Not sure how many of you have seen the movie "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock, it was basically about birds suddenly attacking all humans that were not only outside but inside their homes in a small town. Excellent movie if you haven't seen it by the way a must rent, well recently a Google Street View actually caught a bird getting pretty up close and personal with one of the Google Cams. It would be pretty funny to see the look on someone's face when looking up directions to the local beachside pub. Well keeping with the beach theme and since it will be spring this weekend you might want to start thinking about your outdoor promotions.

 

 

Hey guys back with a tech update for you today. I know that majority of us have used a PC one time or another in our lives. I know that when I was growing up my first machine in the house was a Tandy Computer, and then I got a custom rig made, next was a Dell, and finally just yesterday I built a custom PC. Along the way Windows has upgraded its OS, different looks different feels but one thing that has remained basically the same is MS Paint. No matter what version of Windows since it started MS Paint has always remained the one constant with the least amount of change, until now. Code named Project Gustav, the new paint program looks really good with a 3-D feel to it along with multi-touch capability I think this might just be the future of graphic design. And no guys I don't mean like picking up a Custom Bic Pen and start drawing in the air which would be pretty cool but check out the video below and see what I mean.

 

 

Well this is a story that you don't see every day, Anders Norman of Sweden suffered from a house fire recently. In the house fire his iMac was burned and seemed to melted parts including the keyboard. But even though the iMac was on fire to everyone's surprise including mine the iMac was still operational, yes I said operational. I guess you can say thank God for those firefighters because if the fire had fully engulfed everything I think it would be safe to say there would be no scared iMac to talk about. Hopefully we can give them some firefighter promotions to show how much we appreciate their hard work.

 

 

Now this would make for an awesome unique promotional product if it ever came from the concept table to reality. The Yuji Fujimura's Wheel Driver is a concept vehicle which will have the driver sitting inside the concept. Wonder how safety will play a part in this I guess you can’t until there is some type of production model available for testing.

 

 

Today is the day when all the magic happens, no not that kind of magic. Today is Apple wants us to see its latest creation. Well we all know by now that we will finally get to see the long awaited Apple Tablet, name unknown yet until later on today. We will hopefully get a taste of the new iPhone OS 4.0 which I am looking forward to seeing. Rumor has it that the new OS will have a much different user interface and begin to introduce 4G capabilities. But as we know all eyes want to see the Apple Tablet much rumors have been surrounding the device like a 10 inch screen, webcam, fully touch interface, app downloads, and so much more. Being the geek that I am I have created a file that will run automatically at 1pm EST and will open my browsers to the live Blogs of Gizmodo and CNET. Now if I can have my promotional mug just automatically just pour water into my mouth every hour...back to the drawing board.

 

 

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sail across the ocean to different countries on a garden vessel? Well it actually might be a possibility in the future, Vincent Callebaut has created a whale like floating garden designed to ride through the world's rivers and purifying their waters. The floating garden is a full eco-system that generates all of its energy from the sun and purifies the water through bio-filtration. One man’s vision may someday reduce the amount of energy that consume in a day or even purify the rivers that we take for granted. We can also make a difference one company at a time with purchasing promotional items that are good for the environment, environmentally friendly promotional items.

 

Well I hope that everyone had a great Holiday last week and for those of us that don't celebrate Christmas I hope that you had a great time getting some much needed rest. With the Corporate Gift season coming to a close, we all know what season is quickly approaching as the New Year is just around the corner yes, tradeshow season. Hopefully those of you that are fortunate enough to be setting up booths this upcoming year had sometime to think about what tradeshow giveaway will best suit your budget, if not don't worry we have a great selection of Tradeshow Giveaways.

In gadget news I came across a new what appears to be a Project Natal Video of someone playing Half-Life 2. Now I'm not sure but if this is actual game play in beta form then this is really something to look into. It seems very intuitive and the fact that it is beta makes it more compelling for me to get one when it does come out if it is in fact actual game play.

 

Well we knew this was coming, not too sure if we actually knew it would be so quick, but here it is the new iPhone App from Bing. The official Bing App actually seems pretty well thought out all of the features that you would expect from a search App is available. The App features some very nice features like Bing's image of the day background, voice search, tips, search help and an awesome image search. See some of the screen shots I took from my personal iPhone running the App, be sure to check out our line of promotional cell phone accessories. If you do download the App let me know what you think or how it measures up to the Google search App.

I don't know how many of you out there live in the city and tend to get dropped calls from your iPhone. Well if you are tired of it and want to voice your opinion about it then this is the App for you "Mark the Spot". The "Mark the Spot" App allows you to accurately pinpoint your exact location of where you get dropped calls, bad data access, or even bad voice data and send it over to AT&T letting them know where trouble spots are. So if you're at an important tradeshow handing out tradeshow giveaways and you happen to get a phone call about stock issues of merchandise and that call fails you better "Mark the Spot".

Now I have to admit I haven't seen anything quite like this before but I have to say I am very impressed. Let us say that you are a pet owner and you have to go away on vacation for about a week or two but you have no way of feeding the dog or cat, what do you do? Well Mathew Newton has actually put together a very cool DIY internet enabled cat feeder. According to Engadget.com, "When it's feeding time the user logs onto a web interface to choose the dispensing quantity, or you can also have an automatic feed schedule set up if you trust the system..." Hey if he can mass produce this it will make for one hell of a promotional pet product, but if you still doubt the whole internet feeding aspect check it out for yourself.

Has anyone seen those ads from Verizon the ones that say something along the lines of, "Everything iDont' Droid Does". Now is that I in iDon't suppose to signify a jab at AT&T along with the iPhone hmmm I wonder. According to engadget.com "A new campaign launching...focuses on the iPhone's ability to carry voice and data simultaneously on AT&T's network, and each of the two new TV spots ends with the line "Can your phone and your network do that?"..." I have embedded one of the ads below take a look. Now if I could only convince someone to get me a new iPhone as a corporate gift.

Apple iPhone Ad - Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.