Coming in at 6 inches wide, I finally found a decent mini keyboard/ pointing device for the media center in my bedroom. If you are like me, this is has been long over due. I can’t believe how many years it’s been and the best thing Logitech can come up with is this piece of crap. Logitech Dinovo

I was also really glad that it actually worked with my mac mini which I am running boxee on. Speaking of Boxee, the new boxee remote that will come with Boxee set top box (2010 release) looks sweet, I wonder if it could be work (or hacked to work) with HTPC’s. But for now, I am a happy camper for $69.

Here is some pics and info about the latest playmate, LOL

Product features :
• 2.4GHz wireless receiver, within 30M
• 24 LEDs backlit keys
• Multimedia function keys
• Build-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery
• One wireless LaserPointer, e-Pointer

Specification :
• Size: 151mm x 59mm x 12.5mm
• Weight: 100g / 0.22 pound
• Operating temperature: -10°C – 55°C
• Battery: Build-in 3.7V Lithium-ion battery
• Stand-by time: 500 – 700 hours
• Operating Range: 30m / 100 feet
• Transmission Power: Max +4 dBm
• Operating Voltage: 3.3V
• Operating Current: <80mA
• Charging Voltage: 4.2v – 5.05v
• Charging Current: <300mA

System Requirement :
• Windows 2000 / XP / Vista / 7
• Mac OS 10.x or lower
• Linux (Debian 3.1 / Redhat 9.0 / Ubuntu 8.10 / Fedora 7.0)

Contact Hero enables people to exchange social information including phone number, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter without WiFi or Bluetooth

San Francisco, California – 01/19/2010 – Today on Twitter, Spacemonkey Mike announced the general availability of Contact Hero — the fastest way to exchange contact and social information on the market. Sporting a world class user interface, Contact Hero has a streamlined input process with the ability to immediately follow up with anything from Linkedn profile to Twitter and Myspace via SMS and email – reducing the barrier of engagement from days to seconds. Additionally, Contact Hero allows user to browse new friends including their meeting time and Facebook profiles.

Contact Hero sports world-class user interface

Contact Hero was designed with the needs of social butterflies and business networkers in mind. The age of social media requires new social exchange tools that goes beyond business cards and phone numbers. The main highlight of Contact Hero is its ability to facilitate fast exchange of social information including phone numbers and emails. By trading social graphs, users can access public profile information about their new friends, such as who they are, what they do, who they know, in addition to sending friend requests. As more face to face contacts are replaced by online interactions, the need for fast and reliable social exchange tools becomes more significant.

Contact Hero is a user experience solution for an everyday problem. There are many contact exchange applications on the market today but most do not work the ways users expect. Common WiFi solutions require users to have the same phone, application, and be logged in to the same WiFi network, which is arbitrary and limiting at best. Other solutions rely on Bluetooth which faces similar constraints. By utilizing SMS and email, Contact Hero is universal and works with any recipient phone. It achieves its speed and efficiency by automating 50% of the exchange activity while streamlining the other half down to seconds.

Highlights / Key Facts

More face to face contacts are replaced by online interactions – as more relationships are built and maintained online, the need to bridge the two types of networks become increasingly necessary. We need an efficient social information exchange protocol.

Exchange contacts universally – the majority of the contact exchange solutions are technology centric or offers low compatibility. Technology should facilitate rather than restrict user interactions. Users should not have to determine what technology the other person has before selecting which exchange protocol to use. sadly, email and sms are the only open protocal between phone.

Call backs are the number 1 barrier to making a connection – studies indicate the most difficult aspect of establishing connection is the initial follow up. This task might be challanging because it is sometimes hard to remember the name and circumstances of which you met. It can also be tedious when there are a large number of contacts to locate and process, for example after the bars or after a professional conference.

Full privacy control – Contact Hero includes a fully customizable follow up template which allows user to include as much or as little about themselves as possible. Any links included can be easily opened from any internet capable phones.

Contact hero on Twitter – follow the discussion on Contact Hero or other new consumer product initiatives on twitter by following @contactheroapp

Links / URL
http://www.sweetui.com/contactheroapp/
http://www.twitter.com/contactheroapp
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/contact-hero/id337591403?mt=8

About Spacemonkey Mike
Mike is a product manager and social media strategist located in San Francisco. Mike has worked on a wide ranged of products including Eos – Cisco’s social media platform for music entertainment industries, Xoom – online remittance portal for international families in 30+, and FriendFinder – online dating network with over 20 million users worldwide. Mike currently focuses on open web initiatives as well as augmented realities. In his spare time, Mike is a snowboarder, a world traveler, and a house music mixologist. You can find out more about Spacemonkey here.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/spacemonkeymike
http://www.twitter.com/spacemonkeymike

After I migrated my blog from Blogger to Wordpress, I was in the market for an open auth blog comment plugin. I had used Disqus up until now, and I enjoyed the fact that people can easily leave comments using their existing Facebook ID. But then it occurred to me, what if people could log in with Twitter. Even better, what if people could simply tweet their comments and their conversation can follow them from the blog to their natural social habitat? Shouldn’t my comments belong to me anyways? Yay! Finally a use for twitter. In this light, twitter becomes a solution to preserve comment ownership and facilitate comment portability.

For this experiment, I used a nifty plugin called Twitoaster whose original purpose was to thread Twitter conversations. If this sound a little strange to you, go ahead and post a comment to see it for yourself! XD

ps. twitoaster has a delay in synching tweets so your comments might not show up right away

If you are still struggling with getting Hulu on the big screen, stress no further. I have been runnin Hulu, CNN, Youtube, Netflicks on both my AppleTV Boxee, Xbox360, and AppleTV for over a year.

The solution is “upnp” which is a service you can run on your home pc. It acts as a relay server between your computer and any upnp compatibale device. Thus, any content available on your PC can be easily extended to your TV.

How it works

MediaMall’s PlayOn software is a UPnP digital media server and browser that pulls RSS feeds from content providers, and presents them to DLNA-compliant networked media devices. In plain English, this means you can use your game console or networked television to access content from providers like YouTube, Netflix and Hulu. The PC software pulls in the media streams, in the same way as your web browser, and then sends them directly over your home network to your device, even converting their formats on the fly to make sure the devices can play them. Simple as that.

PlayOn leverages the existing browser and UPnP functions of game consoles and networked televisions, and uses the PC in the middle to bring in the content from the Web, passing it over your home network to the device.