Click here to see video In a world where most of us already have our smartphones glued to our ears and panic at the mere mention of powering down our devices, wearable technology is shaping up to be the next “big thing” here at CES.
According to new studies from IMS Research, the market for wearable-wireless devices is expected to hit revenues of $6 billion within the next four years. But alongside Android powered eyeglasses and tiny video cameras that fit on your ear are a few new gadgets that might just save your life, or your child’s life.
I sat down with Tennessee Titans quarterback Matt Hasselbeck Tuesday, as he unveiled Reebok’s new Head Impact Indicator. The thin, lightweight black skullcap sports MC10’s latest series of wearable sensors to help measure and detect dangerous hits to the head.
A tiny rechargable pack, about the size of a quarter, sits at the base of your skull. If you’re hit too hard — an impact registering above pre-programmed thresholds based on the head-injury criteria levels (HIC) — a yellow or red light goes on. The idea behind the synthetic cap is to give coaches, parents, athletes, and even us hard-headed weekend warrior types, a tool to take better care of our brains.
It’s easy to see why a professional athlete who gets tackled for a living would get behind this kind of technology. Hasselbeck has had a handful of concussions in his career and says he’s seen too many of his fellow-players suffer traumatic head injuries, when they failed to realize that knock to the noggin was more serious than they thought.
Perhaps even more important he says, is that this kind of technology could help kids, coaches, and parents everywhere. He talked about watching his own three kids play, tumble, and even wipe-out on a bicycle a time or two. With a head-injury, often times the severity isn’t all that obvious, especially to a child. The warning lights built right in to the cap, could help act as an extra pair of eyes.
Of course, whenever we talk about this topic, whether it’s when my own daughter falls off the monkey-bars or takes a spill of a horse (which just happened recently), I always think of actress Natasha Richardson. She died in 2009 after not realizing that a ski fall had caused her brain to bleed. The new Head Impact Indicator cap is expected to show up on store shelves in the first half of 2013.
It may not always be easy to find a discount deal on Apple products, but you can land one if you know where to look:
— Go for refurbished. Apple sells its own refurbished Macs, and they come with a one-year warranty. Go to the “Special Deals” section of Apple’s website. Or try refurb-tracker.com to create a personal RSS feed on latest offers.
— Deal site Offers.com is another great way to find discounts on Mac products. You can find discount codes and coupons for retailers like MacMall, and MacConnection.
— There’s always eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist — but go in with eyes open. With eBay and Amazon, see if the seller takes returns. With Craigslist, see if you can meet in a public place and take the laptop for a spin — and don’t pay new computer prices for something that’s used.
Check out these tips and more in USA TODAY’s new daily digital video series TECH NOW.
From snapshots to posed portraits, smartphones have become the camera of choice for snap-happy photo lovers. In this TECH NOW, how to use that same smartphone to enhance any photo with three colorful apps.
Go back to the ’50s with PocketBooth. This cross-platform app takes rapid-fire shots of your friends. You can add filters for that antiqued look, and arrange images into a strip you can then share or print. It’s available for Apple’s iOS gadgets, Android and Windows Phone.
Or … bring still photos to life with Flixel, a free iPhone app that animates a single detail from any shot you choose, giving the illusion of a mini movie.
Then take a walk on the wild side. Wash your photos in funky pop art colors with a 1960s vibe using the psychedelic Photo Tropedelic app available from iTunes ($1.99).
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s new daily digital TECH NOW . Email her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
Apps have literally come to life this holiday season. From interactive plush toys based on the popular Talking Tom and Ginger the Cat characters, to a free customizable sound-equalizer app from RadioShack, here are a few ways to resuscitate that tired gift list.
Talking Tom, the app that more than half a million people are playing with, is an interactive plush toy. Just turn it on and Talking Tom will talk via the app. There are other characters available too.
