up

The best personal fitness gadgets right now

Spring has sprung and that means summer is right around the corner. If you still haven't worked off those extra winter pounds, it's high time to start before swimsuit and tank top weather cruelly arrives. Luckily, there are new mobile accessories that harness wireless technology, competitive behavior, social media, and other online tools to help couch potatoes catch the exercise bug.… Read more

A site where getting poached is the whole point

Time and time again, the old adage that it's easier to find a job when you already have one rings true. One young Austin, Texas-based entrepreneur decided to capitalize on that notion and created a Web site with a perfectly descriptive name: JobPoacher.com.

When building the site in his spare time, John Everett Creighton said he drew on his own experience. As an MIT graduate with a degree in physics and nuclear engineering, he was in hot demand when entering the job market and had to juggle multiple offers and rounds of negotiations. Creighton sought to simplify that … Read more

Instagram clicks with Hipstamatic

The popular photo apps Hipstamatic and Instagram seem to have drawn a little closer.

Instagram has 17 filters to choose from for touching-up and enhancing photos before sharing, while Hipstamatic's free features include four lenses, three types of flash, and three kinds of film. The point here is this: there's a lot more people can do with photos using Hipstamatic, but there's been no one-step way to share them.

Until now, judging by a Hipstamatic tweet today:

Sharing is about to get easier! Tag Facebook friends & upload to multiple networks, incl. @Instagram http://bit.ly/yQunPt (@… Read more

PayPal Here racks up thousands of sign-ups in first week

Since PayPal launched its new payment service "PayPal Here" last week, it has raked in thousands of sign-ups. In fact, in the first 24 hours of its introduction, the online payment company says it was getting 1,000 sign-ups per hour.

"To say there's been some interest in our new offering would be an understatement," PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said in a statement today. "Clearly there's a need for a secure, global solution that provides small businesses the flexibility to get paid anytime, anywhere, any way."

The idea of PayPal Here actually … Read more

RIM, Samsung accused of emoticon patent infringement

The latest in the everyone-sue-everyone patent war is an alleged infringement by Samsung and Research In Motion for installing emoticon shortcut menus on their mobile phones, according to tech news site Ars Technica.

A firm called Varia Holdings began the process of suing both cell phone makers on Thursday for using its "emoticon input method and apparatus" patent, reports Ars Technica. The company asserts that it owns the idea of pop-up emoticon menus, which let users easily insert a happy or frowny face without having to type out the characters one at a time.

"It is known … Read more

New video of the ShutUp Gun in action

Loud screams of excitement have been heard ever since the revelation that two Japanese researchers had developed a gun that could stop people talking. Without killing them.

I wrote about this fascinating firearm only the other day.

Now the Japanese researchers who developed it are so excited by the excitement that they have released a YouTube video of the device.

And what a frisky little Colt .45 silencer it is.

Wired reports that the two creators, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, are bemused at the … Read more

How to back up, then delete your Google account

It's official, Google's new unified privacy policy is now in place, allowing all of your data to be shared across the various Google services. This is definitely going to make some users uneasy. If you're one of those users, and have been thinking about ditching Google, you will want to make sure you back up your data first, then delete your account. Here's how to carry out both of these tasks.

To begin, you will need to visit Google.com/settings.

You will want to back up your account data before you delete the account. To … Read more

Dear tech companies, enough of the corporate sweatshirts

The revolution will not be televised. It will be streamed to your laptop by pirates from the outer space known as Silicon Valley.

Those nice but alien boys and (a few) girls in sweatshirts are changing everything from the way you consume to the way you think. If you still feel the need to think.

The old corporate ways are, to them, prehistoric, predatory, and preternaturally authoritarian. Around here, we skateboard. Bet they never did that at IBM.

And yet there I was at the lovely Miner Family Winery in Napa last Sunday, just needing a few tastes of their … Read more

Google's HUD glasses expected to go on sale this year

More rumblings about Google's Heads-Up Display Glasses materializing sometime in the near future were heard today. According to The New York Times, the public will be able to buy these high-tech glasses by the end of the year and they will cost somewhere between $250 and $600.

Rumors that the HUD Google Glasses were in the works have been brewing for the past couple of months. After accounts that Google was finishing up the prototype in December, tech news site 9to5Google reported that a tipster actually saw the glasses.

The prototype apparently resembles Oakley's Thump glasses but functions … Read more