Totlol: YouTube for 6-month-olds

More and more two- to six-year-olds are watching videos on YouTube. And even the most cautious parents could find it hard to stop their little ones from discovering clips in which Tickle Me Elmo kills Barney.

That's where Totlol.com comes in. The month-old Web site leaves it up to parents to moderate which YouTube videos their kids can see. Parents can join Totlol's community to pick and review YouTube videos that would be appropriate for six-month-olds to six-year-olds. They can also browse among the site's more than 1,000 videos of disco penguins, singing hippos, and leaping elephants--or about 42 hours of parent-approved content.

Ron Ilan, founder of Totlol, said he started building the site in March after YouTube released a new, advanced application protocol interface (API), which the site is based around. His impetus was to create a safe site for his two-year-old son and one-year-old daughter.

"I had to do something with my son while I was in front of the computer. It's every parent's new age problem," said Ilan, a long-time Web developer based in Vancouver, B.C. "I imagined that YouTube had a lot of good stuff. But I couldn't comfortably find it. You don't know what you're searching for."
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Encrypted flash disk detects live skin

Frankly, USB flash disks with biometric fingerprint sensors are a dime a dozen. This is a great concept as the portability of such storage devices also means they are prone to being misplaced or stolen.

So what makes the Sellgino Dragon Security biometric drive unique? It may be the first biometric-enabled flash disk to use a fingerprint sensor that detects the live skin layer. Those found on other devices scan only the surface of the finger, which means that if your hand is dirty you might be locked out of your disk. In fact, from past experience even fingers which are too dry can compromise the detection rate of normal biometric sensors.

By seeking the live layer of the skin, the Dragon Security has a much higher accuracy rate even if you fail to wash your hands after eating chocolate. It doesn't require any driver installation on Windows XP or Vista and can store up to 10 fingerprints. The only issue we have with it is that the current capacity is capped at only 2GB.

Yealink IP Media Phone: Laptop or video phone?

Despite the fact that VoIP has become a popular tool for long-distance communications, VoIP phones have not gained much traction. Perhaps the cost is simply too high for a single-function device as most PCs provide the same voice quality for free.

The Yealink IP Media Phone, however, is more than simply a VoIP device. In fact, the Chinese company tries to shove everything but the kitchen sink into the sleek clamshell phone, which is available in a choice of four colors (black, red, blue and green). Besides being able to handle up to six conventional landlines, the device sports a 7-inch screen that does more than show your friend's hairy facade during video-conferencing.

The IP Media Phone can play H.264, H.263 and MPEG-4 videos, making it compatible with IPTV as well as Video-on-Demand services. Possible a first for a handset, there is an integrated keyboard which works with the built-in Web browser for surfing, instant messaging, SMS and email. The display also doubles as a digital photo frame that can be programmed to show a slideshow while MP3 music files play in the background.

No pricing details are available at this time, but if "all-in-one" can be used to describe a teleconferencing device, then the Yealink IP Media phone fits the bill.

Google's view: Three trends in social networking

"Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference in the US recently.

Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Discovery is becoming social
This was the most telling tidbit from Kraus' talk. He noted that searching on Google is good, but having your friends help you find what you're looking for is better. He gave an example of how social discovery can work--putting a status message in the IM field in Gmail and waiting for people to chime in to help you. But that is not representative of the state of the art in social discovery.

Takeaway: Look for Google to finally launch an initiative in social search. Or maybe acquire a company like Delver.

How we share is changing
Kraus says that people under-share because they don't want to appear self-important. Sending an e-mail to friends with new baby pictures, he says, requires "high social activation energy in the part of the sender," and thus slows down sharing. But guess what, he says: Your friends really do want to know what you're up to. They might not like being interrupted, but they do care.
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2008 a peak growth year for laptops, analysts say

Worldwide PC shipments are on pace to grow 15.2 percent in 2008, according to IDC. That's above the analyst firm's March prediction of 12.8 percent growth. But laptop shipments, which have become an increasing force in the PC market, will peak.

Shipments of portable PCs should grow 34.5 percent this year, according to a PC shipment tracker that IDC released this week. That's up from 33.9 percent in 2007 and way above the projected 13.4 percent for next year. By 2012, according to the firm, portables will increase by only 9 percent.

By the end of the year, PC makers will have shipped 310 million units, close to half (145.1 million) of which are notebooks. The rest are desktop PCs and servers, which together on a global basis still comprise the largest slice of the market, but the difference is disappearing fast.

Portables are especially expected to take off internationally this year, growing from 78 million in 2007 to 109.4 million units this year. That's good news for the industry because notebooks and laptops tend to be pricier than desktop PCs, and they should keep average selling prices higher for a bit longer.

But inexpensive notebooks are stirring up the market, too. A reason for the dramatic 40 percent bump in international portable shipments has a lot to do with how the numbers have been counted, according to IDC.
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