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LAS VEGAS--The days of standing on a scale with your baby and then without it and measuring the difference are over--if it's worth spending $150 on an Internet-connected scale built just for your little one.

So hopes Withings, the French design company that introduced a smart baby monitor last year and is unveiling its Smart Baby Scale--coming in the second quarter of 2012--at CES this week. Made for iPod, iPhone, and iPad, the scale is the first to use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Smart connectivity for tracking the weight of babies and toddlers.

The specs: at 3.3 … Read more

Daily-deals provider BuyWithMe has been sold off to Gilt Groupe, BetaBeat is reporting.

According to the blog, neither party divulged the terms of the acquisition. The companies expect to combine forces on November 1. Gilt expects to layoff some BuyWithMe sales staff and provide them with one week's pay as a severance, BetaBeat's sources say.

Unfortunately for BuyWithMe, layoffs have become commonplace at the company. Just last week, the company laid off over half of its staff, or about 100 people, due to its continued inability to compete effectively against Groupon and LivingSocial. According to BetaBeat, sales staff … Read more

Hanging with Friends is a fun online multiplayer word game for iPhone where you can match up against your friends to play a unique version of Hangman. From the makers of the popular game, Words with Friends, this fun game lets you register an account or connect with Facebook to play against people in your friend list or other players who also own the game. You also have the option to pass-and-play on one iPhone.

Hanging with Friends has a colorful and cute interface in which avatars of you and your opponent hang from floating balloons above lava. If you … Read more

Hanging with Friends is a free, ad-supported multiplayer Hangman app from Zynga, the makers of Words with Friends and Chess with Friends.

Like many of Zynga's apps, Hanging with Friends is a slick, social machine, making it easy to play multiple, asynchronous games with many friends, whom you can quickly pull in through Facebook. (You can also play random online matchups.) The core game is fun, easy to learn, and fast-playing. And while Hanging with Friends mostly follows the traditional Hangman word-guessing format, it adds a few clever innovations: you choose four- to eight-letter words using a set of … Read more

French company Withings has made a name for itself with its Wi-Fi body scale. Now it's announced the U.S. availability of its Blood Pressure Monitor, which it touts as the only "BP cuff in the world to connect directly into any iOS device."

While the extra hardware will run you a somewhat steep $129.99, needless to say, there's a free app in the mix that shows BP measurements and keeps track of user stats.

Withings is calling the Blood Pressure Monitor truly plug-and-play. Wrap the cuff around your arm, then plug the cable into … Read more

Although I was resistant to Facebook at first, staunchly clinging to MySpace until all but three of my friends ceased to use it (thereby making it all but pointless), there is one thing in particular that has kept Facebook in my favor since I made the switch. The social-networking service provides an excellent medium for sharing content, particularly quick bits of information via links posted to your Wall or that of a friend. The ability to display (or hide) photos is also quite handy.

But if there's one place Facebook has failed to excel, it's in the music … Read more

There are more-convenient ways of getting your iTunes playlists onto your BlackBerry than physically plugging in your USB cable and transferring songs in a block. For example, you could use a program like Music WithMe, which is actually a dual-part system composed of a desktop component that scans your iTunes library for playlists, and a BlackBerry app from which you can pick the songs to play.

Syncing took some time, as is to be expected, but the app could do with more helpful hints communicating the estimated time remaining in a sync and more importantly, when you've stopped syncing … Read more

There are easier ways of getting your iTunes playlists onto your BlackBerry than plugging in your USB cable and transferring songs in a block.

Music WithMe offers one common solution that follows in the footsteps of Simplify Music, before Google acquired parent company Simplify Media to fold the service into its own music strategy.

As did Simplify Music (an iPhone app,) Music WithMe's dual-part system has a desktop component for Windows computers that scans your iTunes library, as well a BlackBerry app from which you can pick the songs to play.

Unfortunately, Music WithMe didn't pan out as … Read more

The Withings scale, already breaking waves as the first Wi-Fi body scale that uploads weight and body mass data to personal online accounts, announces this week a new partnership with Gym Technik, enabling much easier tracking via pretty much any smartphone on the market.

Via Gym Technik, users can set up workout routines online, track daily progress via their smartphones, peruse an exercise library for workout tips, and upload before/after photos. Synching this with the Withings scale now allows users to instantly track their weight, body fat percentage, and BMI stats just by standing on it.

This is probably … Read more