Here’s another idea. A pair of headphones to tune it all out. The Auvio Elite headphones from Radioshack also use a free app as a customizable equalizer – to create clean, clear and comfortable sound.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s new daily digital TECH NOW . Email her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
Fix your worst time-draining tech habits
If biting your fingernails took up eight hours of your time every day, would you, could you, give it up? What if the way you’re using email or web search is robbing hours and hours of your life? A recent round of surveys about how we’re spending our precious time online shows that most of us are doing the high-tech equivalent of chewing our nails to the quick every day without even realizing it. From getting sucked into social media to throwing away whole hours surfing the web like it’s 1999, today’s technology should help save time, not waste it.
Here’s a look at some of our biggest time-wasting tech habits, along with quick-fix solutions to take back your time right now.
Time Suck Trap #1: Search insanity
According to recent internet use statistics, people waste as much as 70 minutes a day surfing the web for information. Why? Maybe we’re just stuck in a Google rut. Collectively, we visit Google 7.2 billion times a day and make around 3 billion queries. Yet half the time, it seems we never find what we’re looking for in the first place. Time-Saving Solution: Try a new search engine.
The folks at Bing recently dared me to take this new BingItOn Challenge. Like the old Pepsi blind taste test, it pits web search results from Bing against results from Google. It’s unbranded, and there aren’t any ads, so you don’t know which is which. You put in five queries, then declare a winner based on your preferences. Bing bet that I would be so surprised by the results that I would change to Bing as my primary search engine. “Bing it on,” I thought, as skeptical as ever.
But guess what? They were right. Bing won. Again and again and again. What I like most about Bing is that the results seem more relevant, more tailored to me and my interests. While replacing any bad habit with a good one takes a little time to get used to, I’ve already saved about 30 minutes a day by using a new search engine to track down information during my busy day. Time Suck Trap #2: Social media madness
Americans spend an average of — get this — 100,000 years worth of time each month on Facebook. Add to that Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and mobile games like Words With Friends, and it’s easy to see why we can’t get anything done.
Time-Saving Solution: Automate social media posting.
Use a social media dashboard like Hootsuite to post to all your social media sites at once. It also lets you preschedule social media posts so that you can batch it all into a few hours to go out over a month’s time or even longer.
If that’s not enough to keep you from reading, Liking, commenting, and pinning all your time away, use an application like RescueTime. It measures all the different things you do on your computer, then gives you detailed reports about how you’re spending your digital day. You can also use it to block yourself from sites that you’re tempted to visit but know you shouldn’t.
Time Suck Trap #3: Email overload
Has your inbox become a landfill, overflowing and overwhelming? The average inbox receives 100 emails per day. Of those 100 emails, only 42% are considered important. Time-Saving Solution: Manage your mailbox.
This is another example of how it pays off to use modern technology to help manage modern technology. I use a service called Sanebox. It sifts, sorts, and stacks up email according to what’s important. It’s easy to customize, and it learns from your actions, automatically putting your newsletters in one box, store promotions in another. My favorite feature is that it sends suspected spam to the Black Hole where it belongs. But don’t worry, it doesn’t ditch an email unless you say it’s okay.
Sanebox says it saves people an average of two hours per week from digging through their inboxes (though if you get a ton of emails like I do, I think it saves closer to four).
Time Suck Trap #4: News blues
Now here’s an interesting habit I had no clue was wasting so much of my time — fishing around for news. According to the Pew Research Center, people spend about 70 minutes a day getting news from TV, radio, newspaper, and now online news sites.
Time-Saving Solution: Centralize your news.
You can get all your print and online news, everything that you need to feel informed, in about 10 minutes using a new app called Wavii (download Wavii for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch). This service lets you keep up with everything you care about in a personalized news feed and automatically creates status updates for your favorite politicians, celebrities, gadgets, and more.
If you still prefer to listen to the radio for news or just like to have music playing in the background all day, use the ultra-time-saving service TuneIn. It lets you hear what’s happening right now from anywhere in the world, all in one place. The free service gives you a simple and streamlined way to listen to the music, sports, news, and podcasts you like. You just personalize your favorites once, so you don’t have to waste time channel surfing every time you want to listen to something you like. You can use this in the car and on your smartphone or tablet, not only when you’re sitting in front of a computer.
