Christmas might have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find that as an excuse not to gift your little one another educational toy! The Spark Talking Globe is a full color 3D spinning globe that features seven touch-sensitive areas, where each touch will kickstart the computer within to provide more information about the selected area narrated by a cheerful character. You (or rather, your child) will find a total of 10 activity buttons to get the little ones started, and with hundreds of facts concerning people, music, clothing, customs, geography, food, animals, inventions and languages, this is a treasure tome of interactive information! The integrated LCD display makes it easier for visually reinforcement when learning. The Spark Talking Globe can be yours for $49.95 – and you save a whole lot of moolah in the process without having to travel around the world in person.

I suppose somewhere along the industrialization process, we forgot about sustainable production and decided that profits were the bottomline regardless of the huge environmental cost. This has resulted in unprecedented levels of pollution that has adversely affected our ecosystem, no thanks to the proliferation of plastic bags, while disposable products like diapers, eating utensils, paper plates and underwear all contribute to our landfills just because we want to feed the convenience monster within us. Granted, some efforts have been made to make these from recycled material, but most of it ends up polluting our environment even more. Today we have the Songbird flexfit hearing aid that is touted to be “the world’s first disposable hearing aid” to add to the growing list, and was specially designed to be an over-the-counter solution for folks who suffer from moderate hearing loss and require part-time hearing assistance.

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Acer has grown up from being an awkward child on the playground to a pretty decent jock whom any mother would love to have their daughter date. After all, the Acer brand has grown by leaps and bounds over the years to end up as the third largest PC company in the world at the moment. This time round, they have unleashed yet another notebook for the masses, packing in some serious processing power to keep you entertained on-the-go after a long, hard day at work. The Acer Aspire 8930G-7665 notebook ain’t too shabby when it comes to design either, so let us take a closer look at its specifications right after the jump.

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Sprint has a heart for the local community by announcing the availability of local, 10-digit phone numbers for internet-based Relay (IP), Instant Messaging Relay (IM), Video Relay Service (VRS) and Federal VRS customers. Their ‘Call Now’ service will enable IP and VRS users to be assigned a local 10-digit phone number so that they can receive calls directly and make 911 calls based on their geographic location. No longer will callers have to deal with dialing a toll-free number to reach Sprint Relay users with this new setup. VRS numbers are currently available while IP numbers will kick into action from tomorrow onwards.

With ‘Call Now,’ Sprint Relay users can be contacted directly by their family, friends and colleagues by dialing their personal 10-digit phone number and will automatically connect with a Relay operator or VRS interpreter. In addition, customers can set up their account profile including their physical address with city, state and zip code. The account profile will be ready for VRS or IP relay users to make 911 emergency calls.

This is good news as it shows Sprint isn’t just deaf (no pun intended) to the needs of their customer range.

Press Release

CES 2009 is upon us yet again – has it been a year already? Time certainly flies by too fast for our own good. GiiNii International has a fair number of devices in their lineup that will make their debut in Las Vegas, Nevada, slightly over a week from now. The offerings in question are :-

• PixPlus – A new line of 10″ Wi-Fi–enabled digital picture frames that also are powerful information and entertainment companions, delivering location-relevant online content to any room unlike any other digital frames on the market
• PixPlus Featuring FrameChannel – Streams content from more than 500 FrameChannel.com channels
• PixPlus Source – Streams content from HowStuffWorks.com
• C-U-C-Me digital camera feature – Patent-pending technology lets everyone in the picture see how the photo will look as it’s being taken. With GiiNii’s new reflective image feature, people in the picture can see what the lens sees. This innovative feature is on most of GiiNii’s new line of Clicka digital cameras
• Clearview HDTVs For The Other Room – A line of innovative high-definition televisions that perform double duty as super-sized digital picture frames
• Movit Mini – A portable social networking and communications device that features the Skype application, so it’s ready to use with any Wi-Fi network
• Wireless carrier- independent, it sports a huge, 4.3″ touch-screen and plays music and videos

Sounds like they’re pretty utilitarian gizmos to take a gander at. I’m sure our hardworking staff at CG will check these out on the showfloor, once we’re fed with enough pizza and good beer.

Press Release

Don’t we all love receiving gifts and presents? After all, it makes us feel loved, and there is that indescribable feeling of tearing open the wrapping paper to discover what we’ve been hankering after all this while sitting there, right in front of us. Unfortunately in this day and age, there are some presents that we receive which could come with a pretty serious defect – imaging getting a new digital photo frame that upon plugging into your computer, results in an attempt infecting the said PC with a virus. Yes, that is actually happening for folks who have received several different models of digital photo frames from retailers like Wal-Mart, Amazon and others. Talk about a blue holiday season!

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The holiday season often involves a whole lot of travel, and regardless of the mode of transport, kids will be kids. You will certainly be bombarded with questions such as “Are we there yet?” for at least a few hundred times, even more so if you’re on a long road trip instead of taking a flight that affords more mercies for your ears. After all, children these days tend to get bored much easier compared to their counterparts a generation back mainly because of the environment they grow up in – there are just too many distractions around and they need to be “wowed” in order to capture their attention. Good for you if you own an iPhone – you’ll be able to load it up with the iKids Play software that offers five fun, creative and positive alternatives to gaming for “i” generation kids.

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By Congressional standards, the Digital Television Converter Voucher program has been a roaring success. So much so that the program may run out of voucher coupons limit by the first week of January nearly a month before the February 17, 2009 transition deadline. Congress appropriated $1.34-billion for converter box vouchers to help absorb the cost of the mandatory digital handover. And nearly all of it has been handed out, which is not surprising considering that the program received 1.5 million requests for vouchers per week. So time, and available money are running out fast.

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