Folks who want to maintain their personal space can always look forward to the Orbitsound T3 speaker. While it isn’t as private as a pair of headphones, it won’t cause hearing damage either if used properly, unlike a pair of headphones.

The T3 uses amazing airSOUND® single-point-stereo technology to power its personal stereo aura. The Orbitsound T3 also doubles as a great portable stereo speaker system on the move for use with laptops, music and video players. Great in the office or a hotel room: sit the T3 on any flat surface for great airSOUND spatial stereo sound. Measuring just 102 x 60 x 20mm (22mm at maximum) and weighing 115g, the T3 is powered by a lithium rechargeable battery, providing up to 10 hours playing time on a single charge.

You can pick one up for approximately $170, but make sure this is not used in a library or place of worship unless getting shown to the door is your thing.

Product Page via OhGizmo!

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The iphone and ipod touch are now able to hold digital versions of Frommer’s Travel Guides, enabling travelers (no matter if they’re novices or seasoned folk) to help get through their journeys in relative ease and comfort. Of course, it would be advisable to check up on the type of power points used in your destination country, lest you end up there without being able to fire up your iPhone/iPod touch.

The 2008 editions of Frommer’s New York, San Francisco, London and Paris are available for purchase and download on Apple.com via the new Apple App Store and on iTunes for $9.99. Additional Frommer’s guides are scheduled for release by Modality in late 2008. The fresh and innovative digital editions of the trusted print books will be locally stored on iPhones and the iPod Touch, allowing users to quickly browse ad-free content without an internet connection. Frommer’s for iPhone features local travel tips, restaurant and hotel reviews, and bonus features such as location-based services, interactive maps, and web and phone links, all instantly accessible with the flick of a finger using the unique touchscreen interface.

Al, can you get one of these travel guides of Vegas as you and the team head there for CES next year?

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FROM APPLETELL - CNN is reporting that the iphone 3G has broken the three million unit marker, according to Michael Cote of the Cote Collaborative.
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Nehalem, the next-gen processor architecture from Intel, will officially be known as Core i7 when it hits the streets. Just like with Intel’s other products (Northwood, Santa Rosa, Montevina, etc.), the codename will never disappear, but it will eventually fade into nothing more than tech-speak as Nehalem becomes part of the Core family of processors.

DailyTech has the full scoop on what we know about the upcoming roll out of the processor as well as the implications this has on Intel’s currently line of offerings. The post’s author takes a guess at the name “i7″ as well, Intel hasn’t given us any info on why it was chosen, though it turns out that he might have been reading into it too much (see comments here).

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Opening up the iphone and ipod Touch seems to have been a good idea for Apple, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The Apple App Store is generating an average of US$1 million dollars a day in revenue according to an interview with Steve Jobs. As the article states, this could mean US$360 million a year in new revenue for Apple if the current trend is maintained.

What’s amazing to think is that many applications on the Apple App Store are free, yet it is still averaging US$1 million a day in sales. Don’t assume Apple is going to pocket all the profits though. The way the App Store works is that 30% of the price of software will be maintained by Apple while 70% is given back to developers.

Creating a store by which software developers could make some green is definitely one way to get developers to create applications for your device. Other mobile operating systems being developed may want to take a page from Apple’s book when it comes to generating developer interest in writing programs. Perhaps Google’s Android should have a similar App Store when it is finally released?

Read more from the Wall Street Journal article.

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As popular as Google is and considering its ever increasing stock price it probably shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that search engine use is on the rise. According to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, daily search engine use is up from one-third of all users in 2002 to just under 49%. In comparison, 60% of Internet users use email.

Search engine use rose an incredible 69% from January 2002 to May 2008. Using email as a comparison once again, it saw a growth rate of just 15% over the same time period. Based on growth alone, it is safe to say that search engine use is well on its way to match, if not surpass email use on the Internet.

Internet users check online news as the third greatest daily activity at 39% followed by checking weather at 30%. Though social networks like Facebook and MySpace are all the rage these days, visiting these sites doesn’t seem to be a daily activity for the majority of Internet users. In fact, only about 13% of users reported visiting a social networking site every day.

