schools

Here's one that's good for back-to-school season. The Web has made it possible for media niches that normally would get squeezed out of newspaper margins or TV time slots to find a way to be heard, and high school sports are no exception. We've already seen Takkle (earlier coverage here) fall into this sector, and now media giant Hearst-Argyle Television has launched a competitor--High School Playbook, which aims to go for a cross-platform strategy of TV, Internet, and mobile content. Sponsored by Canon, the site has launched in beta for a select number of sports-obsessed metro … Read more

One big yellow bus is going green in Napa County. The Northern California school district today received a plug-in hybrid diesel-electric school bus -- the first of its kind in the state.

The move is part of a nation-wide initiative aimed at reducing school bus emissions and cutting costs by improving fuel efficiency. The program is led by Advanced Energy, a non-profit corporation based in Raleigh, N.C.

The bus, which doesn't look terribly innovative on the outside, is built by IC Corporation, the largest school bus manufacturer in the country. It uses a hybrid drive technology dubbed a … Read more

If you're not a parent, you might not see the immediate value in a pair of headphones designed especially for kids. But if you have progeny of iPod-bearing age--which will soon come before they're crawling, at this rate--then the need for Mad Catz's "AirDrive" headphones is all too clear.

Anyone who's been forced to endure a multi-hour car ride with children aboard knows that they'll never hear you, or anything else for that matter, because they generally keep the volume on their MP3 and DVD players turned up somewhere between 9 and 10. … Read more

MySpace has quadrupled its estimated number of registered sex offenders posting profiles on the site, from its May estimate of 7,000 to a current tally of 29,000. The pages of identified offenders have been deleted. What does this news mean for parents? How do we assess risk and keep it in perspective, and what best practices should be implemented on family, corporate and societal levels to keep kids safe?… Read more

You know, it only occurred to me until very recently that karaoke means something very different for the younger generation than it does for mine when I was a kid. When I was in elementary school, we had roller skating parties and laser tag parties and arcade pizzeria parties--but no karaoke parties, because that was dorky and no one would sing, and since we were well under the legal drinking age, no one could break the ice with, "Okayyy, let's get a round of SoCo and Lime and then see if anyone wants to try the mic, how … Read more

As many a deafened parent of pre-teen kids will tell you, Disney's High School Musical is a force to be reckoned with. It has gone well beyond its TV-movie origins to become an international phenemenon, with live shows, DVDs, CDs and maddeningly repetitive pop tunes that are driving innumerable moms and dads to the brink of insanity.

All of which makes it a perfect storm, of course, for a major merchandizing blitz. Never one to shy away from a marketing challenge, Amazon is offering a "High School Musical Wii Bundle With Microphone" next month. But Gizmodo notes … Read more

There have been several stories in the news this week about airplanes and spacecraft. I'm an Air Force veteran myself, and I've been an Aviation Week subscriber for over 20 years, but you don't have to be in the industry to keep up with the latest in aerospace technology. Even CNET covers this kind of thing today, and some of the stories I've seen this week have gotten me thinking about buying a private jet.

I think Esther Dyson deserves a lot of credit for bridging the computer and aerospace industries. In 2005, Esther inaugurated her … Read more

A lot of innovation in scanning technology has been in the 3D department, but Germany's Zeutschel has stuck to the basics with ink on paper. And at least in one regard, it's paid off.

If the "Omniscan 12000 BookCopy" isn't the top of the line where copying machines are concerned, it's got to be close, scanning at a rate of a page per second. Unlike traditional face-down copiers, this one works with an overhead camera so you don't have to worry about the paper's position on the glass. And if you do … Read more

Which business model is likely to be the most successful: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, or Second Life?

According to a war game played out at London's Business School last week, MySpace wins. But, in a conclusion that was validated by this week's Viacom lawsuit against Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, the participants concluded that both MySpace and YouTube are vulnerable to legal attacks and government regulations that target illegal activities and objectionable content, such as child pedophilia and pornography.

Copyright lawsuits will be a "major distraction at best or they could undermine" the businesses, says Leonard Fuld, president of Boston-based Fuld & Co., which ran the war game. "Sexy and cool as MySpace and YouTube seem, they are prone to attacks."

Meanwhile, the team of students representing MySpace successfully convinced the panel of experts who judged the war game that MySpace has the most viable business strategy among the social network sites. "MySpace won the game by a fairly good margin. They had a much better argument: that content is king," Fuld says. "MySpace won the strategy event...whether it will win the war" is unclear. … Read more