Webware

The entry hall in my house has been a test bed for home monitoring cameras for years. I like to be able to record people coming into the house and see what's going on around the front door. Anyone with a family and occasional babysitters will understand. So I continue to look for simple, robust video-monitoring solutions, and vendors keep obliging by improving the state of the art in home remote cameras.

The latest: Two interesting and very different products, Avaak's Vue and the Astak Mole. Both are very easy to get up and running, and neither require monkeying with arcane router settings to get offsite access to the video streams--something that can be a problem with the Panasonic BL-C131a cameras that I otherwise favor. (I've also tried the Logitech WiLife system, and find it quite good.)

The Vue.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The Vue
The Vue is the most unusual remote camera I've seen. The product is unchanged from my March 2 preview, but I had a chance to experiment with the shipping version recently. The big benefit of the Vue: The cameras are tiny, battery-powered and thus completely wireless, and the system is extremely easy to set up. You plug an included controller box into your router or switch and tuck it out of the way, and then you can place the cameras anywhere in your house on their clever little stick-on magnetic dome mounts. The standard kit comes with two cameras.

The Vue is great for monitoring a location but there's a big downside: The cameras don't have motion sensors. If they did, the batteries wouldn't last. So you can see what's happening when you want, or record images on a schedule, but this product doesn't work as a security camera. It is very easy to share the output from a camera with friends, though. A two-camera kit is available now for $299.

The Vue experience is simple all the way around.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The aptly-named Mole.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The Mole
I also recently received the Mole, from Astak. This is a single camera for $299, but unlike the Vue cameras, this unit must be plugged in for power (it has Wi-Fi as well as Ethernet for connectivity). It can be panned and tilted by remote control over the Web, so one camera can see more than two Vues in some setups.

The Mole also has infrared illuminators for low-light capability, and a microphone, so you can see and hear what's happening at all hours. Since the camera is always on and can see in all conditions, it can also watch for motion and perform actions--alerting you and recording video and stills either to the Web or to its own memory card--when it detects movement. It even has a speaker so you can talk back through the camera. It is black and industrial-looking, however, befitting its name --not so great for installation in a nice white-painted hallway.

Google on Tuesday announced a new Maps feature to help make it easier to determine the availability of flu vaccine.

According to the company, users can now visit Google's new flu shot Google Maps page to find out if there is any vaccine available in their area. It partnered with "the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, their Flu.gov collaborators, and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder," the company wrote in a blog post.

On the flu shot page, users can input their Zip code or town and find all the vaccine available in their area. The tool will also be made available on the U.S. government's flu page, as well as the American Lung Association's site.

Find flu shots with the help of Google Maps.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

As useful as it might sound, Google was quick to point out in the blog post that so far, the company has yet to receive information on flu shots from many locations. It should also be noted that depending on where the user searches, he or she might find several clinics that are out of flu shots. Google said that although some of the service might not feature actionable content now, it felt the time was right to "help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute."

Google is currently working with the Centers for Disease Control, state and local health agencies, and other organization to add more vaccination locations to its maps. So far, it has received "data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting." To expand its coverage, Google is also working with chain pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS to add more vaccination-availability information for all 50 states.

For now, you can try out Google's flu shot page to see if there is any seasonal flu or swine flu vaccine available in your area. Expect the page to feature much more content going forward.

If you think these prices are good, wait until you apply coupon code ENTREE.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled tech deals to bring you this important bulletin...

Food!

Specifically, restaurant food. As many of you know, Restaurant.com sells gift certificates for a fraction of their face value. And right now, you can buy them for a fraction of that fraction.

For example, $25 certificates normally sell for $10, but if you enter coupon code ENTREE at checkout, the price drops to $2. And $10 certificates, normally $4, drop to just 80 cents. Yowza.

For those unfamiliar with Restaurant.com, the only real "string" attached is a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it's not like you have to order the lobster tail and a case of wine. To use a $10 certificate, for example, your total bill usually has to be at least $20.

