auto Expo India. Volkswagen is all set to launch its first small car, Polo for the Indian market during the Auto Expo India. Mahindra & Mahindra will launch its new series of heavy vehicles like trucks with its joint partner Navistar, Japanese car giant Toyota will showcase its compact car specially developed for India by the Toyota and Kirloskar Group joint venture. US auto major Ford Motor Company small car Figo and Micra from Nissan-Renault will also launch in Auto Expo 2010 Delhi

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Workstation PCs have primarily stayed in the business sector because traditionally, they’ve always been very pricey.But the HP Z200 Workstation might change all that. It’s an entry-level workstation computer that is priced like your average desktop. The system features Intel Core dual-core processors and quad-core options based on the enterprise-class Intel Xeon 3400 series. Pricing begins at $769 and it will be available starting in February.

Not many surprises here today at Google’s headquarters, or even celebrity appearances. As speculated, it is launching the Nexus One, which is the latest Android handset that it will be selling directly to consumers through a newly launched web site at Google.com/phone starting today.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is calling the device, built by HTC, a “superphone,” and as that name would imply, it does sport a lot of the latest hardware and has some software surprises, but it’s not revolutionary. That said, it’s a very solid device that provides a nice competitive offering to the iPhone.

The phone will be sold by Google online for $179 if customers sign up for a contract with T-Mobile USA. If they buy it unlocked, the device will cost $529. The online store is part of a new Google program that will start retailing certain high-profile devices. In a Q&A following the initial news, Motorola’s Co-CEO Sanjay Jha dismissed concerns that Google’s retail presence is a threat to his business, and said it actually expands the potential sales channels that can “take our innovations to consumers as fast as we can.”

While the announcements today seem small in scale for a company that has promised to completely revolutionize the industry, Google’s Andy Rubin promised that more is coming. He would not comment specifically on questions about whether ad-supported phones were coming, or radically different business models, but added: “Before you can revolutionize the world you have to have a mechanism in place in which you are selling products. Let’s get an online store going, and let’s get a best-in-class store, and then enhance it.”

The store will eventually offer additional handset models, but not everything, which would be difficult and cluttered given that in the last year alone, Google has gone from one to 20 different handset models. The Nexus One will initially work best on the T-Mobile USA network, but if consumers wish, they can run it on the slower AT&T (NYSE: T) EDGE network. In the Spring, Google says the phone will be offered by Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) abroad. The Google phone store is also being tested in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong.

The hour long presentation included highlighting many of the phone’s details. It has one of the fastest speed processors, a 3.7 inch screen, and a multi-colored trackball that changes colors depending on which apps you are running, such as Bluetooth. The phone runs Android 2.1, the latest software version, which means that it has turn-by-turn navigation. New to the Nexus One is a noise cancellation technology for eliminating background noise. Google has also developed a new news and weather app, a Google Earth app, and has some spiffy new wallpapers, which they say are “live.” The background acts like a pool of water, when leaves fall into the background, or a person touches the phone, the water ripples. In addition, everything is voice-enabled, meaning you can speak to update your Facebook status, your Twitter feed, or even an email. In a live demo, the phone flawlessly wrote: “Check this new voice keyboard! I just hope this demo works.” The UI is super snappy and while Wi-Fi and GPS was running in the background during most of the demo, the battery level never faded (how realistic this will be over time, who knows?).

So, if Google is also becoming a retailer with the launch of this phone, does that mean it’s now hoping to make revenues off of hardware? Rubin says, no. While there are inherently revenues to be made in hardware, it’s more about increasing search revenues. “Our primary business is advertising. This phone from a performance perspective is like your laptop four to five years ago, It’s a great way to access the internet, and along with that comes our normal business model of advertising. This is the next front of core business.” Mario Queiroz, Google’s VP of product management, who presented most of the information today, provided some stats on how the mobile-search business is going. He said during the past year or so mobile searches to Google have increased by 5 times, and that Android users users in general search 30 times more than users on feature phones.

When Google handed out a phone at an all-hands meeting in December last night it gave all of its employees a cellphone, everyone was quick to assume this was the coming of the Google Phone—even though Google had said in the past that it wasn’t interested in doing its own phone. When asked about this, Rubin was coy. “I’m very precise when I talk. I said Google will not build hardware…We are internet and software guys and we know how to do that quite well and I think we’ve contributed back to the ecosystem.”

Related

• What We Know And Don’t Know About Google’s Phone Plans
• Google Phone May Be Much Ado About Nothing
• Google’s Nexus One Specs Leak; Phones May Be Available By ‘Invitation Only’

This morning kicks off a month-long cycle of mobile news with the two notable bookends being today’s anticipated release of the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) phone, and later this month, the potential unveiling of Apple’s tablet. What lies between isn’t trivial either – CES begins informally tomorrow and lasts until Saturday. You can follow both the Google event, live at 10 a.m. Pacific, and CES on mocoNews. Additionally, my colleague Staci Kramer will in Las Vegas for paidContent.org.

Today, at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, the internet-search giant is extending its reach further into mobile. The company is expected to formally unveil the Nexus One, a phone that was passed out to all Google employees late last year and was quickly considered the famed “Google phone.” While it’s unlikely that the name will continue on, Google plans to sell the device direct to consumers rather than through the traditional carrier partner. Initially, the business model was considered a game changer, but more recently, critics have pointed out that other phone manufactures have been unsuccessful at selling unsubsidized and unlocked phones in the U.S.

Just as the dust settles on the Google news, CES will kick into full gear. The gigantic consumer-electronics show attracts hundreds of thousands of participants and exhibitors each year; it informally gets going on Wednesday and lasts until the weekend. The week is packed with back-to-back press conferences with big names on the calendar, like AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon Wireless, Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel and Palm (NSDQ: PALM). That’s even before big keynotes, by, among others, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Intel’s Paul Otellini, Nokia’s Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Qualcomm’s Paul Jacob.

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What are your kids posting on Facebook, Twitter or other social groups?

Is it family business, private family matters, their intimate relationships, spats with siblings or others,  in addition to their achievements and joys?  It seems that these Internet chat places reveal more than one really wants to know about their friends’ and relatives’ private matters, especially on a public forum.

Computer Kid Image: sxc.hu

This is the game “Gossip” in a much larger scope than simply whispering around a table.

Do your kids realize that these postings are up there for the world to see?  Even though they may have designated this be seen by only a closed group of friends, the gossip and postings spread.  It’s not like confiding in that one special friend or sibling whom you generally can trust to keep your woes and business to themselves and be the sounding board when you need one.

But when you use the world as a sounding board you expose yourself and also make yourself vulerable.  When you post about “dirty laundry, clean laundry and that in between,” you’re keeping noting secret.

You also give the impression that you’d not be a good friend or confidant. You’d write about another friend’s secrets.  You’d write about dissatisfaction with an employer or co-worker.  You might even post confidential information about a business your worked for.  You might give out confidential information to news sources.

When I see someone posting confidential information or “spilling their guts,” I wonder if an employer will think twice about hiring them or offering them a business opportunity.  They may not be looking for a job today.  But what about down the road?

Will someone think twice about entering into a relationship with that person if they’ve seen intimate posts concerning previous relationships or friendships?

What your kids, or you, write on the Internet can come back to haunt you/them.  It also might haunt you, if they write about family matters and finances.

What do you think?  Is it up to parents to become knowledgeable, set an example, and inform their kids about the choices they’re making?

Post from: Blisstree

What Are Your Kids Posting on Facebook,etc?

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