360 DEGREES Weblog

If you’re a parent, you know that you can’t be with your children 24/7. So how do you safe guard them against the ever looming threat of stranger danger? Thanks to the geniuses over at Amber Alert GPS, parental units everywhere can breath a little easier with the release of the Amber Alert GPS 2G.

The 2G version of the Amber Alert GPS is being billed as “the world’s smallest, most powerful GPS tracking device.” Now if your child wanders off or something more serious is afoot, you can simply call or text the 2G and you receive a detail map of their location to your phone within seconds. One feature that sets this tracker apart from others on the market is the new bread crumbing feature that creates an accurate trail of your child’s travels. Another nifty feature is the Safe Zone feature that allows parents to create an area where it’s safe for the kids to be in –kind of like a digital fence for juinior.

Travellers planning a trip can already tap a variety of sites for creating guides and itineraries, including TripIt, Offbeat Guides and Tripwolf—to name just a few. Focusing more on travellers’ own search process, however—specifically, the time they spend scouring the web for ideas—comes Gliider, a Firefox plug-in aimed at organizing all the best results in a single, online place.

Now in invitation-only beta, Brooklyn-based Gliider is essentially a digital file that lets travellers keep track of all the interesting ideas they come across while researching and planning a trip. Users begin by downloading the application, causing the Gliider icon to appear in their Firefox browser bar. (Currently, Gliider works on Firefox 3, but support for Explorer, Safari and Chrome are coming soon, the company says.) When they’re surfing the web and come across a hotel, restaurant or photo they want to remember as they make their plans, they need only click the icon and Gliider drops down on the right-hand side of the browser. Into that window they can then simply drag and drop whatever it was they wanted to save, creating a neater, more organized alternative to a list of bookmarks. Users can share their trip files with up to four other users, and they can also create a summary travel document PDF for emailing and printing. Perhaps most interesting of all is that Gliider tracks deals on hotels relevant to a specific trip and allows users to take advantage of them in a single click.

Through a partnership with Expedia, Gliider currently earns revenue from affiliate fees when users click on the deals it presents to book a hotel, according to TechCrunch. Coming soon are deals on flights too, as well as an iPhone application and an “ask around” feature that taps Facebook.

Barry Zekelman paid the full $1.55 million price up front on a 2009 Bugatti Veyron, but days after Bugatti told him they weren’t building one, he demanded a refund. Eight months later he’s filing suit to get his money back

After placing his deposit of $427,935 on the $1.55 million vehicle, he paid in full last December. A few days later he was sent an email by the selling agent in Troy, Michigan he would not be receiving his 2009 Bugatti Veyron in Italian red, ever, they weren’t making any more. To add insult to injury, Bugatti offered a 2008 model in place of his ordered 2009. At this point Zekelman decided he’d had enough and demanded his money back, and has gone on demanding for eight months with no satisfaction. He’s had to file a lawsuit naming Bugatti, who’s kept his cash in their coffers for the entire time, and is seeking a complete refund and all court and lawyer fees. This isn’t the kind of thing you ever expect to hear about the buying process of the most exclusive supercar in the world.

Marco Arment’s Instapaper is one of two* killer apps for the iPhone: It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.

Now Arment has cut the price of the Pro version in half, to $5, and you should buy it.

Instapaper started out as a simple web service. To use it, you drag a special “Read Later” bookmarklet to your browser. Whenever you find something that you’d like to read but don’t have time for at the moment, just click that “Read Later” button. The article gets added to your personal page on Instapaper. When you’ve got time later, just visit that page and read away. Conveniently, every article is automatically reformatted (all excess HTML and graphics are stripped out) leaving nothing but highly-readable text.

The Instapaper iPhone app lets you view all those saved articles in an iPhone-friendly format.

In effect, it turns the iPhone into a super-convenient mini-reading tablet, great for catching up on the news, reading long-form articles, and more.

Instapaper Pro adds a couple new features. It now downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. It handles the “graphical version” (with photo) of articles better than the free version. It lets you archive articles that you’ve read more easily. And it adds some minor interface enhancements, such as a reversed mode (light text on a dark background, good for reading at night) and tilt-scrolling.

And, it adds features that let you optionally share your articles with the wider Instapaper community, or read popular articles that have been shared by others.

But even if you don’t feel like you need those features, you should still get the Pro version. It’s only $5, and most of that goes to Arment. For developing such a great app, he certainly deserves it.

One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and arbitrary approval and rating policies.

