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"The 4-Hour Workweek"--for parents

Efficiency expert Timothy Ferriss has written The 4-Hour Workweek for an audience who wants to "escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich." Ferriss uses a combination of techniques that take advantage of globalization, smart use of technology and outsourcing, and sheer brazenness to create a self-financing lifestyle that suits him.

Now, I do not have plans to ditch my homelife and move to Buenos Aires while my virtual empire churns away making money, but I wondered, could Ferriss' strategies help me break through some of the grunt work and limited thinking that typically comes with being a parent? I found that Ferriss has plenty to say that applied to busy families looking to create a satisfying life.… Read more

HP looks to the future of shopping

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Despite the digitization of nearly everything else in our daily lives, the Sunday circular ad for beef and bags of baby carrots has remained. Hewlett-Packard is developing a technology to bring even the banal task of grocery shopping into the Digital Age.

At HP Labs here, researchers are developing an in-store kiosk solution called Retail Shopping Assistant (RSA) that will make shopping for food, clothes and electronics easier for buyers and make selling things easier for retailers.

The idea is this: imagine walking into a grocery store, and instead of bringing your shopping list along, simply swiping … Read more

ChaCha: Where the experts, sadly, aren't

The weirdest Google competitor I've seen so far is ChaCha, an assisted search company. What that means is that you have a text-chat conversation with a person on the other end of the search engine, someone who's supposedly an expert, and they help you find the info you're looking for.

I tried finding a hotel in Austin for the South by Southwest conference by entering "sxsw," and I was connected to a nice person in the "conditions and diseases" category. A poor start to my ChaCha experience, but she did a yeoman's … Read more