What's nice is that you can print the coupons right on your own printer; they're immediately ready for use. They're also transferable, so they make ideal last-minute gifts.

In these horrendous economic times, this offer is too good to pass up. Just make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy your certificates, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes.

Also, I'm not sure when this coupon code expires, so if you're interested, act fast. Bon appetit!

Facebook groups are under attack. But the attackers say they come in peace and insist they want only to highlight a flaw in the way Facebook handles group administration.

An organization called Control Your Info has taken control of hundreds of Facebook groups. Those groups had administrators that eventually stepped down from their position, creating a power vacuum at the top. According to the organization, when the administrator steps down, anyone can take over a group, view the members' personal information, and change group information to say whatever they want. Control Your Info believes that the way Facebook handles group administration is a major flaw. And it wants to bring that to everyone's attention.

Control Your Info has hijacked Facebook groups.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

"Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group," a message written on Monday reads on one hijacked group. "This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severely."

Janis Roukkos, a representative from Control Your Info wrote that his organization wants to get social-networking users to "think about the safety in your social-media life to the same extent you do in your real life." Although the Control Your Info is in control of that specific group now, Roukkos wrote that Control Your Info will restore the group name (which it changed) and leave the group "by the end of next week." He also promised to not "mess anything up."

That single group isn't alone. A quick search for "Control Your Info" in Facebook yields hundreds of groups that have been hijacked by the organization. All the group names have been changed to "Control Your Info," the logos have been changed to the organization's image, and the messages are all the same. The only difference is which Control Your Info representative is writing about the organization's intentions to each group.

Control Your Info's blog sheds some more light on the organization's problem with Facebook. According to Control Your Info, "Facebook Groups suffer from a major flaw. If (an) administrator of a group leaves, anyone can register as a new admin. So, in order to take control of a Facebook group, all you really have to do is a quick search on Google.

"When you're admin of a group, you can basically do anything you want with it," the blog post continued. "You can change (its) name, and the groups members won't even get a notification of it. You can send (messages) to all members and edit info. This is just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media."

Once again, Control Your Info attempted to justify its actions. The organization said the "project is strictly not for profit and done for a good cause."

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment.

In the meantime, what do you think about Control Your Info's practices? Is it really teaching folks about social-media security? Let us know in the comments below.

As someone who just celebrated his first wedding anniversary, I know what it takes to plan a wedding. Everything from the venue to flowers must be accounted for. It's no easy task.

Realizing that, I thought I'd use this space to make it a little easier for those planning a wedding. We have included some well-known resources as well as some sites you might not have heard about before but that could help you save some cash--or stress.

Before we get started, I should note that there are a ton of wedding resources on the Web. This isn't an exhaustive collection of resources, but it is a collection of some of the best.

Get your wedding going

Flowers

1-800-Flowers: 1-800-Flowers is best known for providing users with delivered floral arrangements, but the site is also a fine resource for those who want to get flowers for their wedding.

1-800-Flowers' wedding page lists several flower arrangements, ranging from centerpieces to bouquets for the bride. It even offers boutonnieres for the men in the bridal party. Although flower pricing varies in different areas around the U.S., I do know that 1-800-Flowers' pricing is far better than those in my area. Even better, the flowers are available on the same day the order is placed.

1-800-Flowers has several flower choices.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Grower's Box: Grower's Box is an online wholesale flower retailer that provides a slew of wedding packages. It's a fine resource for anyone looking to find flowers for their wedding.

When you first get to Grower's Box, you'll see several listings available to help you find the flowers you might be looking for. When you click the Wedding option, you'll see a listing of several "Weddings in a box." Those items include the ability to buy everything from bunches of roses, lilies, sunflowers, or just about any other kind of flower the bride might prefer. Even better, they're priced well, since you're only paying the wholesale price. In many cases the Grower's Box beats local floral shops by a wide margin, according to one bride-to-be I know who checked pricing in my area. Grower's Box has a slew of packages to choose from. The site even has a wedding guide if you want some ideas. If you're looking to compare flower pricing, Grower's Box is a great place to start.

