Tech Buzz
Dude, you're getting the boot?
By Staff and wire reports
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 20, 2003
Noticeably absent from Dell Computer's TV ads lately has been "Steven," the character who made "Dude, you're getting a Dell" into a ticket to personal fame.
Steven, played by actor Ben Curtis of Chattanooga, Tenn., may have talked himself out of a role, or at least a prominent place in Dell's campaigns. Dell's ads now feature a group of interns pitching Dell's services.
"We're not running the Steven TV Show," said Michael Dell, who as CEO wants the attention on the computers, not the actor.
Tapping out a missing message
Tapping out a text message on a cell phone can be like tossing a bottled message into the sea, according to a study by Keynote Systems of San Mateo, Calif., which found that tens of millions of text messages are lost every month.
Overall, Keynote found 1 in 20 text messages are never delivered. And a little over 1 percent took at least 10 minutes, if not far longer, to arrive.
Worse, cell phone companies rarely warn users when their messages are lost.
Though the practice is more established in Europe and Asia, millions of Americans have started using their wireless phones during the past year to zap short text messages to one another. Keynote found Nextel Communications and T-Mobile had the worst performance, while AT&T performed among the best.
Personalized chimes ring in your calls
If you are tired of garden-variety cell phone chimes, several small Web companies are offering to help you spice things up with unusual ring tones -- not to mention animations, voice messages and more. The creative possibilities may surprise you.
At PhoneSnacks.com (www.phonesnacks.com), run by Polymedia, users can order polyphonic songs (playing several tones at the same time, so that they actually sound like songs) for about $1.30 each. The songs are sent directly to the customer's phone. For '80s fans, there are the themes from The A-Team, Airwolf and Danger Mouse. Beatles aficionados can choose among 10 songs, including Let It Be and Yellow Submarine.
For those drawn to the rich and famous (or just the weird), companies such as Zingy (www.zingy.com) and Yourmobile (www.yourmobile.com) let users order celebrity voice-mail messages that are either sampled and spliced together or recorded by impersonators. Cell owners can now offer recorded greetings from the likes of Joe Pesci or favorites such as Hannibal Lecter or Kermit the Frog.
FCC chairman big fan of TiVo
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is a new convert -- to the personal digital video recorder.
"My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo," FCC chairman Michael Powell said. "TiVo is God's machine."
If Powell's enthusiasm for digital recordings of TV broadcasts are reflected in FCC rulings, the entertainment industry could find it difficult to push in Washington its agenda for technical restrictions on making and sharing such recordings.
Missing out on the CD settlement
Suppose someone was handing out $20 bills and almost nobody wanted one?
That's roughly what's happening with a massive price-fixing settlement involving states and compact disc companies.
The deal calls for payments of as much as $20 for customers who bought CDs between 1995 and 2000. But so far, only a few people have signed up, and officials fear the money will go begging.
In September, the five top U.S. distributors of compact discs and three large music retailers agreed to pay $143-million in cash and CDs to settle allegations by 41 states that they cheated consumers by fixing prices.
About $44-million in cash is earmarked to pay customers from $5 to $20, depending on how many people wind up dividing the money. By the end of December, only about 30,000 people nationwide had applied for a piece of the pie, a tiny fraction of the number the settlement could handle.
The settlement's Web site (www.musiccdsettlement.com) is up. Anyone who bought a CD, cassette tape or vinyl record at a retail store between 1995 and 2000 is eligible. The application deadline is March 3.
Bye-bye bar codes?
The Gillette Co. is exploring technology that could one day push bar codes off products.
The Boston company is conducting the first large-scale tests of a "smart tag" device that would allow for easier tracking of goods from plant to warehouse to store shelves.
The technology, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Center, is designed to provide large companies with highly specialized, up-to-the-minute information about how products move through the supply chain.
Bar codes have limitations. They must be scanned individually and generally depend on a human to line up the product so it passes by the laser correctly.
"Smart tag" technology embeds a tiny chip that does not require such a clear line of sight. The goal is to let machines read an entire batch of products simultaneously: Imagine a grocery cart passing under a scanner that instantly calculates the bill.
If the tests work, Gillette says it could put a half a billion of the chips on its products within a few years.
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