Time Suck Trap #5: Dings, rings, and annoying things
Every time you get a notification alert — those dings, rings, clicks, or popup instant message (IM) bubbles on your smartphone or computer — it takes your attention away from the task at hand. Even if they don’t make a sound (maybe your smartphone screen just lights up when you get an email or new Facebook comment or it’s your turn to Draw Something), those distractions kill your concentration and drain your device’s battery.
Time-Saving Solution: Turn off alerts.
It sounds so very simple, and it actually is. Whenever you download a new app, it asks you whether to allow push notifications. Hit “don’t allow.” If alerts are already on your device, go to the start or settings menu, find the notifications center in the drop-down menu, and select “no” for everything you don’t want to bug you throughout the day.
It’s fine to schedule time to play Words With Friends, IM with your BFF, or scan the latest cute kitten videos on YouTube. But set boundaries and time limits on those activities so that you get in, get out, and get on with a more productive digital day.
What are your biggest time-draining tech habits? Do you have any quick-fix, time-saving tech solutions to share? Let us know what saves you time.
Shhh, don’t tell the kids, but many of the hottest holiday tech toys this year can actually be good for them. From iPads and Wii U’s, to all of the battery-operated, USB cable’d, LED-lighted magic in-between, today’s top picks can combine the best of the digital world with the engagement of the real world, to create modern toys that both educate and entertain. Here are some of my favorites:
Barbie Photo Fashion is bright, beautiful, and rocks the latest fashion trend, but there’s a whole lot more to this little doll than meets the eye. She’s equipped to introduce kids to the world of digital photography, graphic design, and modern marketing.
This Barbie doubles as a digital camera, with a built-in best-shot billboard. By pressing her belt buckle, you turn on a lens embedded in Barbie’s back, which features a 0.3-megapixel camera. The camera shoots and stores up to 200 photos, and displays them on the LED backlit screen built-in to Barbie’s shirt. Kids can customize photos with more than 30 filters, frames, and stamps. Compatible with both Mac and PC, Barbie Photo Fashion Doll can encourage creativity in a modern, pop culture sort of way way. Look out supermodel turned super mogul Tyra Banks, this Barbie is on to your kind of multimedia super powers.
2. Hot Wheels Apptivity
Age: 4+
Price: $20
Buy: From Amazon
Here’s another high-tech twist on a perennial favorite, Hot Wheels Apptivity. Kids can use specially designed, screen-safe Hot Wheels cars on their parents’ iPad. The cars actually interact with a free app. It uses a conductive technology, so the app recognizes each vehicle and its driving style. Now, of course this means parents have to be willing to give up the iPad for playtime. Apptivity also came out several other popular toy-meets-tablet games including Fruit Ninja, Batman, and Cut the Rope. If you lose one of the race cars or action figures, you can still play the apps with your fingertips.
3. Furby
Age: 5+
Cost: $60
Buy: From Amazon
A big trend in general this year is the “rad” revival of toys that first came in the 80’s and 90’s, like Furby. Today’s more modern furry friend encourages interactive play, through progressive learning. That means that the more a child plays with it, the better it learns to perform a trick, speak, and even pick up on the personality of the child playing with it. Furby even has sensors all over his fuzzy little “body” that help him react in a realistic way to kids movement and speech. Oh, and he’s got his own own smartphone and iPad app too. One word of warning for parents: the cutesy sounds this little guy makes will drive you crazy after awhile (like most kids toys that make noise). Nothing that set of ear-plugs won’t fix.
Another toy making a comeback (though really, it never went away) is the Rubik’s Cube. But this holiday season’s must-have version is the Rubik’s Stack & Build Blocks set that turns the classic puzzle into a set of 20 building blocks, perfect for the stroller set. The blocks have the same bright colors of the classic cube, and come in four shapes: triangles, squares, and small and large rectangles. These building blocks encourage creative play, help develop fine motor skills, and teach little minds about sizes and shapes.
