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This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the impor­tant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the lat­est news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).

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This year, Ban­ner is once again involved in Byte Night, the IT industry’s annual sleep out in aid of young home­less peo­ple in the UK. The event involves peo­ple from many lead­ing IT com­pa­nies sleep­ing out for a night to raise money for NCH, the children’s charity.

The date for this year’s Byte Night is Fri­day 22nd Sep­tem­ber and will prob­a­bly coin­cide with the first Autum­nal storm/frost/blizzard (ok, maybe not blizzard).

We have a team sleep­ing out and would love any addi­tional spon­sors to help Byte Night reach its tar­get of £300,000. You can donate online. Thanks.

OK, so it’s not exactly new. GPS has been help­ing peo­ple dis­cover where they are, where they are going and where they made a wrong turn for some time. But really, that was just the start.

For one thing, GPS has now emerged from the car/boat, got way smaller and become portable. I run most days (hard to believe if you know what I look like) and use a Garmin Fore­run­ner to tell me how fast I’m going (not fast enough), how far (not far enough) and how many calo­ries I’ve burnt (just enough for a guilt-free break­fast). It wasn’t so long ago I was reliant on a piece of string, a map and a stop­watch to plan and track my runs (BTW check out Map­MyRun for a nice Google Maps-based app for work­ing out your run in advance).

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At the risk of con­firm­ing the wide­spread sus­pi­cions that (a) any­one into tech­nol­ogy is a Star Wars obsessed geek and (b) peo­ple in adver­tis­ing have too much time on their hands, if you’ve got a Apple lap­top you have to check out Mac­Saber.

Like many new lap­tops, Macs have a bunch of motion sen­sors in them. It’s these that recog­nise when you’ve man­aged to elbow your machine off your desk and which brace its innards for impact. But of course where there’s a sen­sor, there’s input. And this can be used to trig­ger other events. This is pre­cisely what the geniuses behind Mac­Saber have used to turn their Macs into some­thing far, far more inter­est­ing.

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Sin­ga­pore will have wall-to-wall WiFi by the end of the year. No more look­ing for a friendly Star­bucks or try­ing to leech off an unpro­tected wire­less router, sim­ply boot and go (well that’s the plan). This ini­tia­tive is part of a wider effort (the Intel­li­gent Nation pro­gramme) which extends into many gov­ern­ment ser­vices and which is look­ing to line Sin­ga­pore up with the world’s tech elite nations.

Now, all they need is a sub­scrip­tion music ser­vice and some WiFi-enabled play­ers.

Source: news.com

The choice for dig­i­tal music fans has got wider again with the announce­ment by new entrant Spi­ral­Frog that it will begin a free (ie ad-supported) music down­load ser­vice that will give users access to Vivendi’s Uni­ver­sal Music Group’s cat­a­logue (if you are in North Amer­ica that is). Uni­ver­sal is back­ing the new start-up and, as the world’s largest music com­pany, should be able to offer a rea­son­able selec­tion. And the magic word ‘free’ never hurts.

This is, of course, just the lat­est attempt to chal­lenge iTunes’ dom­i­nance in the (legal) down­load mar­ket. But for me, it kind of misses the point.

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Any brand who’s name enters the lan­guage has to have got some­thing right. Of course, Google has got a whole bunch of things right again and again. It now seems a very long time ago that I’d reg­u­larly change my search loy­al­ties as the next big thing came along. And media agen­cies the world over have scram­bled to get their Google accreditation.

It appears at times that Google is an unstop­pable force. As much as there’s been the occa­sional back­lash, it often seems more sour grapes than any­thing else. And while Yahoo and MSN are sig­nif­i­cant forces (as well as oth­ers in other geo­gra­phies) the argu­ment tends to be around how many X mil­lion results you get in under a sec­ond. That and generic ‘gate­way to the Inter­net’ or news por­tal posi­tion­ings.

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You can now tell pre­cisely how nuclear your Mac is get­ting with the Tem­per­a­ture Mon­i­tor wid­get. A quick F12 tells you exactly how hot your bat­tery is (mine is 32 degrees centi­grade as I type). In fact it’ll take read­ings from a whole bunch of tem­per­a­ture sen­sors on your Mac.

Now if only it would do some kind of James Bond style count­down when your bat­tery hits crit­i­cal so you could get to a safe distance…

Another day, another work:life study.

Accord­ing to some research for head­hunters Korn/Ferry Inter­na­tional, 80% of exec­u­tives are always con­nected to their work – whether through mobiles, PDAs, lap­tops or what­ever. And 77% of these believe that the tech­nol­ogy behind all this enhances their work:life bal­ance. The study cov­ered 2,300 exec­u­tives in 75 coun­tries (which when you do the maths is just over 30 per coun­try – so not the most robust sam­ple ever).

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Microsoft announced on Fri­day that it’s launch­ing ver­sions of Win­dows and Office in the Incan lan­guage in Bolivia. This promises to help close the dig­i­tal divide between the 2.5 mil­lion Quen­chan speak­ers (about a third of the pop­u­la­tion) and the bet­ter sup­ported Span­ish speak­ers in the country.

If we are to see tech­nol­ogy as a force for good (which per­son­ally I do) then open­ing up access is fun­da­men­tal to suc­cess. This is an area where open source has promised so much (and deliv­ered rea­son­ably well all things con­sid­ered). Because users have access to the code, they can tweak it for spe­cial­ist use and port it into new lan­guages (if they have the skills them­selves of course).

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