FineDigital's FineDrive M760 : a thin 7-inch PMP with GPS navigation - Engadget

I want one! Somehow I don't think garmin is going to build anything like this soon...

Rapid Prototyping Resource

I found this a very useful guide to understanding RP technology and terminology.
http://home.att.net/~castleisland/home.htm

Connections Generate Value

I was in a meeting this morning to discuss an international initiative that we're preparing to launch at Art Center, and later, one of the participants complimented me on something I'd said. I didn't say it this way at first, but we boiled it down to "Connections Generate Value". I think this is the business lesson from Web 2.0. At its best, the academic world has understood this for a long time (and often forgot it, to its detriment). This is a new way of working where you get more by giving something away, not because you want to be altruistic, but because you want to be better off in the end. LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs and podcasts are all elements of this. Viacom suing Google YouTube demonstrates a company that doesn't understand this concept.

The Checker Playing Dog

My use of the phrase "checker-playing dog" comes from the following rather lame joke:

I was visiting a friend and I saw he was playing checkers with his dog. I said, "That's amazing! You have a really brilliant dog!" and my friend said, "Nah, he's not that smart, I beat him two out of three."

I refer a technology that seem to represent some kind of a breakthrough, but isn't necessarily that useful, as a checker-playing dog. One of the classic examples is the Newton. I bought one and hauled it around for a couple of years, and found it fun to play with, but it was more about the potential of a hand-held organizer than the reality. It was heavy, didn't fit in a pocket, the interface was poor, the screen was dimly lit, and it didn't really make my life any better, except that I enjoyed it. But we all know that the Newton was one of the precursors of the Palm, the Blackberry, and the iPhone.

Some technologies seem to hang around a long time and keep reappearing in new guises, but never get past the checker-playing dog phase, like voice recognition (as a general interface vs. a useful niche) and ebook readers.

My favorite checker-playing dog right now is the home-built Fab@home machine. My intuition is that low-cost 3D printers are a disruptive technology, but they might be checker-playing dogs for a while. All I know is, I want one.

Everybody's a Star

You don't really expect to see your computer science professors on TV, except perhaps on something like Nova. I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise at my son's suggestion (and I guess I'm old school, but it's no Star Trek) when I see a strange ad for a search engine called ask.com and realize that it's Apostolos Gerasoulis from the Rutgers University Computer Science Department. I knew that he had founded a search engine company back in the late dot com days, and there he was as a kind of Dave Thomas of search engines, talking in his inimitable accent about searching for car rims.

I don't know how you go about selling a search engine - I think only Google knows that. But if you want to see the ads, they're here:

http://media.ask.com/creatives/ag_rims.mov
http://media.ask.com/creatives/ag_librarians.mov