Livewire: Internet Offers Relief of Holiday Blues
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When the going gets tough at the stores this holiday season, the tough go shopping online. When life gets really tough, there's online therapy.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Chuck Harris remembers when the Internet was fun and he'd spend hours reading his favorite news sites, checking the church calendar, browsing the shops. Then, a few weeks ago, he lost control of his computer. It turned into a giant electronic billboard.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget isolation and relaxation. For the seriously connected geek of today, vacations just aren't what they used to be. An informal and completely unscientific poll of InfoWorld readers revealed that -- although a few certified techies unplug completely when on vacation -- most elect to stay at least somewhat connected with their regular life; thanks to the ever-broadening range of cellular and wireless networks, most of them can. [See InfoWorld's Top 10 geek vacation list.] Jeff Helm witnessed the transition at one vacation spot: "I first took the family to Pigeon Forge (near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) in October 2001. I walked across the hotel parking lot to the new public library to get on the Internet and check mail. I was told I would have to fill out a form, pay $5, let them hold on to my driver's license, and swear that I wouldn't 'conduct any business' or credit card transactions of any kind." Fast-forward to August 2006: "We went to the same hotel. I got out of the car to check in, and my PDA gave an audible report that it found a wireless signal. Yes, the same library was now beaming invitations to connect to the Internet to everyone in the area. Every hotel â¦ did the same. I checked e-mail at the outside mall, waiting for a patio table at the restaurant, and just about every place I went. I shut off the audible alert because the thing was going off constantly with all the networks." "The Outer Banks of North Carolina have a full complement of Net hotspot and cell-phone coverage capabilities," writes Peter B. Young. "I like to sit in the shade of an upper deck on our mansion-of-the-week, my sturdy old laptop plugged into an outlet in the living room or often out on the deck itself, and let 'er rip -- as gentle southern breezes caress my worn and wounded body." Rand Foster recommends cruising the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington between                                                     Vancouver Island and the mainland: "There is Wi-Fi at every marina." Brad St. Pierre found the perfect combo in Canada's Northwest Territories: "At the Bayside B and B in Yellowknife, I could watch the lakeside airplane and boat activity from the lounge or deck all day while surfing the Net. With almost 24 hours of sunshine, it's never too late to do the things you forgot to do while you were online." High-tech contractor David G. Evans found a way to have his vacation and get paid for it, too. "I was on call for production support. I spent a few weeks grooming my contacts to text me if they had an issue. That being done, I found a wonderful camp spot in Seaside, Calif., 20 seconds from pristine dunes and the ocean, 15 minutes from downtown Monterey, private, inexpensive, and well equipped. The recreation room has two hookups for Internet and a Web-mail kiosk. "Since this was an East Coast contract, I would get up at 4:30 or 5 to do a quick message check and reply as a first-thing-in-the-morning connection for them. Then we would drive to the Monterey Bay Aquarium but leave me three blocks away at the Kinko's with my laptop, where access is free, 24 hour, and comfortable. I would spend an hour or two working, then wander down to the wharf to meet them for some exhibits and lunch. If there was work, I would check back at Kinko's; if not, we had family time. Except for some mad coding from the backseat of the Volvo, plugged into the cigarette lighter for a portion of the trip home, this was the best working vacation I ever had." Edward C. Horvath had the best idea for a busman's holiday: "Buy yourself a ticket to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Live on caffeine, sugar, new technology, and the famed Jobs Reality Distortion Field for a week." The prize for the most far-out connected experience has to go to Savio Rodrigues, one of the authors of our Open Sources blog. He proudly sent us a photo from Machu Picchu -- not of himself, but of his BlackBerry, with a strong connection. A close second: April Harris Calderwood's working vacation, "going to a third-world country and helping a community project with technology; you rest and give back to the community."
