track

Study tracking people via cell phone raises privacy issues

Updated 12:34 p.m. PDT to correct the attribution of the cellular phone tracking story. The story that focused on the privacy issues was written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.

Cell phone usage tracked in an undisclosed industrial nation revealed a majority of users tend to remain close to home for months at a time, according to a study conducted by Northeastern University and cited Wednesday in the journal Nature.

While the study of 100,000 cell phone users in a country outside the U.S. demonstrated that 75 percent remained within a 20-mile radius of their … Read more

Track multiple packages with maps using TrackThePack

Package tracking is really one of the better inventions of the 20th century. One of my favorite tools for said activitiy is TrackThePack, a delightfully simple tool that lets you track packages from a multitude of services, and keep them together in one simple list. It also throws each shipping location the package visits onto a map, which is neat, but mostly useless.

If you're unregistered, you can only run a single tracking number at a time. Registered users get the added benefit of pulling in the package updates as an RSS or iCal notification feed. People who will … Read more

Retro Tech: Mego's 2-XL

When I was growing up, the closest thing we had to artificial intelligence was something called 2-XL (if you're younger than 30, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about). We've always had trivia games--what made this one interesting, especially to a generation that's just seen Star Wars, was that these trivia questions were asked by a plastic robot.

In 1978, when I got my hands on 2-XL, I was ecstatic. It was the it toy back then. 2-XL was a trivia robot created by Michael J. Freeman, an inventor with an interest to educate … Read more

Little things to Buzz about: Yahoo tweaks social-news service

This post was updated at 11:18 AM PT to correct the date of the announcement.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has made some minor upgrades to Buzz, the social news service that it launched in February.

Most notably, the company has released a "Top Buzz" widget that site and blog owners can embed in their Web sites, displaying the top articles in Yahoo Buzz or those from a specific Buzz category. There are also now RSS feeds for stories submitted to Buzz as well as each of its categories, and "First Buzzed By" indicators much … Read more

FindWhere: Your GPS gizmo is your phone

The other day my esteemed colleague Leslie Katz mentioned a lightweight gadget you can slip into a car's glove compartment or onto a pet's collar to locate the things you care about wherever they are. If the device doesn't provide enough stats for your detail-hungry brain or seem adequate to cover human cargo, FindWhere offers a similar tracking service using a gadget that your teen/workforce/elderly parent most likely already has--a mobile phone.

Like the Zoombak Universal GPS Locator, FindWhere offer worriers no-go zones whose border crossing sends text message or e-mail alerts to whoever's … Read more

Xoopit turns Gmail into a gorgeous media browser

All these media-hosting and social-networking services are great, but there's been a relatively untapped resource in tracking what you're sharing: your e-mail in-box. Today a new service called Xoopit is opening up in private beta to Gmail users who are looking to not only sort through the deluge of photos, videos, and other files that make their way into your in-box, but add ways to share that media with social networks you're already using.

Xoopit's answer is to have you install a small browser plug-in and give it the credentials to your Gmail account. It will … Read more

Analyze your daily workload with RescueTime

If you've ever wondered how many minutes a day you spend using Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Gmail; or how much of your day is "wasted" by community Web sites such as Digg, Slashdot, or MetaFilter, a free application called RescueTime (also available for Mac) can track that information for you, while providing several other valuable features to monitor your time.

Monitoring productivity in the Internet age has become more complicated than ever, especially if you work online. E-mail, instant messaging, and multitasking keep many of us switching constantly between projects or contacts. RescueTime combines a local application … Read more

Berners-Lee wary of unsolicited Web tracking--of any kind

Update, 1:23 p.m. Monday: Background was added about the debate in the U.K. over the use of Phorm's tracking software.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and senior researcher at MIT, recently described his vision for a semantic Web that, instead of analyzing statistical data focused on people, would draw on a layer of metadata to highlight more-complex connections between all types of data, from your banking activity to your photo collection to your business calendar.

But Berners-Lee's enthusiasm for innovation on the Web is tempered by anything that might compromise user … Read more

Pricepinx intelligently watches for price drops online

I've looked at a handful of price watching services, but this one has got to be the coolest. It's called Pricepinx, and it's been designed to work on any site--not just some of the big retailers.

All you have to do to get going is add a small bookmarklet to your browser, highlight the price of the item and click on the bookmarklet. If there are any changes in price, you'll be notified by e-mail. As an added bonus for those who register with the service, added items are pooled together in a list. You can … Read more