upcoming

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Hewlett-Packard's rumored slate that will run off of Palm's WebOS is in fact coming in "early 2011" according to remarks from Phil McKinney, HP's vice president and chief technology officer for the company's personal systems group.

During an interview with VentureBeat's founder Matt Marshall as part of this year's Demo Fall conference, McKinney said that the WebOS-based version of the company's slate is well on track for its release early next year, but that HP is currently working hard to get its Windows 7-based slate out the door … Read more

SS Birthday reminder is a simple program that allows users to keep track of their friends' birthdays and other information. Its basic interface and straightforward functions make it a good choice for users looking for a quick and easy birthday utility.

The program's interface is plain, displaying a list of the people the user has entered in a grid. It is easy to add new people, and users can also include contact information and notes, making this program a very basic contact manager as well as a birthday reminder. The program's features are limited but functional. Users can … Read more

Whether you're moving to a new place or you just want to be more familiar with your surroundings, there are a variety of sites on the Web that fill you in on everything from restaurants to businesses to apartments in your area.

BooRah If you're only looking for restaurants, BooRah is for you. The site features information on how to get to a restaurant, but really shines when you read through the informative reviews from users and consider the "similar restaurant" tab, which features a listing of local eateries that are similar to … Read more

Yahoo plans to begin a beta test of a major overhaul of its online calendar Wednesday, a redesign that brings new advertising and social-networking possibilities.

The new site brings a more polished Web 2.0 interface, with drag-and-drop abilities, color-coded entries, Flickr image backdrops, and a slick "zoom" feature that expands a single day's schedule to a usefully large size when browsing in the monthly view. And picking up an ability from No. 2 rival Google Calendar, the new design finally moves beyond the narrow single-user calendar idea of the earlier design.

For example, people can subscribe … Read more

If Going.com is for sweaty nightclub parties, Meetup is for business mixers, and Yahoo's Upcoming is for geeky hackathons, a new site called Center'd is for your church picnics.

The event organization site is clearly designed for a crowd looking for a simple online planning experience rather than the Web 2.0 maximum, as well as those looking to collaborate with other community members. It evolved out of a project called Fatdoor, shaped by user feedback that (among other things) changed the potentially offensive name.

As with its Fatdoor predecessor, Center'd aggregates local business ratings and … Read more

There's no doubt Yelp was going to add a local events and calendaring functionality to their popular user reviews service, and today they've done it with a new feature called Events. Coincidentally, last week brought about a refresh of Yahoo's Local service, which finally integrated Yahoo's own events service Upcoming.org.

Not surprisingly, Yelp Events is quite similar to Upcoming.org, with a landing page for each event, a comment board, and a list of yeses and maybes from community members to say whether they'll be attending. The main difference being the way user profiles … Read more

Tomorrow night, legions of Harry Potter fans will be gathering at bookstores all across the world to pick up the final installment of the series. If you haven't already preordered it on Amazon, or hunted down the digitally photographed pages of the leaked copy--tsk, tsk--your best bet is to exercise patience, or give in and pick it up with the throngs of other fans at one of the midnight release parties.

But where do you find ones worth going to? Short of browsing your local paper's A&E section, there are some handy tools online for … Read more

Most iPhone Web apps are standalone applications that live in isolation from all the others. This means that if you use a lot of these applications, you'll either have to bookmark a ton of them, or enter in all those URLs by hand. Leaflets, however, is a site that collects a bunch of small handy Web applications into a single iPhone-friendly portal. The site is very well-designed and feels a lot like an iPhone within an iPhone (even the icons look similar). Not only is there an RSS aggregator, but there's also one-tap access to iPhone-optimized content from … Read more

I got a chance to play around with OQO's new baby, the Model 02, at last night's SF Tech Sessions meet-up, and boy, is this gadget hot. Well, sort of. It was surprisingly not that hot considering it was smaller than a paperback book and running Windows Vista.

The Model 02 was announced a couple of weeks ago at CES, and the upgrades from the Model 01 are noticeable, especially the scroll sensor on the bottom right of the display, which makes browsing large Web pages like Crave a breeze. Its 800x480-pixel screen can handle a fair amount … Read more