tracking

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

FedEx delivers AIR package tracking

FedEx was on hand today to show off its new Adobe AIR application for tracking packages.

Similar to tracking widgets you may have seen on tools such as Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Widget engine, you can keep small widgets on your desktop that update and let you know when that digital camera you ordered online mistakenly got delivered somewhere three states over. But that's not the sole use. The application doubles as command center for business users and frequent shippers to keep track of what's going on with several of their packages at once.

The company … Read more

Creepy alert: Stalk friends in real-time with WeFi's Facebook app

Privacy--who needs it? The creators of WeFi don't seem to think much of it, although that might not be a bad thing

Today the company, which offers up a pretty svelte little replacement for Windows' clunky Wi-Fi manager, is launching two new items: a mobile application for Windows Mobile users (which could soon be SideKick users too), along with a Facebook application to help users track people using the service. Oddly enough, in all its news release bravado the company failed to offer up a link to said Facebook application, and it's not in the directory--so I can'… Read more

Eye-tracker lets you get location information by staring

Someday soon, you might be able to figure out where you are in the world by staring.

Researchers from South Korea's Yonsei University will present a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference next week on a system that spits out two-dimensional coordinates for the object or place that a person is focusing on. The same group has worked on several eye interfaces in the past, mostly for people with disabilities. By integrating eye interfaces with GPS information, users can apparently get geographic information. The group presents its paper on Monday, February 3.

ISSCC is one of the … Read more

Google improves flight search, kills referral traffic to travel sites

Google has improved its search results for flight tracking. Previously, when you searched for an airline and flight number in Google (for example, AA 28), you got links to services that would tell you if your plane was on time or not. Now, you don't need the link: you get that data on the search result page.

This is a time-saver for Google users, but Travelocity, Expedia, and FBOWeb, which offer flight tracking services, will suffer since they no longer get the links. Instead, the data is provided by Conducive Technology's FlightStats. It's a decent service, but … Read more