Kylo and Loop are two tools for watching TV shows over the Internet.

Despite all its appeal, watching TV programs over the Internet is not one of the most pleasant experience in life. Some people have tried a lot of different things like using a laptop connected to a TV screen through a long extension cable, or using a wireless keyboard and mouse. There are many others solutions (fancast.com, CastTVOnline.com free TVOnline.com to name a few), available for dealing with this issue but two recent ones from the same company have caught thee attention of critics and reviewers. They are from a company named Hillcrest Labs from Rockville Md who has just put out two very revolutionary products that address the problem.
The first product is a Web browser called Kylo available free at Kylo.tv and refereed to by the company as " the Web browser for television." According to the Wall Street Journal, it runs on both Windows and Mac computers and has links to 128 popular Web video sites; it is still in beta mode and needs some improvements according to the WSJ.
The second product is a round shaped remote control called Loop available at Loop.com which controls the computer it is linked to and not the TV. With a simple wave of the Loop in the air, you can move the cursor on the compute or scroll down or up the screen. The Loop came out last summer and works well with Windows and Mac and sells for $99. The Loop can be used separately or in combo with the Kylo Web browser and like the later, it is a nice concept in need of refinement, according to the WSJ.


For more, see WSJ.com

Cell phone apps that prevent distracted driving.

With all the talks about the dangers of distracted driving and the use of cell phone being one of the main culprit, different States are scrambling to enact various laws to outlaw driving and texting or even talking on the phone. All those laws in the pipeline or already enacted, address the issue differently with most of them making the act of driving and texting a secondary offense only enforced when the driver is stopped for another one. For its part, the fed is also getting into the act, with a federal ban of driving and texting in the work.
But until then, something needs to be done specially given the rate at which the most accident prone drivers on the road, teenagers, text and drive. For concerned parents, hopefully, there are some technical solutions available right now that would give them some peace of mind knowing that their kids' phones are not in use while they are behind the wheels.
Those technical solutions come in the form of cellphone apps that can block the ability to send or receive texts or make or receive calls or surf the Web. The extend of what these apps allow or don't allow, varies per app. But they almost all work based on the same principle of using the cellphone GPS system to sense when the car exceed a certain speed, to start blocking whatever they are set to block. Here a list of some of them to just name a few: iZup, tXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer. The list is far from being exhausted with new apps or services being made public almost every day.

For more, see NYTimes.com

Watching streaming Netflix movies directly into a TV.

As if any additional proof were needed, the recent news that movies rental Hollywood Video was shutting down is a further evidence of the ever increasing popularity of Netflix, the Online movie rental company. The business model of Netflix has struck a chord with consumers for the convenience and ease of use. And now the model is getting even more convenient with the possibility to watch movies from Netflix vast catalog, directly streamed to your TV screen bypassing a computer. That is possible with a small portion of Netflix catalog and with help of set-top boxes or other
TV-connected hardware that allow these movies to be played directly on a TV, according to the Wall Street Journal. The most popular of those are the Xbox 360, TiVo digital video recorders, Play Station 3 game consoles and the simplest and least expensive, the Roku.


For more, see Netflix.com

Give me my data app allows users to retrieve their personal information on Facebook.

Recently, Facebook has proceeded to remove users personal information that they have spend years to built, from their profiles to make room to its newest project called " Open Graph."
With that latest initiative Facebook plans to connect users to others people, places, and things across the entire Web. It is part of the much more buzzed about "Instant Personalization" project which is Facebook attempt to link with as many Web sites as possible by letting them install its "Like" button. With that button, Facebook users who visit those sites will have the possibility to click on it and have the page in which it was in, linked to their profiles and have all their friends made aware of the action. More of that Facebook Instant Personalization project can be found at this previous post.
Facebook removal of users' personal information from their profile interfaces has been met with a lot of negative feed back from perplexed users. The good news is that that information is not deleted, it is just removed and moved to a place unreachable by the new interface. But with the whole thing done without any explanation from Facebook to make its users understand what is going on or to give them the necessary tools to retrieve that information, it did not take long for confusion to reign in. Fortunately, there is a little known app called Give Me My Data created earlier this year and available at Givememydata.com that walks people through the steps of retrieving their data. And according to the New York Times, the free app will let users retrieve not only their personal information on their profile pages, but a variety of their Facebook data making it possible for them to make copy to be saved somewhere else.