Thanks WIRED

Do you sometimes wish that you could email the latest family news and pictures to Grandma or Grandpa, but can’t because they don’t have a computer? Well if you live in former East Germany  maybe otherwise i wouldn’t know anybody wtihout email but ok just let assume. Sunnygram offers an email service to connect to these “unplugged” people in your life. With Sunnygram, you assign an email address to a non-emailer (such as Grandma@sunnygram.com), and then friends and family can send messages and digital pictures to that address, which are then compiled into a bright and cheery newsletter which is sent through regular mail each week.  The newsletters are customized for each recipient, with special designs for birthdays and holidays. Grandma can even respond back to her loved ones by pre-paid letter or through Sunnygram’s toll-free phone system. When Grandma replies, the response is emailed back to the original sender.  If she responds by writing, the response is scanned by Sunnygram and emailed out; if she responds by phone, the voice mail recording is emailed as a sound file. A subscription is $9.95 per month, and they will be offering 6-month and 12-month gift subscriptions over the holidays.

It’s monday morning and just looking for new entries. As i’m suffering from high bloodpressure myself this little new device might just be the solution. The Zona Plus is a blood pressure reducing isometric exerciser that was developed from technology used by the U.S. Air Force to improve F-16 pilots’ blood circulation. This exercise device claims to reduce your blood pressure without medication and clinical research by cardiovascular specialists shows the device lowers blood pressure in 90% of users who perform the therapy 12 minutes per day, five days a week. Simply hold the device and squeeze as hard as you can; the unit measures your maximum hand strength and calculates a target pressure that is 70% below your threshold. The handgrip then prompts you to maintain the target pressure, indicating when to squeeze harder or loosen your hold with audible tones and visual cues on the LCD. The price is $379.95, which might raise my blood pressure again.

If you’re thinking about starting your own career as a “gentleman racer”, this is the machine you’ll need: the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. It’s one of the most popular race cars of all time, and is the staple machinery used in a whole variety of racing series in American, Europe and abroad. And for 2010, Porsche has released a newly revised version that is expected to debut at the Frankfurt auto show next month.

Based on the recently-released GT3 RS, the new GT3 Cup is treated to the same improvements as the rest of the revised 911 range. But from there it’s all business. It packs the same 3.9-liter 450-hp flat-six engine as the street-legal GT3, but offers more downforce courtesy of extra wings and competition-spec suspension, wheels and more. It comes in white so each team can emblazon it with their own sponsors’ logos, and sells for a cool 150,000 euros.

Keeping up the theme of stylish kitchen appliances with a splash of color we have these new Vera electric kettles by Casa Bugatti. Now we’re no strangers to Bugatti’s efforts in the kitchen, having previously brought you their Vela 3-Speed Blender, but the Vera kettle goes one step beyond just a lovely design.

You see the handle on the Vera incorporates a screen that provides information about the temperature of the water boiling inside. The high-tech handle can also be used to set a specific temperature for the water (between 45 and 100°C) or you can set a timer to ensure you wake up in the morning to piping hot water ready for your coffee. The Vera Kettle is expected to be in stock at WhereDidYouBuyThat.com sometime in mid-September in a variety of colors, but it will set you back about $300. It is a Bugatti after all.

A father-of-two has spoken of his disgust after spotting fruity cartoon characters appearing to have sex on SWEET wrappers.
Simon Simpkins was buying Haribo MAOAM sour candies for his children when he noticed the ‘pornographic’ illustrations of limes, lemons and cherries romping with each other.
Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorkshire, said: ‘The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.
‘The lime, whom I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face.’
He said: ‘I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.’
A spokesman for Haribo said the ‘fun’ packaging of the sweets was introduced in Germany 2002 and added: ‘This jovial MAOAM man is very popular with fans, both young and old.’

Thanks Dailymail

Well, it’s been almost two weeks in the process, but the official Facebook application has been officially updated, and is able to be downloaded now via the App Store. It’s rocking the 3.0 moniker now, even though it’s still listed as version number 2.5 in the store. The app’s designer, Joe Hewitt, said that if you hit download anyway, you should get the new application without a hitch. So how does it stack up, and are the features all that great?

There’s a ton of features, to be honest, and it makes the application feel more like you’re navigating the natural Facebook web page than anything else. Simple things like the ability to “like” a friend’s status has been finally implemented, as well as an Events section, which has been a gripe for quite some time. And if you’ve upgraded from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3GS, then you’ll be able to upload videos directly from your phone to your Facebook page.

Sadly, there isn’t any kind of Push notifications this time around, but Hewitt is hard at work at it, and will probably rolled out with a 3.1 update. Also, landscape mode will be available later as well, and there may be support for watching Facebook videos directly from the app, instead of having to upload them first. And while it’s exciting to see the Facebook 3.0 app finally released, there was definitely some contention between Hewitt and the App Store/Apple, that hopefully got smoothed over since the submission of the app itself.