nnovations
Standard Bank has come up with a new Internet credit card. Beans, schmeans. Even if you don’t give a toss for e-commerce, this one’s worth it just for the exceptionally competitive interest rates on their Mastercard-linked credit card. If you have an ordinary Standard Bank credit card, you have to have R100000 in your account before they’ll give you an interest rate of 8,68%. With the bean machine, you get a 9% interest on credit balances of any size. Beyond that, if you buy things online within the “walled garden” of 25 approved Standard Bank online retailers, you score “beans” for each transaction, much as you get Voyager miles on other cards. You can then buy things with your accumulated beans – but only within the walled garden. Standard Bank promises exceptional security and so on. Visit www.bluebean.com.
Steven King’s effort to publish one of the first big e-books is being followed locally by Pieter-Dirk Uys, who will be publishing his Trekking to Teema free online, helped out by Incredible Connection, Independent OnLine and designers Radarboy. Two pages will be published every day from August 22 until the end of the year. Unfortunately, as you’d expect with designers called Radarboy, words alone will not suffice: you have to get it through “the latest Shockwave technology”. Maybe they’ll issue a plain-text edition later. Check out www.teema.iol.co.za.
If you’re a Palm PDA user, you can now download the Daily Mail & Guardian on to it daily when you hotsync with your personal computer. The venerable Internet publication is now one of many tantalising offerings available through the Avantgo portal. Visit www. avantgo.com.
Agenda Computing, based in California, plans to ship a palmtop computer that runs the Linux VR operating system in October. However, it is not designed just for geeks: it has a friendly graphical front-end like the Palm’s, to shield users from the complex Unix-like operating system underneath. The Agenda VR3 has a 6,35cm by 8,25cm monochrome screen and weighs 112g. It is powered by a 66 megahertz Mips 32-bit processor. Agenda plans to ship the VR3 model, with eight megabytes of memory and two megabytes of Flash storage for $145. VR3+ and VR3s models will offer more Flash memory for storage, and a VR5 is expected by the end of the year. Optional accessories include a keyboard and a 33,6 kilobytes-a-second modem. Visit www.agendacomputing.com.
The big talk in digital camera circles at the moment is about the number of pixels each camera’s CCD (charge couple device) is capable of capturing – the greater the number of pixels in an image, the more detailed it is. Olympus this week announced the November launch of the R15000 Camedia E-10, which it claims is the world’s first four megapixel camera. In addition to its high resolution, it boasts a 4x zoom, one of the brightest lenses on the market, storage slots for both SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards and a host of manual and creative controls. Fuji is also targeting the enthusiast end of the market with its new camera, the Finepix 4900 Zoom. Due out next month, the model sports a 2,3 megapixel CCD and a powerful 6x zoom. Samsung has also become the second manufacturer to deliver a digital camera with a built-in MP3 player (Fuji got there first). The tiny, R2500 Digimax 35 Plus comes with a 32 megabyte CompactFlash card which can archive about 30 minutes’ music. Kodak is expected to announce three new cameras in the next week that will go on sale in autumn. Top billing goes to a budget model that features a video clip facility and a USB (universal serial bus) port, yet sells for less than R1100.