INNOVATIONS
Got a gold card burning a hole in your wallet? Shame. Head on over to www.eluxury.com, which is filled with the outrageously expensive commodities peddled by LVMH: Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton. If you’re not intimidated by names like Dior, Salvatore Ferragamo, Celine, Bottega Veneta, or you just don’t know why they could be intimidating, surf on over and gaze across the wealth gap.
Do you have a webpage? Have you ever wanted to change something on it while away from your own computer, with all your favourite Web manipulation tools? Enter www.omniupdate.com, which gives you a Web interface for modifying the Web. For the technically inclined, what it does is give you FTP (file transfer protocol) access via a browser. However, it does place a small graphic (and subsequently removeable) advertising itself at the bottom of your page.
Even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in the financial markets, put aside your reservations for a few minutes and take a look at www.smartmoney. com/marketmap, for a glimpse at a truly ingenious use of Web technology.
This page is divided into irregular shapes, denoting the value of stock traded in a particular company, while the colour of each shape indicates price movements up or down. Click on any particular company and you can pull up instantly more data on it, recent news and stock movements. The map combines data from the Dow Jones Industrial Index and the fast-moving tech-heavy Nasdaq.
If you don’t like surprises, you’re sure to be charmed by the latest mobile phone in Motorola’s Timeport series. The T250’s unique feature is that it glows one of three different colours depending on who’s calling.
It can be programmed so that for example a business call can cause the screen to glow yellow, a friend on the line will turn it a shade of blue while anonymous callers will send the screen green. The phone also features a Wap browser, an apparently improved user interface and a couple of new games.
Canon has launched what it is billing as “the smallest and lightest digital camera in the world”. The Digital Ixus is a 2.1 Megapixel model that you can virtually hide behind your credit card. Find it at www.canon.co.jp/Imaging/IXUS/IXUS.html.
Even manufacturers as innovative as Sony understand that sometimes “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. The Japanese giant has unveiled the first of its Pocket Cinema products, a personal DVD player complete with LCD screen that’s not unlike one of last year’s most coveted gadgets – Panasonic’s DVD-L50.
Hi-fi fans who feel short-changed by the CD format – it apparently has a rather limited bandwidth and is missing little chunks at either end of the frequency spectrum – will be cheered this week by news from Philips and Marantz.
Both companies have decided to join Sony in championing the SACD (Super Audio CD) format. SACD offers significantly higher frequency capability and wider dynamic range than standard audio CDs. It also delivers multi-channel music, and has much in common with the DVD-audio format soon to be launched by Panasonic, JVC and others.
The SACD group claims to deliver superior sound reproduction to DVD-Audio through the use of DSD (Direct Stream Digital) technology.
ENDS