Posted in Girlfriend's Guide, Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, TechStyled, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized
In The Press
Whether you’re heading out this spring, or just enjoying a break at home– Spring into action with some of the hottest new tech that will make the season blossom.
1. What’s hot right now are these – Intel-inspired Ultrabook Convertibles like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga : Starts at $1049
• It’s a full, powerhouse PC that goes from laptop to tablet mode by flipping, folding or twisting the screen.
• Just over 3.4 lbs with up to 8 hours of battery life
Here’s another great multi-tasking gadget with built-in flexibility:
2. iHome iDL45 Clock Dock : $99.99
• Spring forward with a clock that charges and plays all your old and new i-devices with a Lightning connector, 30-pin and USB.
• What really sets this iHome clock apart is the sound quality:
• Reson8 Speaker gives you crystal clear sound that can really fill a room or office.
• According to the NPD group – iHome is the #1 for digital audio and #1 for docking stations
Time for some spring cleaning:
3. iRobot Looj 330 Gutter Cleaning Robot : $300
• You may know iRobot for the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot – they also make robots that clean outside your home
• The Looj is super easy to use: just climb up the ladder, place the robot in your gutter, and use the wireless remote to drive the robot while the augur spins at 500 RPM, kicking out all the debris, leave, and muck.
• It stays charged for 3-hours and can clean 30-feet of gutter in 5 minutes.
… Which means more time for fun!
4. Sony Action Cam (HDR-AS15) Built in Wi-Fi $269 / $199 (no Wi-Fi)
• POV camera’s are all the rage and I recently tried out Sony’s Action Cam on the Zipline at the Canyons Resort in Park City, Utah. Action Cam is the perfect name for the incredibly small, lightweight video camera that will mount anywhere and stream video from anywhere, including during the middle of a 2,000 foot zipline, some 300-feet above the forest floor.
• With the Wi-Fi remote – you can actually frame, shoot, and watch right from your smartphone in real time – or stream video to YouTube or Facebook.
• Works great in low-light
• Is complete with SteadyShot image stabilization, a 1080/30p capture mode and a 720p option at 120 frames per second, enabling some pretty slick slow-motion effects.
5. Playstation MLB The Show 13 PS3 – $59.99 & PS Vita – $39.99
• You can’t talk about Spring without thinking about Spring Training and Baseball.MLB 13 The Show is the most realistic baseball video game I’ve ever seen.
• Its jaw-dropping detail captures the mechanics and the raw emotion of Major League Baseball.
• What’s really cool – you can play other people on the go through Cross-Play with your PS Vita in Home Run Derby mode.
Perhaps the most important spring tech gadget of them all –
6. Motorola P4000 Universal Portable Power Pack – around $70
• This is the MUST HAVE gadget for all spring-breakers – stop getting caught with your battery down.
• You can recharge your devices at the beach, at your kids’ little league practice, working from a café or anywhere in between.
• It’s compatible with phones by all manufacturers, so will work with any device you use.
• It provides up to two full phone charges, so you can keep the movies rolling, listen to hours of music, browse the Web, text or tweet without skipping a beat.
• In as little as 15 minutes, your smartphone can be recharged with up to 2.5 hours of talk time.
For more information, you can go to jenniferjolly.com or see my reviews via TechNow at USAToday.com/tech – or watch the TV segment here:
Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News
Posted in Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, TechStyled, What The Tech
There’s no shortage of cooking apps on a mobile device near you these days, but why clutter your connected kitchen, or your brain, with a whole bunch of them that you don’t really use? Here are five of the very best apps available today, for saving time and adding inspiration in the kitchen.
1. BigOven
Free, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Kindle Fire or $15 Pro
With more 250,000 recipes, BigOven serves up a healthy portion of brand new concoctions and interesting twists on classics for just about every appetite. It also features drag-and-drop recipes into a calendar for a day, a week, or a month. If you fork over $15 for the Pro version, the app automatically generates your grocery list for you. You can also share recipes via email, Facebook or Twitter. There’s a reason why more than eight million people have downloaded this app – it’s kind of like the King Kamehameha of cooking.
2. Panna App
Free to download on iPhone and iPad, then $15 per year subscription
For true video-magazine style food porn, take a look at the new Panna App. It’s a real foodies cooking app in the form of a beautifully designed and rendered digital multi-media magazine. You can sort recipes and how-to videos by cuisine or by a chef’s name. You can also add ingredients to a shopping list with a quick one-tap button.
3. The ChefTap Recipe App
Free, Android
Remember the old days, when we tore recipes out of magazines, wrote them down on index cards, and cluttered our kitchens with sticky, stained, and faded notes? The ChefTap Recipe App for Android fixes all of that. It lets you import any recipe from any website or blog. See something awesome on Pinterest? Pull it in. Want to bookmark a favorite via Epicurious, Food Network or AllRecipes? No problem, there’s never too many cooks in the ChefTap’s kitchen. It can even scan your phone’s bookmarks and import recipes from food blogs you’ve saved, if that’s more your cup of tea.
4. Cook4Lyfe
$1.99, iOS
Got a handful of ingredients in the fridge, but not sure how to put them together into a good meal? The Cook4Lyfe App will come to your rescue. It recommends recipes from a library of over 40,000 based on what you already have on hand, (mustard, cheese, asparagus … hmmm…) or sends you to a nearby grocery store based on what you need. You can even set dietary filters for gluten free or low-fat recipes.
5. Matthew Kenney’s Everyday Raw Express
$2.99 Android, iOS
Ironically, one of the cooking apps getting a ton of buzz right now, is for food that’s … “raw.” Matthew Kenney’s Everyday Raw Express features more than 50 healthy and quick raw food recipes with videos, photos and nutritional data also included.
If all else fails, there’s always the Chefs Feed AppCooking Apps. It tells you where the pros go when they need someone else to cook a great meal for them.
What are some of your favorite go-to cooking apps? What are some of the apps you still want to see? So you like cooking with your tablet or your Smartphone better? Be sure to let us know in the comments section!
Posted in Digital Parenting, Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized
Win Net Nanny – as seen on the Marie Osmond Show!
Send us an email and tell us why you want to win a subscription to Net Nanny. Have any funny/scary/interesting stories about digital parenting? Be sure to share them here!
Posted in Connected Kids, Cyber Safety, Digital Parenting, Girlfriend's Guide, Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, Tips & Tricks, Top tech news
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.
Posted in Connected Kids, Cyber Safety, Digital Parenting, Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, Top tech news
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.
Posted in Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow
Press here to see the video segment
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.
Posted in Great Gadgets, In The Press, TechNow, TechStyled, Tips & Tricks
Posted in In The Press
I love doing the Daily Buzz with co-host Andrea Jackson. Will post the segments here soon!
Posted in Connected Kids, Cyber Safety, Digital Parenting, Girlfriend's Guide, Great Gadgets, Health & Fitness, In The Press, TechStyled, Tips & Tricks, What The Tech
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.
Posted in Connected Kids, Cyber Safety, Digital Parenting, Girlfriend's Guide, Great Gadgets, Health & Fitness, In The Press, TechStyled, Tips & Tricks, What The Tech
