When in the name of all that is good and pure, is the United States going to completely allow this?  Now, as I’ve mentioned before, the allowance of mobile phone calls in-flight has a plethora of pro’s and more than its fair share of cons.  While it WOULD be rad to call whomever you want whenever you want while flying, it most certainly WOULD NOT be rad to hear everyone else yacking at the very same time.  Yikes.

That said, the U.K. has officially approved in-flight mobile phone calls, just not during take-off and landing, and only after the plane reaches at least 3,000 meters according to reports.  According to the Office of Communications in the U.K., “The safety of passengers is paramount and mobile systems on aircraft will only be installed when they have secured approval by the European Aviation Safety Agency and the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK.”  Well at least they’ve thought it out.

Apparently the calls will be routed to an on-board base station and then sent out accordingly.  So, knowing this, how much do you want a Bluetooth headset to at least not have to HOLD the phone during your long flights?  Lets just hope they pre-install soundproof curtains between every seat from now on because the thought of hearing 250 passengers talking to 250 OTHER people all at the same time in a closed-in cabin at 30,000 feet is just, well, terrifying.

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Wikipedia defines the Uncanny Valley as: “a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.”

Why am I bringing this up?  I don’t know, really just to link you to this site I found today that does more than freak me out.  Clearly I drove my car straight off the cliff and dove headfirst into the Uncanny Valley with this website visit, and I wanted you to as well.  In relation to technology, what does it all mean?  Simple really, it means we’re heading into a world where EVERYTHING is going to advance, Everything.  Already we are seeing new fuel opportunities arise, new ways of communicating, mice that fit INSIDE your computer and charge there…you name it, it’s either here, or on the way.

Head over, get properly freaked out, then head back to see how you can dip your baby toe into the future without all the “response of revulsion,” by getting your hands on one of your own aforementioned MoGo Mice.  How uncanny is your valley?  I guess time will tell.

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Our very own Jack Corrao has put up a new MoGo-mercial over at YouTube.

It’s wicked cool with a wicked accent…. spin on over and take a gander!

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When a company as big, powerful and influential as Google makes a new claim, 9 times out of 10, the best idea is to just listen.  I’m just listening this morning and you know what I heard? That’s right, Google announced that the era of Mobile Internet is officially at hand.

Does this signify a drastic shift in the way we access information?  Does this indicate a change in the “how” and the “Where” for the data, communications, and programs we’re using?  Absolutely it does, on all counts.  We’re becoming (as you, kind readers of this blog already know) a mobile generation of mobile warriors.  We’re on the go, on the rise and the home-based desktop computer is becoming so much more antiquated.  With Wi-Fi, SmartPhones, Bluetooth, MoGo Mice, and mobile Web, we’re able to be so much more mobile, ALL of the time.  Welcome, friends, to the Era of the Mobile Internet.

According to the article,

“We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage,” Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. “We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.” 

It’s here, it’s now and it’s only going to increase more.  Hold onto your hats, who knows what is coming next.

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In honor of the holiday, we bring you some of our favorite Easter Eggs. The tech kind, of course.

A tech Easter Egg is a little application, picture, or message that is “hidden” in a device or software. Back in the days that I gave tech seminars, I always finished my Mac presentations withe a list of all my favorite ones from Apple (and they are legion). Google also loves a good Easter Egg. And? Really bad ones!

Here are a couple of links:

- The BIG LIST of Easter Eggs (including those hidden in your DVD’s!)

- 17 Cool Eggs found in Google

And if you’re interested in C|Net’s Top 5 favorites (I especially enjoyed making my printer sing ‘Ode to Joy’!)

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I can remember being told that “…in the year 2000, there will be flying cars!”

Hey, it’s 2008.

Where’s my flying car?

Seriously. I have spent about (roughly) a bazillion hours of my life either stuck in traffic or waiting for a plane to either load, taxi, land, or be something mysteriously called ‘de-iced’.

I know the best airports for WiFi, fish fry, souvenirs, tire exhibits, and a chilled cosmopolitan. (Grand Rapids, Boston/Logan, Paris/CDG, Detroit and the Ambassador’s Club in Raleigh, NC.)