Read more at the Pew Internet & American Life Project Report (PDF).

Brian’s Opinion
These statistics emphasize the reason why Microsoft made a play for Yahoo! and why Google continues its impressive growth. Quite frankly, search engines are a hot commodity right now. Considering the number of websites that come online each day, it’s no wonder why people have to use a search engine to find anything.

Of course, it helps that search engines are being designed for listing more than just websites these days. They are truly being engineered as a “one stop” location to look for websites, music, movies, books, directions and other bits of information. That’s probably why their use is ever increasing.

It’s not good enough for a search engine to simply list websites anymore. It really has to be an online library of information. Google has been very successful at adding functionality around its search engine very early on; and it is for this reason it is king of the search companies right now.

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It looks like I’m not the only one who wondered if people/firms really need paid support service contracts for Open Source products. ars technica reported on a presentation by an analyst at the recent LinuxWorld conference that companies are increasingly using community supported Open Source products instead of the commercial supported version of the same product.

My personal experience ,after seven years of involvement with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) type production server environments, is that the free community distributions of many well-respected Open Source products are so good that they rarely, if ever, required paid support. That is, if you have reasonable in-house expertise (”me” in my case :-). Here’s two examples with slightly different situations from my own experience.

MySQL provides ready-to-install binary files (no compiling needed) of both their commercial (Enterprise Edition) and free (Community Edition) SQL database server. I’ve been installing, configuring, and developing with MySQL since late 2001 and have found it to be rock solid. In fact, it is so rock solid that I’ve never felt the need to call anyone for any particular issue though, I have read a lot of books, articles, and web-discussions to fill in my knowledge gaps. Red Hat does not provide a free ready-to-install binary for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server product, however, they do provide its full source code. The CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) community project took this source code and created easy to download and install ISO files of their own that anyone can download and install. I’ve used both the MySQL Community Edition and CentOS Linux distribution heavily over the years to support various projects with no regrets.

Of course, if you or your firm does not have in-house technical Open Source expertise, but need to use Open Source products, you should definitely consider either paid support directly from the product vendor or one of the full-stack support firms that have emerged over the years. I’d be interested to hear from those of you who have chosen either route: Full in-house Open Source support or commercial technical support.

For more information on this topic, read the ars technica article: Analyst: Ubuntu, community distros ready for the enterprise

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Microsoft looks set to lose the battle of the browsers in due time, with the latest results of browser market share being broken down into the following :-

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer - 58.50%
2 Firefox - 18.94%
3. Netscape - 11.63%
4. Google Desktop - 4.01%
5. Mozilla - 3.05%

That’s pretty much a 6.96% drop compared to the corresponding period last year. This is where the strengths of a free market comes in - people get what they want, always keeping the manufacturers (software houses in this case) on their toes as they try their level best to wrest users away from one another. Image courtesy of TechTracer.

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One way to convince everyone your back on your game is to surprise everyone with an update, well before it is expected.  Could it be that is what Palm is doing with their runaway hit Centro?  A big, fat maybe.

This supposed advert from Palm shows a nice looking iteration of the Centro minus the keyboard.  We all assume there is still a physical keyboard somewhere, unless they are bringing Graffiti back (haha, that’s an older handwriting via stylus input method from PDAs kids).  Could Palm be jumping on the success of the Centro so quickly?  If so, it would send a strong message that Palm isn’t floundering, in fact it is thriving.

Could Palm jump into a touchscreen only environment with the Centro?  Is it real?  Probably not, definitely not. but I miss thinking of Palm as vibrant.

Via [Palm Addicts]

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This is kinda cute:

It’s a knitted power cord which, naturally, you can’t actually use, but which you can wear as a skinny scarf or a belt (you know it would be the perfect accessory when you sit on that SXSW panel), or as Geeksugar suggests, you could use it as a geekalicious curtain tieback (in your tech-filled office, perhaps?).

It comes in white, beige or black for $25 from KnitKnit on Etsy and could also be the perfect gift for the geek in your life…

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