“With more than 450 exhibitors at this year’s Macworld Expo, it’s impossible to see it all,” writes Jochen Wolters. “Which is a shame especially because of all those countless small and medium sized companies whose product announcements are often drowned out by the major news from the big players like Apple or Microsoft. Hence, let me point out five products I stumbled over at the 2008 Expo which, in my humblest of opinions, deserve a bit more attention than they have received so far.”
“Parliant’s PhoneValet has been a valuable part of my automated home for a few years now, but the recent addition of built-in iPhone/iPod touch support has pushed it close to a “must have” tool.
PhoneValet has long had the ability to answer the phone, present a simple (or sophisticated, if you’d like) voice mail system, and record messages. It’s also been able to send email notifications of incoming messages and, more recently, offered a web-based interface to view call logs and play voice mail via the PhoneValet Anywhere add-on.
But for me, it took the iPhone to gel all these pieces into a coherent and very useful whole.”
The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO that I ordered for my daughter under the Give One Get One (G1G1) program finally arrived. We played with it quite a bit this evening. And, after writing a long-ish mini-commentary on it… (see my mobile tech focused blog entry)…
The Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s articles are now freely available on the web as well as a low-resolution PDF download. The high resolution PDF version as well as the paper version are available for a fee (seems reasonable to me :-). The magazine also sponsors the annual (and usually hilarious) Ig Nobel Prizes. A video of the 2007 event is available for viewing on their website.
A combination of holiday busy work and being a bit under the weather (wheeze, sniffle) has me a bit behind checking out items on my list of freeware and Open Source apps for Mac OS X and Windows.
In the meantime, I hope everyone who reads this blog (all three of you :-) has a safe and happy holiday season.
Here’s wishing for more great freeware and Open Source apps in 2008.