5. Cubelets
Ages: 8+
Cost: $160
The cost of this toy is high, because what a child can do with it is seriously that cool. By using what looks an awful lot like regular building blocks, kids can create simple, reconfigurable robots that can actually move around, respond to light, react to sound, and display other lifelike behavior. It works by combining sensor, logic, and actuator blocks. Depending on the combination, you’re basically “programming” the robot to perform different tasks. The different types of cubes elicit different actions, and reactions, in the simple robot, without any wires, tools, or programming skills. This is a great way to introduce young minds to the core concepts of robotics and programming logic.
6. Tablets for Tots
Ages: 3-9
Cost: $80 — $150
Parents ask my advice about kids tablets all the time, and it’s tough to recommend just one. The one you choose has a lot to do with your budget. In the sensibly priced range, I really like both of the new, upgraded LeapPad 2, and VTech InnoTab 2 kids Tablets. Both focus more on learning capabilities than flashy tech specs, though they hold their own with more memory to store apps and creations, and faster processors that can handle more complex software. They also both have a 5″ touch screen, tilt sensor, microphone, and built-in digital photo/video cameras. Either of these tablets are fantastic first choices, great for learning early reading and math skills.
7. PlayStation Wonderbook
Ages: 7+
Cost: $40 for stand alone, $80 for the PS3 bundle
The new PlayStation Wonderbook is essentially a digital, holographic pop-up book. It works with the PlayStation Eye camera to “see” what’s happening in real-time, then layer it augmented reality-style with various events and activities on the screen. The first title coming out is the “Book of Spells,” written by J.K. Rowling. It teaches you how to become a wizard, and by using the PlayStation Move controller, you can actually perform spells with an onscreen wizard’s wand. It’s sure to captivate and engage audiences young and old, with it’s multi-sensory storytelling magic.
One of the most popular selling games for the 2011 Holiday season was Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. Now, Activision’s bigger, bolder sequel Skylanders Giants, is poised to dominate this year as well. Skylanders broke ground as a revolutionary bridge between video gaming and action figures. With the Giants starter set, and a video game console (PS3, Wii, XBox 360), you can bring action figure to life inside the Skylanders game universe. The figures actually save and store your levels and information as well, and each comes with it’s own special powers. I like the way this provides a portal for positive play, away from the screen, creating a nexus between gaming, imagination, and active play, while creating a fairly positive storyline.
9. Digital Light Designer
Ages: 6+
Cost: $60
The Digital Light Designer lets you draw and color with light. With a digital stylus, kids can create and manipulate 96 colored LED’s inside a 3D, light-up dome. You can even animate the art with special effects like color change, rotation, and three panel animation.
It also comes with games and an activity mode, and lets you create and save your favorite drawings and personal messages to light up a room later.
10. Wonder Box
Ages: 3-6
Cost: $20 per month
For a truly interactive toy, take a look at Wonder Box from Education.com. It’s a subscription-based monthly service, that delivers ready-to-go science, craft and other fun projects right to your doorstep. Each month has a different theme, such as mad scientist, nature, or once upon a time. Each box is filled with age-appropriate projects to help educate, enrich and entertain kids. This is a great way to get families more quality time together, while helping kids satisfy their curiosity about the world around them.
As a mom, I know first hand that the best toys are the ones your kids actually play with. As someone pointed out the last time I did a toy round-up, sometimes the best toys are a simple cardboard box or set of pots and pans. But if you’re like me, there’s a good chance you’ll want to get a few of these toys, just so that you can play with them too.
One in every two people suffer from a chronic medical condition. In today’s Tech’s Appeal, we’ll talk about a handful of gadgets that will help get Americans on the mend. Modern technology is usually blamed for poor health; sitting around and staring at screens is taking its toll. But these gadgets can help you treat and control your medical challenges.
While many of these gadgets could be covered by your insurance, you should obviously check in with your doctor before using them.
