Imagine being able to pay for a song on the jukebox, buy a bag of groceries or gain admission to a sports arena by simply waving your phone by a machine.

With consumers in Asia and Europe already using their mobile phones to pay for soda and parking fees, the long discussed concept of the wireless wallet could be slowly creeping closer to reality in the United States.

In countries such as Sweden, Ireland and the United Kingdom drivers can avoid putting coins in a parking meter by simply sending a text message on their mobile phone.

About two million customers of Japans NTT can already use mobile phones with built-in debit cards to pay about 20,000 merchants such as restaurants and supermarkets.

Life just gets easier everyday…So does this mean we wont need Banks anymore ?

Who is going to hold our hard earned cash ?, Will we still get interest on our money ?

Rest assured that someone will be making lots of money out of this but I will take a bet that its not us, the ever suffering customer.

Continue reading about this technological advance at reuters.com

Hanging from utility poles or buried in underground conduits in communities across America are power lines that feed electricity to homes and businesses. This same electrical grid might soon be providing subscribers the ability to surf the Internet with greater speed and efficiency than is now available from cable and DSL service, according to industry watchers.
This promise of accessing the Internet via existing electrical wiring, known as Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, initially encountered technical problems, lack of funding and regulatory issues. Those problems largely have been overcome, according to experts. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now supports BPL service.

Earlier this month Google, Goldman Sachs and Hearst invested in Broadband over Power Line (BPL) provider Current Communications. IBM and CenterPoint announced a big partnership to promote the technology.

I wonder if this is another way to ensure your utility bills get paid, no power, no internet acccess maybe ?

Just a thought, but you never know what might happen…but that being said technology is moving at a rapid rate and we have to adapt if we want more reliable and speedy services.

This is just another industry step.

Continue reading What this Development means to you as a consumer at, YahooNews.com

A judge has temporarily barred a former Microsoft executive from performing his job at Google, saying Microsoft has a well-grounded fear that leaked trade secrets could hurt its business.
Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez granted Microsoft Corp.s request for a temporary restraining order Thursday to prohibit Kai-Fu Lee from performing any duties at the search giant that are similar to those he performed at Microsoft.

We needed to take this step to protect our sensitive business information and to ensure that Google and Dr. Lee honor the confidentiality and noncompetition agreements he made when he started working here, Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said.

The judges ruling will stand until a Sept. 6 hearing, she said.

So, Would you go this far to protect your business interests ?

It raises an interesting point really, How valuable are your business assets and could someone else gain from them, clearly something that we should all consider.

Read more of this intriguing story at YahooNews.com

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is used to notify users when an update is posted to a Web site through the use of special RSS feeds. The syndication technology is getting much attention within the blogosphere where many bloggers use RSS themselves.
Only two percent of the Internet population uses RSS, Forrester research says in a new report about the syndication technology.
Principal analyst Charlene Li based her findings on a survey of 68,000 households in North America. The figure doesnt include households that use RSS without knowing about it, for instance through the my.yahoo.com Web site.

RSS use is highest among young consumers between the ages of 12-21, with 5 percent saying they use the technology.

Are you using RSS to promote your business ?

Maybe you should, the story continues at newsfactor.com

They are online, half of them on a daily basis, and use the Internet for news, games, and instant messaging.

A Pew Internet and American Life survey reaffirms something that marketers have realized for some time: most teens have found their way online. The study found that 87 percent of 12-17 year olds use the Internet, which would be about 21 million of them.

Nearly 11 million visit the Web every day. In 2000, about 17 million teens used the Internet, with 7 million hitting online sites every day.

The immediacy of instant messaging has much more appeal for teens than conventional email. That should make executives at sites like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN quite pleased, as they are significant providers of IM services. Those services all drive advertiser revenue to their providers.

These teens are your future staff…how do you encourage them to gain some interest in your operation ?

This story from webpronews.com addresses the issues.