I know from brutal experience the worst stretches of road for congestion. (94 coming out of Boston, Manhattan [all of it], 290 at 90/94 out of Chicago, 101 at the 405 in  L.A., The Bourne Bridge on a Saturday morning in the summer, the entire 85 in Atlanta, and all of Washington D.C. until you hit New Jersey.)

But all this knowledge could become happily useless if someone would just give me a flying car.

Well, check out what Milner Motors is up to!  It looks wonky, but do we really care? It’s a FLYING CAR.

Or, rather, it WILL be once they make it, uh, fly.

If you live in the New York area, you can check it out starting tomorrow (March 21) through the end of the month at the New York Auto Show.

And if you do - please take your laptop and MoGo mouse and tell us all about it!

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Just stumbled on another site this fine morning that has a pretty cool little post suggesting that all those in need of a rockin’ mouse that don’t want to have to deal with the pesky issue of “power.”

You know how it goes with most normal travel mice, they might be tiny and they might fit in your messenger bag or laptop case or briefcase, but then what inevitably happens is that you run out of juice, most often at the worst time, and most often lead to you frantically searching for batteries.  Not cool.  As all of you know by now, the MoGo Mouse line, all store inside your computer so you do not lose them, and the best part…it charges there too.  That’s right, need some juice?  Plug it in for 20 min.

Straight from their little article:

“Enter the ingenious MoGo Mouse BT, which operates wirelessly via Bluetooth and docks/recharges inside your notebook’s PC Card slot. How smart is that! Newegg.com has the MoGo Mouse BT for $29.99, plus $5.58 for shipping. That’s a pretty sweet deal, considering that most vendors sell it for around $70.” 

Man, I couldn’t agree more.  Get over, Get one.  Now.  Please.

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Software developers round the globe are probably sitting on cloud nine right now.  How many of them?  Somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 according to my sources, as Apple iPhone’s new SDK development kit has been officially downloaded over 100,000 times since its release last week.  Wow.

Following in the same basic idea Facebook of letting all of you develop your own applications, Apple hopes that a whole slew of new, exciting, handy and helpful little apps start making their way around the planet.  Knowing it’s popularity, I don’t see how it won’t happen.

So, we know it’s good for a few reasons, but the bad news is, and this is very bad for a lot of reasons, there is also quite a few things that are “crippling” this SDK.  According to the article I just read,

“Third-party applications can’t run in the background which means they can’t multitask. Apple written application can run in the background. ‘The Apple SDK, as many have come to find, has arguably crippled much of the functionality that set the iPhone apart when first released. Even simple features like the ability to run a program in the background have been crippled in the Apple SDK…’ “

Bottom line is, there are some tweaks that need-a-tweakin’ if this thing is going to appease the masses.  They made some pretty drastic changes after the initial launch, don’t be surprised if they do it again.

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This, my friends, is from all of us at MoGo, to all of you out there…hopefully a lot of you are as Irish as I am (50% Irish/50% Scottish) and love this holiday as much as I do!

That said:

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!!!

I hope you find the nearest pub, nearest friend, nearest parade, nearest leprechaun, nearest rainbow and whatever else you need to make it a fun holiday.  It’s not a big-one to a lot of people, but for us proud Irish, it sure is.

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Your company laptop may soon be a whole lot lighter.

Coming up this year, Intel is rolling out a new line of microprocessors called “ATOM” which are geared to a new kind of notebook computers. The systems (being called “netbooks” or “nettops”) will have just enough processing power to drive an operating system, basic applications, and a search engine.

It was the iPhone’s huge success that has opened the business market to these new solutiona. Originally, the biggest impact was expected in education sectors and emerging markets. Now Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini sees a good portion of the expected $10 billion market going to corporate customers from small businesses to large enterprise solutions as a “companion device”.

Somewhat akin to a big ‘ol PDA. Except without the cool touchscreen and ability to make calls.

Prices are anticipated to initially run between $250 and $300.

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