Online: Listen to Donnie Jenkins' podcast on baseball technology.
A recent article on downloadsquad.com reviewed an interesting little program called Eufony, a bare-bones audio player. It lacks basic common features like forward and back buttons, but it only requires small amounts of memory, and it plays several musical formats. This might be a good choice for a USB or so-called "thumb drive" with music on it, sort of poor man's iPod.
Pixorial is a new video-sharing site with a few twists. It allows you to upload videos, nothing new there, but you can also mail in video on old formats such as VHS and Hi8 cassettes. The site uses the common Freemium business model in which basic services are provided for free with other services available at a fee. The service allows in-browser editing of uploaded videos, which is rare at this time. If it works well, it should be a great value.
From lifehacker.com.Zinepal is a new service that proposes to make you the editor of a custom eBook or online magazine, or even a printable PDF document. The idea here is to choose blogs, web sites or other online content you want to have available anywhere you go, and then to customize it to your exact needs or taste. You can have the content e-mailed to you or even sent to a Kindle reader.
A review in pcmag.com recently featured three free accounting programs and services for business. These are Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009, Intuit Quickbooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 and outright.com.
The Microsoft offering received an Editor's Choice award from the site and generally gets great reviews almost everywhere. Intuit's free product also receives praise, but many reviewers feel that it's a bit limited.
My thoughts? Hey, they're all free, what do you expect? I think it's a wonderful day when you can use free software to run a business.
You may recall that I have discussed the Internet of Things here several times. It's a very exciting concept and basically deals with connecting regular objects to the Web in a way that allows interaction between the two.
An article in readwriteweb.com recently quoted an online source that announced that one of the companies I reviewed, Violet, is declaring bankruptcy. This is regrettable, as their Mirror product was one of the most promising in its field. It allowed a person to program an RFID stamp or tag, attach it to an object and then have the object trigger an action on the Web such as sending an e-mail.
I think this type of technology can be useful, but it may be a bit before its time. The biggest problem the company had was in trying to communicate how practical it could be on a day-to-day basis.
In the same article was a video that should be required viewing for anyone who will ever carry an ID or passport with an RFID chip in it-which could be all of us at some point. In the article, a hacker showed how to detect and track RFID chips from a mobile unit in San Francisco. He was able to detect three passport chips including one he had designated as a test unit as well as other RFID chips.
As RFID matures we will hopefully get past such problems, but it's best to be aware of the current state of the situation. As in all such things finding a problem can actually aid in designing a better product.
Finally here's an interesting twist in an area of what we could call old technology: baseball cards. According to slate.com, Topps has recently signed an exclusive contract with Major League Baseball to be the only licensed producer of baseball cards. While many people look at cards as child's play, the business has generated millions of dollars through the years and has started to evolve toward the Web in various ways. It should be interesting to watch how this plays out, so to speak.
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