Tagged: technology

As has been the case with all of Apple's product unveilings, there is a shroud of secrecy surrounding today's impending announcement.

Today, Apple has invited media to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for a 1 p.m. ET. event. The only clue provided by Apple was a typically cryptic invitation with a picture of an iPad and a few words: "We have something you really have to see. And touch."

The buzz is building about the news that, as The New York Times has reported, there soon may be "Google glasses" that can "stream information to the wearer's eyeballs in real time."

Yes, by the end of the year Google may be selling spectacles that come with a small screen that in theory will allow users to get information about nearby locations, the weather, friends who might be close by and other things. They're reportedly going to cost between $250 and $600.

Sounds cool, right?

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft is hooking up MSN.com with a hipper sidekick to broaden its appeal and stay on top of the Internet's hottest topics.

The trend-tracking service, called "msnNOW," tunes into the buzz by sifting through millions of Internet searches and links circulating among the hordes on Facebook and Twitter. The chatter is then distilled into the equivalent of a digital water cooler — a place where people can go to keep in touch without taking up a lot of their time.

Kickstarter, a website designed to fund creative projects through the support of small online donations, crowned its first millionaire this week: Casey Hopkins, an engineer based in Portland, Ore.

It all started when Hopkins got fed up with the iPhone docks he kept buying in stores.

In an effort to protest the working conditions in the Chinese factories that make Apple products, demonstrators delivered a petition to six different Apple stores in four different countries.

The petition, which asks the country to make "ethical" products, included about 250,000 signatures. Organizers said they were delivering them to Apple stores in Bangalore, London, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Sydney and New York City.

NPR's Margot Adler was at the Apple store at Grand Central Terminal in New York. She reports that Shelby Knox, the director for Change.org, the website used to collect the signatures, delivered the petitions to the store manager.

Yesterday afternoon Google announced it was making sweeping changes to its privacy policy beginning March 1. Users can't opt out, so Google is beginning to send notice to its users via email and even on its homepage.

The big change is that Google will now track you across its services. In other words, Google will now, for example, be able to pair information it collects on its email service with information it collects on its search service to really target its advertising. In a blog post explaining the changes, Google says it will make the experience across its suite of products "more intuitive."

A few weeks ago, Mike Wendlinger bought himself a Christmas present — a Nook Simple Touch e-book reader. And when he did, he joined a wave of Americans who have combined to make e-readers and their more powerful bretheren, tablet computers, into genuine mass market devices.

Americans like to buy the latest devices and that makes us happy ... but it also makes us the biggest contributor to the global problem of electronic waste.

However, Seattle is home to two entreprenuers who are effectively swimming against the e-waste stream: Charles Brennick of Interconnection and Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim.

Read more on Humanosphere.

Tomorrow (Thursday, 12-29-11), electronic tolls will kick in on the 520 bridge across lake Washington.

A series of technical glitches caused multiple past delays.  But now, the reader boards are going live and billing drivers on the most popular route between Seattle and the east side.

There are many creative ways to get around the tolls, but you’re bound to have to pay, sooner or later.

"It was like Palm Springs around much of the Northwest" recently, says KPLU's weather man, Cliff Mass. But that will be shifting soon. 

"Unfortunately, we're about to make a major shift into a much rainier pattern - a much more normal pattern."