Satellite navigation systems may be the latest "must have" car gadgets but London cabbies, who have to pass the world's toughest taxi exam, are not impressed.
While hundreds of thousands of the electronic mapping devices are sold every year -- despite some reports of software glitches that have sent drivers down one-way streets or up impassable mountain tracks -- most cabbies in London regard them as largely irrelevant.
It was a match made in computer heaven.
The May-December marriage of a young company called Microsoft and business powerhouse IBM would change the landscape of offices and homes across the globe.
August 12 is the 25th anniversary of the IBM personal computer launch, a pairing of MS and DOS, Microsoft and the disk operating system.
"MS-DOS moved computer access from a community measured in thousands to one measured in millions," said Benn Konsynski, professor of business administration at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.
In the evolution of electronic companions, first came the speaking doll, then the Tamagotchi virtual pet, then Sony's short-lived AIBO dog.
Now, it could be the dawn of the Wi-Fi rabbit era.
The plastic bunny with ears like TV antennae can read out emails and mobile phone text messages, tell children to go to bed, alert one to a stock collapse and give traffic updates by receiving Internet feeds via a wireless Wi-Fi network.
Some Mobile Money Wallet (MM Wallet) service subscribers can now settle their electricity bills using their cellphones and the short message service (SMS).
Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) has just joined the service?s list of merchants.
But for now, the TNB payment option is only available to Mobile Money credit card (from Hong Leong Bank) and Mobile Money ATM card (from Bumiputra-Commerce Bank) holders.
Pundits and political junkies may have put blogs on the map. But now individuals all over the planet are using new blogging tools to share gritty, uncensored information.
"If you see a car bomb blast, your first thought is not to go to an Internet cafe and start blogging," said digital media expert Erik Sundelof.
But almost everywhere in the world, cell phones are available, with the ability to send text, photos, even video of such events instantly, he said.
As the bikini turns 60, it's entering the electronic age with a new model featuring a built-in alarm to warn wearers to get out of the sun -- and ease concerns that the scanty swimsuits damage the health.
The American Cancer Society advises that the best way to lower the risk of skin cancer, the most common form of the disease in humans, is to avoid too much exposure to the sun and other sources of ultraviolet light.
Two years ago, a quadriplegic man started playing video games using his brain as a controller. That may just sound like fun and games for the unfortunate, but really, it spells the beginning of a radical change in how we interact with computers - and business will never be the same.
In 1996, William Beaumont Hospital, a 254-bed community hospital in Michigan, had a problem: A small number of rogue employees were taking narcotics from a storage area without authorization.
Security Director Chris Hengstebeck looked for ways to tighten control to the affected rooms and cabinets and to generate a log of employees accessing them. The hospital's provider of control access methods suggested a biometric hand geometry system, which identifies individuals through hand measurements.
Mobile phones are changing the lives of both criminals and the investigators that hunt them, mobile phone security experts said at the Infosecurity conference held in New York on Wednesday. As a result, corporate IT departments should be aware of their criminal capabilities, and take steps to gain more control of the mobile devices used by their workers, they said.
With constantly improving storage and processing power, a mobile phone is probably a much more powerful device than many realize, said James Steele, a computer forensics investigator with T-Mobile USA Inc.
It's easy to be told all the fancy features in a mobile phone. You can choose the VGA camera, EDGE high-speed data and a pop-port USB, or perhaps video streaming, an MP3 player and mobile internet.
