!!!....Electronics world....!!!

Do you want your new  iPad  to have a soft, seductive voice? Do you want that voice to tell you what the weather will be in Copenhagen tomorrow? Do you want her to send e-mails to your lover for you? Apple, you see, is reportedly, allegedly, rumoredly  announcing a new iPad in March . Naturally, many speculate that this will be called the iPad 3, just as many speculated that the last year's  iPhone  would be the  iPhone 5 . That turned out to be the iPhone 4S. So why shouldn't one believe that the new iPad will be the iPad 2 and a half? The iPhone 4S enjoyed improvements that amused the hard-core, dual-core tech community. But there was only one reason that it caught the imagination of real human beings. That reason was Siri, the occasionally moody personal assistant that makes you feel like Ari Gold. Surely then, the first supposition would be that Siri would migrate to your iPad, so that you can demand the New York Times from her and ...

Companies take liberties. The liberty some seem to enjoy most is yours. As recessions hit and profit pressures become the sole reason for existence, bosses seem to believe that they own workers--until they discard them for younger, fresher models. Now a curiously human law has reared its head in Brazil.  According to the Associated Press , this law says that if a company e-mails you after your allotted working hours, then this is the same as if one's supervisor is giving one an instruction to perform a certain work task. (Credit:  CC ILamont.com/Flickr ) Ergo, argue Brazilian labor lawyers, if a worker receives such an e-mail and has to act on it, he or she qualifies for overtime pay. I can already hear the howling of corporate management in, say, America. I can hear sniggers suggesting that every corporate employee should be on call 24 hours a day. That is today's connected world. Some might offer, though, that today's connected world has become peculiarly inhuman-- one i...

Not everyone knows (or cares about) the finer points of technology. Many are happy just to discover that their phone works and that they know how to work it. So who cannot at least attempt to have sympathy for the man whose  iPhone   stopped the New York Philharmonic  in its tracks last Tuesday? The marimba was so out of tune with the strings that conductor Alan Gilbert downed baton and became upset. Now the New York Times  has located the man  who stopped Mahler dead, and he is mortified. Yes, they come with alarms. (Credit:  CC Brett Jordan/Flickr ) He is a regular concertgoer. He was seated in the front row. Unfortunately, though, his company had--for reasons unknown--taken back his corporate BlackBerry and given him an iPhone instead. This was its first day in the gentleman's possession. This was its first time at a concert. And the gentleman explained that he wasn't quite au fait with all of its joys. He was sure he had switched his phone off. There ...

Try this trend out for size: Google is abandoning search There has been a huge maelstrom about  Google integrating Google+ into its search links . And it all misses the point. Twitter and others are complaining that Google is throwing its massive 65% plus market share weight around and quashing smaller competitors. The reason Twitter and others are so threatened is that the pattern of shared links within Google+ provides a decent enough indicator as to what links are interesting. What's important is what's trending, and algorithms can get a sense of that with just a subset of everything that's getting shared on the Web.  The most interesting aspect of Google's move, however, is its tacit acknowledgement that its stalwart search links are largely irrelevant and might as well be replaced with social results. Google search results are  essentially gamed results  produced by search optimizers. In other words, the search results that we supposedly value so highly are t...

First Lady Michelle Obama officially  joined Twitter  this morning, and after only four tweets, she has 185,000 followers and counting. "Hi, everyone, and thanks for the warm welcome. Look forward to staying in touch with you here. -mo," she first tweeted. As the 2012 election season heats up, it's all hands on deck for Team Obama. The president, who joined Twitter during his 2008 election campaign and has almost 12 million followers, welcomed his wife onto the social networking site. "It's not every day we get to welcome the First Lady of the United States to Twitter--happy to have you, @MichelleObama!," he tweeted this morning. According to the first tweets on Ms. Obama's feed, the account will be managed by campaign staff and anything directly from Ms. Obama will be signed "-mo." Similarly, President Obama's staff regularly tweets on his behalf and anything written by him supposedly includes a "bo." Last September, Twitter ann...

Facebook's new "Listen With" button. Facebook is pumping up the volume on its Open Graph initiative by rolling out a feature that allows users to listen to songs with their Facebook friends. Listeners can chat about the music while it's playing. (Credit: Facebook) The social network announced today the introduction of a " Listen With " button that lets users of music services such as Rdio and Spotify share the exact same song, at the same point in the song, via the music service. However, both parties will have to be registered users of the service. A chat sidebar spotlights current listening opportunities with a music note. To listen, users hover their cursor over the user's name and then click the "Listen With" button. The chat sidebar also allows listeners to discuss the music being played. Users will also have the ability to control who sees when they are listening to a song with a Facebook friend. "Only the people you've sh...

Google is making search even more personal--mostly by making it even easier to scan for information and photos in Google+ and Picasa. Google is adding the ability to search for personal results, including images in Picasa and Google+ posts. The green arrow points to the Personal Search icon for blended Web and personal results. The red arrow shows where the number of personal results is indicated. And the yellow arrow shows the personal image results. (Credit: Google) If I want to find out more information, for example, about Miranda July's quirky new film "The Future," I can go to Google.com and see the  usual Web results . But with Google's new "Search plus Your World" feature, I can also opt in to see "personal results" that will show me what people I know have said about it. If anyone in my Google+ circles has posted on the topic, their contributions will appear in the results. So will any related images friends have posted in Picasa wou...