Grower's Box has several "Weddings in a Box" options.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.

Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).

Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.

Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.

Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."

(Credit: OfficeMax/Elf Yourself)

It's that time of year again, when you trawl the Web for unflattering mugshots of your boss to embed on the bodies of dancing elves with the "Elf Yourself" holiday card promotion, going live for the fourth consecutive year on Tuesday. They're the brainchild of OfficeMax, which teams up annually with online animation shop JibJab to bring forth what might be the most successful social-media marketing campaign that the Web has yet seen.

Last year, a total of 35 million "Elf Yourself" cards were sent, and OfficeMax says that since it launched in 2006, the seasonal site has chalked up 284 million visits. So what's new this year? Well, there are two new elf dances! Yay! You can now, in addition to "Disco Elves," "Country Elves," and "Elf Classic," choose to model your creation off the "Hip-Hop Elves" or "Singing Elves" dances.

More importantly, OfficeMax is playing up how the latest edition of "Elf Yourself" ties into Facebook and Twitter, with an option to tweet out your video creation or to share it on your Facebook profile or a friend's. Additionally, it uses Facebook Connect so that you can source your embarrassing headshots from your photo albums or your friends'--that's clever.

It's not actually clear whether "Elf Yourself" drives up OfficeMax sales at all, but it does make some money on its own: you can pay to download the video, which normally expires once the holiday season has ended, or to order a hard copy.

Now go forth and tick off your human resources department.

(Credit: Xobni)

A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.

Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the native address book yourself. That expanded address book goes for everyone who has ever sent you an e-mail, been cc'd in an e-mail, or even mentioned in a message.

With the premium Xobni Plus Outlook add-on, you can access this secondary address book by typing into the Compose field. Integration isn't quite so tight in BlackBerry. On the Bold, Tour, and new Curve 8900s, you'll access contacts by flicking up on the track pad to get to to the stylized Xobni address book.

Then search by a contact's name, domain name, or by a keyword to speedily find the person you're looking for. As with Xobni on the desktop, you'll be able to send your calendar availability to a contact, get Facebook to supply contacts' Xobni profile picture, and view Twitter feeds and LinkedIn and Hoovers information from the BlackBerry.

In creating its own address book--instead of adding contacts to the native address book--Xobni makes a statement. Unlike Gwabbit, which adds the information from a signature block into a new record, Xobni finds e-mails and phone numbers anywhere in the message. Besides that, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte believes that inserting contacts into your native address book means "you've already lost the battle." Instead of adding contacts one-by-one, Xobni builds you a social roster behind-the-scenes, and adds social networking plug-ins in the process.

As far as time lines go, Xobni is looking at a closed alpha release sometime in December. Bonforte expects a beta early next year, and the final release a few months after that. The pricing model is still undecided.

Xobni for BlackBerry will first be available on the Bold, Tour, and Curve 8900. Storm users will have to wait a little longer.

Google and groups representing authors and publishers have asked for more time to revise their controversial settlement over the rights to scan digital books.

Judge Denny Chin approved the request to extend the deadline to Friday, which was submitted ahead of a Monday night deadline for the parties to submit a revised settlement after the U.S. Department of Justice objected to the settlement as previously worded. After it was sued in 2005 by The Author's Guild and other groups representing the publishing industry over its decision to scan certain types of books without explicit permission, Google reached a settlement a year ago that would grant it unique rights to scan books that have gone out of print but are still protected by copyright laws.

However, that settlement has been met with objections from authors and privacy advocates almost since it was filed, and Google has faced a long and difficult road in getting it approved. Monday's delay comes after a Friday meeting with the Justice Department, according to a copy of the request filed with the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York.

Google refused to comment on the subject of that meeting, but it's not too hard to imagine that the Justice Department was not ready to give the new draft its blessing. It had previously objected to provisions of the deal that it felt "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." However, in recent weeks Google has sought to downplay the proposed changes as "targeted and surgical."

The patient apparently needs more time.