BOSTON - One of the cheapest places to buy software is on eBay, where merchants sell programs that come directly from manufacturers, saving them from paying a mark-up to distributors.
But it may also be a risky place to shop, as it can be tough to discern good values from scams.
Consumers Union — which tracks Web retailers and advises consumers on Internet shopping through its ConsumerWebWatch.org service — urges buyers to use common sense. (more…)
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Today, IBM announced a new and emerging technology that can help the blind and visually impaired people “see” Internet multimedia. This new technology that enables blind people to experience streaming video and animation on the Internet has been designed at IBM’s Tokyo Research Laboratory.
This new multimedia browsing accessibility tool developed by IBM has the potential to open a world of rich content to visually impaired people all over the globe.
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With a family of four, I’ve lately been trying to figure out how to wedge my crew into a single car. Sounds easy, but have you seen how big car seats are now? The one for our toddler consumes so much space that the front passenger seat in my Subaru Forrester is pushed all the way forward and can’t be moved back. My four-year-old daughter, who sits behind me on the driver’s side, is wedged in to the point where here feet are constantly in my back. Isn’t the point of an SUV (even a small one like the Forrester) to avoid such cramped spaces?
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Vonage’s V-Phone is a curious device. You plug a headset microphone into the bullet-shaped memory stick. You then plug that memory stick into any Windows personal computer that is connected to the Internet and use an on-screen soft phone and your mouse to take and make calls to any phone number around the globe.
It’s that simple, and a great way for frequent travelers to make relatively cheap calls without the fuss of carrying around cellular modems and the like.
On a recent trip to Japan and South Korea, the bright orange V-Phone worked moderately well. Calls sounded fine in the earbud headphones that came with the memory stick, though people on the other end complained my voice sounded far away until I placed the microphone on the wire directly in front of my mouth. (more…)
Apple Computer Inc. unveiled an eagerly-anticipated iPod mobile phone with a touch-screen today, priced at US$599 ($878) for 8 gigabytes of memory, pushing the company’s shares up as much as 8.5 per cent.
Chief Executive Steve Jobs said the iPhone, which also will be available in a 4-gigabyte model for US$499, will ship in June in the United States. The phones will be available in Europe in the fourth quarter and in Asia in 2008.
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