Mole and Vue Webcams reviewed

The entry hall in my house has been a test bed for home monitoring cameras for years. I like to be able to record people coming into the house and see what's going on around the front door. Anyone with a family and occasional babysitters will understand. So I continue to look for simple, robust video-monitoring solutions, and vendors keep obliging by improving the state of the art in home remote cameras.

The latest: Two interesting and very different products, Avaak's Vue and the Astak Mole. Both are very easy to get up and running, and neither require monkeying with arcane router settings to get offsite access to the video streams--something that can be a problem with the Panasonic BL-C131a cameras that I otherwise favor. (I've also tried the Logitech WiLife system, and find it quite good.)

The Vue
The Vue is the most unusual remote camera I've seen. The product is unchanged from my March 2 preview, but I had a chance to experiment with the shipping version recently. The big benefit of the Vue: The cameras are tiny, battery-powered and thus completely wireless, and the system is extremely easy to set up. You plug an included controller box into your router or switch and tuck it out of the way, and then you can place the cameras anywhere in your house on their clever little stick-on magnetic dome mounts. The standard kit comes with two cameras.
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YouTube going 1080p

SAN FRANCISCO--At the recent NewTeeVee Live conference, YouTube director of product management Hunter Walk announced that the video-streaming service is getting a new high-quality streaming option: Full-HD, or 1080p resolution. The current "high-quality" option, when available on YouTube videos, is 720p, referring to the number of horizontal scan lines that make up the image.

Walk said the new resolution, as well as a new full-screen player, will roll out to all users within days.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced high-quality YouTube viewing at NewTeeVee 2007. He also said, then, that YouTube stores all video it receives at the resolution it's uploaded at. So when YouTube ads a resolution option, as it did then and is doing now, it simply needs to re-encode videos for the new player, not get new raw content.
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GE debuts miniature ultrasound scanner

SAN FRANCISCO--In a wide-ranging interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, announced a low-cost and very portable ultrasound scanner called the Vscan.

"It's about the same size as a BlackBerry," Immelt said, holding up a white device that appeared to fold in the middle like a flip-phone. The top of the device showed an ultrasound image (of a patient's liver, we were told), while the bottom showed control keys.

"This is Moore's law," he said, saying that the device had the same power as a console ultrasound from two to three years ago that would cost US$250,000.

The price of the device was not revealed, but Immelt asked the audience to imagine these devices going to Africa and helping health care providers there determine "if a baby is breech," for example. "This could be the stethoscope of the 21st century," he said.

Immelt also gave a demo of an enhanced online medical records system, in which patient data is combined with clinical outcome data and research to help caregivers apply effective and current treatments to patients. Medical records, he said, don't win only because they give patients portable electronic files, but rather, "it's about making better clinical decisions faster."
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Watching TV together with your smartphone

I'll be paying special attention to Hand Eye Technologies when the company gives its pitch at DemoFall 09 at about 10:40 a.m. PDT Tuesday. This company, as I said in "What to Watch," is trying to close the loop between television and the Internet, by using smartphones as secondary, interactive screens for people when they're watching typical broadcast shows.

As CEO Jonathan Kessler explained to me Monday night, the first step to making this work is to enable your smartphone to know what you're watching. First, you need special technology in your TV or settop box. It knows what the screen is displaying and whether it's live or playing off a DVR or DVD. Then your phone needs to know what you're interested in that's showing on your TV.
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LogMeIn can control some PCs, even when off

During a recent talk with LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon, I learned about the company's new LogMeIn Central dashboard for IT managers, designed to help them keep tabs on thousands of computers at a time.

I also heard about the new version of virtual network service Hamachi, which makes it a competitor to standard (and expensive) virtual private-networking products in the enterprise.

We chuckled a bit about the version of LogMeIn that's embedded in the dashboard of some Ford F150 pickup trucks, so their owners can remotely control their office PCs. And I heard about a LogMeIn technology, just now reaching the market that enables not just remote diagnostics of computers but also access to data on the hard drives of PCs that are turned completely off. Gulp.
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