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The web as your auld grannie might have wished it
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Mixed economic news and forecasts of weak IT spending for at least the beginning of next year caused IT investor confidence to waver this week, though upbeat analyst presentations from Cisco and AT&amp;T and online e-commerce figures brought some cheer to the holiday season.Macroeconomic news is making technology investors uneasy. Wednesday morning, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board cut its federal funds rate in an attempt to allay fears that turmoil in the housing market would wreak further havoc in financial markets. But the move (a cut of 25 basis points) was not as great as some market observers hoped for and sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index into a decline.Uncertainty in the U.S. is depressing IT spending forecasts. &quot;The economic slowdown we see happening in the U.S. will in fact translate over to slower growth in the U.S. IT spending market,&quot; said Andrew Bartels, principal analyst at Forrester Research, on a Thursday conference call with media and analysts.The good news, Bartels said, is that globally, IT capital spending should remain strong, U.S. spending should pick up again by the fourth quarter of 2008, and a real recession will likely be avoided.ComScore, meanwhile, had good news about online spending. Almost $19 billion was spent online during the holiday season up to midweek, an 18 percent increase compared to the same period in 2006, the market research company said.Companies that appear ready to supply the infrastructure for e-commerce and Web 2.0 multimedia services gave investors something to cheer about this week.AT&amp;T, which is melding the telecom services and infrastructure of the former SB Communications, BellSouth, and the old AT&amp;T, gave a presentation that impressed analysts Tuesday, convincing many that the communications giant is poised to leverage a wide range of assets.In a research note, Christopher King of investment firm Stifel Nicolaus said that AT&amp;T has &quot;the premier set of assets in the telecom industry.&quot; Independent analyst Jeff Kagan noted in an e-mail report that &quot;10 years ago, the company was only into the local phone business and was just getting into long distance and DSL. Today, it is a full featured company offering local and long-distance telephone, wireless, high-speed internet, and even television.&quot;The presentation came a day after AT&amp;T announced that it has expanded its 40G IP/MPLS backbone network to more than 50,000 miles in the U.S.AT&amp;T shares closed at $39.46 Tuesday, up by $1.56, and continued to move up over the next few days.Cisco&#39;s analyst presentation on Tuesday also drew good reviews. The company has a good track record of predicting trends and executing product strategy accordingly. The company announced, for example, that&#160;it will debut next year its Entertainment Operating System (EOS), a platform for multimedia content for online communities. Its unified communications product strategy and expected enhancements to its software offerings should also make its product suite more central to the corporate data center.Lehman Brothers sent out a research note saying that the company is well-positioned to offer products supporting the new generation of Web technologies. Cisco shares rose $0.46 to close at $28.08 Tuesday, and continued to move up during the week.In a shaky economy not all companies and sectors will perform well, and big questions surrounded chip maker AMD at its analyst presentation Thursday. The problematic launch of its Barcelona quad-core chips, which are still experiencing production delays, has shaken confidence that the company can make an effective counterpunch against Intel.Company CEO Hector Ruiz said that the company should break even by the second quarter of 2008, helped by -- among other things -- new graphics chips. But analysts are worried that may be too little, too late, to stop a market share slide. With product sales in doubt, the promise of cost controls was not enough to win over investors. AMD shares declined by $0.13 to close at $8.84 Thursday.
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Happy Holidays! Have some drug-enhancing technology.
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By Jane Kwiatkowski, The Buffalo News, N.Y.  Dec. 9--Tired of cranky cashiers? Sick of ATM lines? Want to know where there are no lines?   Online -- at the Internet Mall, where you can join 115 million other shoppers this holiday season.
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Startup that enables users to broadcast live video over the Internet has sent Web cams to the families of service members so soldiers in Iraq are a little closer to home for the holidays.
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Holiday shoppers gravitated toward the Internet in big numbers late last year, with online retailers reaping some US&#36;23 billion from U.S. consumers. That figure marks a 25 percent increase from the &#36;18.5 billion spent online during the same period in 2003.
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If you're like a lot of people, you've got a wealth of digital photos left over from the holidays that you'd like to share with family and friends. Thanks to the Internet, there are more options than ever. Some services even let you make images available to the general public.
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The best strategies for coping with electronic overload.
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Joy during the holiday season usually comes from family and friends, but this year Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. want it to also come from the PC.
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NEW YORK, Dec. 11  /PRNewswire/ -- No matter how you're doing financially, it's easy to feel buried by the constant onslaught of bills.  Here's more on new ways to use the Internet to get rid of the clutter and organize your financial life once and for all.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 5  - As college students leave  home and head off to school, Internet entrepreneur Steve Case  has launched a new Web site to help them deal with being apart  from their families and handle depression.
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By JANE KWIATKOWSKI  Tired of cranky cashiers? Sick of ATM lines? Want to know where there are no lines?  Online -- at the Internet Mall, where you can join 115 million other shoppers this holiday season.  Shoppers use the Internet for much more than making purchases.
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ONE Christmas ritual should be a lot cheaper this year for anybody with broadband. Calling friends and relatives just about anywhere in the world now costs nothing, or just over 1p a minute (0.02 to be exact
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Online merchants are poised to record a much bigger rise in holiday sales than their offline counterparts. Broadband expansion, more luxury gift sales and a rise in late shoppers help the bottom line. By Joanna Glasner.