For more, see NYTimes.com

How to safeguard your identity Online.

In this digital age where some people spend more time socializing online than in real life, and with the ever expanding list of every day activities done on the Internet, the amount of information about people stored and sometimes shared out there, can be mind boggling.
One thing is sure: unless you live completely off line and under a rock since the day you were born, it is almost impossible to completely erase your digital tracks.
With the genie already out of the bottle, the one or two things that you can do is to make sure what is out there about you is as accurate as possible and to limit it to only what is in the public domain.
One first step, calls for some pure common sense by limiting the number of sites you sign up for, never sign for site just in the spur of the moment, like when they are claiming to have contests or free give aways.
On the social networking front, try to only sign up with sites that have been around for a while and with a strong commitment to safeguarding users' information. I know that proposition may be a little hard for many people trying to be early adapters. But given the fact that there is something new almost every day, it may be a bad idea to engage in a race trying to be one of the first to try them.
That said, after limiting yourself to a few sites, you should do a good job to keep track of them and be careful about what you reveal in there. And when a site like Facebook starts to play loose with users data, you always have the option to take down your data and delete your account because after all, that data belongs to users even though from time to time, Facebook acts as if it had forgotten about that.
Another tool in users' arsenal, is Google Dashboard which gives them the means to edit or remove--information about users that various Google sites and services may be storing.
Others information repository places in the Web like WhitePages.com, also allow you to edit or sometimes remove some information about yourself.
And who can forget about Twitter? With the micro blogging site experiencing a phenomenal growth and people eager to share almost any thing instantaneously, there are a lot of room for regrets later. To deal with embarrassing tweets, the service offers its users a way to remove them, but that can be done only one at a time. So, if you are tweets prolific with a bunch of those, until recently, your options may have been limited to just close the account and open another one even though the old offending tweets, would be still out there. But now, there is another option offered by a third party service called TweetWipe, at TweetWipe.com to get rid of them all at once.


For more, see pcworld.com

Artnear is an app that lists art exhibits near you.

If you are into arts and are visiting a town and would like to see some exhibitions you can do that with the help of an app available to iPhone and Blackberry owners. The app maps nearly contemporary art exhibits and presents them to you in the form of a list based on your location.
It comes in two versions: a free one that is adds supported and a $4.99 adds free version that lets you bookmark events you are interested in.
According to the New York Times, Artnear compensates the lack of comprehensiveness of its database by listing links to different venues that it may not include yet in its listing.


For more, see NewYorkTimes.com

How to opt out of Facebook sharing option.

With the announcement last week by Facebook of the expansion of its "Like" program to other sites, little notice were made of the possible ramifications of such program. The program works by allowing outside participant sites to embed Facebook Like button on their sites. Once embeded, the button will appear on its page of the site and will give Facebook members a chance to click on it when they see something that they like. That seemingly harmless action will have a lot of ramifications since since that one click will essentially broadcast the user action to his or her network through his or her newsfeed. Also, all the names of the user Facebook friends who have already clicked on the button, will be broadcasted alongside.
In conjunction of the new Like program, Facebook has launched a new innovation called Open Graph which is a technology that allows certain sites like Pandora, Yelp, and Docs by Microsoft, to personalize their offerings to users based on the information stored in their personal profiles. That level of personalization is possible because Facebook gives those sites access to those users information. Ant that's where it gets scary for unscrupulous users who unwillingly may be giving away access to their personal information.
As you may have noticed, the opt-in option is by default and users who do not want their information accessed that way, have the means to opt-out.
You can either turn Instant Personalization off entirely at Facebook, or you can opt out at individual websites on a case-by-case basis. The latter is easy; the first time you arrive at a website that uses Instant Personalization, a bar will appear at the top of the page letting you know that’s what’s happening and giving you the option to either accept that or not.
To opt out of the personalization feature altogether, you can do so by going to Facebook home page, access your "Account" and click on "Privacy Settings."

For more, see the Hardfordinformer.com