This weekend Jacked.com is launching the first stages of its service. The easiest way to describe it is like a souped-up Netvibes you can use as a reference while watching live television programming. The service is rolling out its features slowly, beginning with a partnership with Notre Dame and NBC Sports to serve up real-time content for Notre Dame's football season which starts on Saturday. NBC is billing the service as "Play Action." You can visit the site now, but there won't be anything on it until game day.
Jacked is linked up to what you're watching on TV, so say you're watching the game, and a player scores. Jacked's smattering of Web widgets will pull up the player's stats, photos, related news stories, a comparison chart of that play to others, etc. The idea is to save you from having to track down player, team, and historical information on your own, and serving it up automatically.
The widgets are powered by a group of underlying technologies that scan through live TV content and grab bits and pieces of information from its metadata. Combine that with things like optical character recognition, and you've got lots of information to work with. The result is an impressive array of widgets, that--when viewed during a live broadcast--will pull up information and related content seconds after it happens.
... Read moreAnnounced today at Demo 07, security company Inilex is launching its own GPS car security system. Like competitor Lo Jack's early warning system, Inilex has a GPS hardware unit that's installed in your vehicle and alerts you if your car is moving when you're not in it. The unit also lets you know how fast your car is going. You can secure your vehicle via phone or a Web-based interface. What's really cool is that Inilex has created a way to make your own perimeters called "geo fences." Going outside of or (in some cases) entering these virtual perimeters will automatically alert you by cell phone or e-mail.
Inilex is marketing geo fences as a good way to keep track of teen-age drivers. Maybe a better use for geo fences is leaving your car with a valet. Everybody wants to avoid getting a valet attendant like the one from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but there's no way to be sure. Setting a half mile QuickFence around your location is a smart way to keep your car close by or at least let you know when it's clearly being used inappropriately. QuickFences can be set using your cell phone, and you can automatically set a radius around your car's present location.
Inilex's Web-based interface allows you to view and set your security options in real time. You can see where the car is, and you can set up customized geo fences on a map. The more expensive Inilex package even lets you start your car and toggle the door locks.
I would have liked to have an Inilex system in my car when it got stolen a couple weeks ago, and I think most vehicle owners would too. Inilex seems geared toward the luxury crowd at a bit more than $1,000, with a monthly service fee after the first year. It's cool being able to check up on your car over the Web, and the uses for this on the business side, especially for tracking and securing service vehicles like taxis, is just plain smart. If Inilex could team up with Dash and other traffic monitoring systems, having GPS in your car could help others too. Previous GPS stalking tracking coverage here.
This pun? It sphinx.
(Credit: JellyVision)This has been out there for a while, but it just occurred to me that not enough people know about it: The awesome quiz game You Don't Know Jack is back. Sort of. Each weekday, the old JellyVision team posts one seven-question "Dis or Dat" sequence (for example, "Texting shorthand or Egyptian god?").
I'm waiting for the company to take all its old content and put it online. Some people like their fancy catapulting penguin games, but I'm happy with Jack, straight up.
- prev
- 1
- next
