WHAT’S NEW
Missing toddlers and truanting teenagers could soon be things of the past with the development of a revolutionary satellite tracking system which willenable parents to keep an eye on their children 24 hours a day. A tiny gadget called KidBug will enable parents to monitor the movements of their children – and the manufacturer plans to give them to 10-million parents before the end of the year in the expectation that many will pay the 10-a-month fee to use them.
The 4cm2 unit, which can be concealed in a child’s clothing, will be able to track the precise location of the child to within 1,5m using the global positioning satellite tracking system (GPS) more usually used to navigate at sea.
Look out for the The New Economy TV show on Summit TV, the business-focused DStv channel. Over the next 52 weeks, the show will discuss two topics each week such as “Free pricing” and “Disintermediation of industries”. Anchoring the TV programme is a planned Web portal – myNEWeconomy.com – that will aggregate and consolidate global opinion and research on the “new economy”, including material from sources such as Fast Company, The Industry Standard, Red Herring, and Reuters as well as local sources including Financial Mail, Business Day, Intelligence magazine, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Investor Centre and ITWeb.
Samsung is hoping to make a big splash with its latest MP3 player. The pendant-style Vivace, which goes on sale in August, is the first waterproof model. The company believes it’ll even survive a dip in your swimming pool. Due later in the year is a hi-fi system, the NC-CP70, that features both an MP3 encoder and a dockable personal MP3 player. The company intends to be first on the British market with a DVD video recorder. Its DVR-2000 recorder uses the DVD-RAM format to store up to 4,7gigabyte or two hours of DVD quality video on one disc.
ENDS