connected

Getting things done service The Class Connection is nowhere near as exciting as The French Connection, but potentially useful for students looking to organize the whirlwind of planning and information sharing that getting a modern day education entails. The service combines calendaring, messaging, flash cards, and social networking to help students manage their work and daily schedules alone or with others. The hope is that students can become better organized, and if everyone in the class uses it, they'll have a centralized place to share files, notes, and study materials with one another.

The most useful part of the … Read more

There's a reason why no mobile social-networking company has broken out yet. They haven't found themselves--on a map, that is.

Mobile networking, at least in the U.S., remains a limited extension of the social-media industry's biggest PC-based players: lighter, messaging-focused versions of Facebook and MySpace.com, as well as instant-messaging software like Yahoo Messenger and AIM. Social-networking start-ups with a major or exclusive focus on mobile use, like Twitter, have failed to amass a following outside the alpha-geek crowd. For mobile social networking to really take off, it's going to have to move beyond providing … Read more

And here we thought the "Hip Office" concept was a joke. Now we have the "Connect-A-Desk," a real product that's also ripe for an SNL parody.

Like the Hip Office, it straps to a computer to your body, but around the neck instead of the waist. It's kind of a laptop version of the keytar, with a dork factor that rivals the "Light Head Magnifier." The site claims that it's "ergonomically designed" but, depending on the weight of the computer, we can't imagine using this for any length … Read more

3:14 p.m. PT: This post has been updated with the results of the hearing involving Facebook and 02138 Magazine.

There's a cliched old joke among the Ivy League set: how many Harvard students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? The answer: only one. He holds that bulb and the world revolves around him.

It's a somewhat fitting jab in the latest back-and-forth spat involving social-networking site Facebook's powerful legal team, as the skirmish has brought out the ugly sides of both the Palo Alto, Calif.-based dot-com and the Harvard alumni magazine attempting … Read more

BustedTees, the Web site responsible for that "Prose before Hos" t-shirt that you wore to your English 101 final exam, has announced a Facebook Platform application that offers to split cash revenue with users willing to install it.

The application has soft-launched and is set to launch formally in a few days.

The model here is similar to traditional "affiliate programs" for advertising on Web sites and blogs--and indeed, it's essentially a "Facebookified" version of BustedTees' existing affiliate program. Pimp them on your Facebook profile, and you'll get a cut of the … Read more

Thousands of representatives from international corporations, design firms, government entities, and institutions of higher education, spanning more than 35 countries around the world, attended the CONNECTING'07 World Design Congress last week in San Francisco, the largest and arguably most influential gathering of industrial designers to date.

Did it live up to its promise? The short answer is: yes and no. There were early warning signs for the "no": The opening ceremony was a long-winded and largely self-congratulatory celebration of the two organizing bodies, ICSID and IDSA. In his opening keynote, ICSID president Peter Zech set the tone … Read more

The lengthy legal fight between social-networking scion Facebook and onetime rival ConnectU isn't over yet. New developments in the dispute on Wednesday probed deeper into the question of exactly what happened in 2004, when both sites were early-stage start-ups run essentially out of Harvard University dorm rooms.

The best-known component of the court drama has been ConnectU's allegation that Zuckerberg pilfered the former's business plan while he was a student at Harvard with ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (they're twins) and Divya Narendra. In a San Jose, Calif., courtroom on Wednesday, however, the conversation turned … Read more

School projects can be a helluva lot of fun, especially if they involve world domination with Nintendo's Wiimotes. We've read about these things whacking innocent TV screens due to overly enthusiastic gamers, and here's one more reason to do so.

A team at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, has developed a Bluetooth driver called "WiiConnect" to pair the S60 3rd Edition phones to the Wiimote. You can tell these guys are serious about what they are doing. They even have a motorcycle game to make use of the 3D accelerometer and rumble … Read more

NEW YORK--Spykee, a communications robot from the toymaker Erector for $299, allows you to listen, see and record the surroundings of the robot from anywhere in the world through a Web-based software application.

Similar in function to iRobot's ConnectR robot, the Spykee offers a VOIP telephone that works with Skype 3.0 and a Webcam, as well as controlled movement around a room.

Spykee operates over a wireless network and is controlled through downloadable software that Erector refers to as its "machine man interface."

You can upload music to the device from a computer and it will … Read more