By Gilbert Falso :: 6:19 AM
With the price of postage set to go up later this month, sending an e-mail and paying bills online rather than forking out the additional cash for stamps probably looks better and better to many Americans.
On January 27, the price of a First-Class stamp will cost 46 cents, up a penny from the current rate for a 1-ounce letter. Stamps for postcards will also go up 1 cent, to 33 cents.
Also new this year as part of the U.S. Postal Service’s rate increase, is a First-Class Global Forever stamp, which pays the postage to mail a letter anywhere in the world at a flat rate of $1.10.
Prices will also be raised on the Postal Service’s package rates. The Flat Rate Priority Mail will now have boxes starting at $5.80 and envelopes starting at $5.60.
What many people don’t realize about the U.S. Postal Service is that it receives no taxpayer dollars. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that created the current United States Postal Service formed it as an independent agency, and it has not received any taxpayer assistance since 1982. The Postal Service relies on the sale of postage and mail products and services for revenue to cover their costs.
The post office is seeing some electronic competition. In 2012, the number of emails sent and received per day totaled 89 billion. This figure  is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 13% over the next four years, reaching over 143 billion by year-end 2016, according to data collected from The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm.
By Paul Thomson :: 2:17 AM
Leap Motion, makers of a new hands-free motion control system, announced earlier this week that they have entered into a retail partnership with Best Buy to exclusively sell their product in BestBuy stores.
Best Buy  will start taking pre-orders in February and will sell the Leap in its stores this spring. The deal comes just a few weeks after Leap announced that its device would be bundled with some Asus PC models.
Leap’s new technology has spawned a device that is capable of measuring motion with an accuracy down to a hundredth of a millimeter. Through its robust developer network, the company has made more than 12,000 Leaps available, ensuring that it will be able to go to launch with an app store brimming with applications built especially for the new technology. More than 40,000 developers have applied to be part of Leap’s program.
According to contract terms, Best Buy has committed to market the device in all its stores by placing it in prominent locations across its stores along with video displays.
“Finding a major retail partner for our North American launch was a critical component to our strategy, and Best Buy was the obvious choice,†Leap Motion President and COO Andy Miller said. “Best Buy’s market leadership and extensive store distribution network, combined with the product floor space and dedicated marketing promotional plans, represents an incredible opportunity to bring the Leap Motion controller to a massive consumer audience.â€
By Cynthia Herbert :: 1:08 AM
The popular Galaxy Note line from Samsung may soon see its newest piece of hardware revealed when the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet is debuted at Mobile World Congress next month.
Although rumors are abounding, specs for the Galaxy Note 8.0 are likely to be a screen resolution of 1,280 x 800, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3-megapixel front camera, 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of flash storage. Android 4.2 Jelly Bean will be the standard OS, and models will come in both Wi-Fi only, and Wi-Fi plus cell plan data.
As with all current Galaxy offerings, the tablet will also come with Samsung’s S-Pen.
At 8 inches, this new tablet will likely have some strong competition with other models already on shelves, such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Apple iPad mini.
Also on the horizon at Mobile World Congress for Samsung is the long-awaited Galaxy S4 smartphone handset. Unfortunately for Samsung cell aficionados, it is likely that the S4 will be later in the year than Mobile World Congress. Patience is a virtue, after all!
By Cynthia Herbert :: 12:12 AM
Debuting earlier this month in the Eureka Park section of CES, the new VIVOplay watch from Evado Filip brings together three technologies, GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular, to provide state-of-the-art location and tracking services in a watch for children.
In 2009, Evado Filip’s Founder and CEO Sten Kirkbak became separated from his young child in a shopping mall. Although he was quickly reunited with this child, Kirkbak had initially panicked, and realized that there had to be a better way for children to reach their parents quickly in times of emergency. After doing research, Kirkbak concluded that no single device was on the market that blended communication, location, ease of use and good design. He sought to change this with the new VIVOplay watch.
With the watch, children can reach their parents when they need to, and parents can call and locate their children via an app on their smartphone.
In addition to emergency and contact uses, the watch can also be used with geofencing technology to serve as a monitoring device. Parents can create different safe zones, and are alerted with a pop-up message on their phone if their child leaves the predetermned area.
Evado Filip has working prototypes, and demonstrated them at CES. The company will be conducting beta testing over the next few months, and plans to take pre-orders and ship the first products in early summer.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 9:31 PM
Walmart has marketed its Straight Talk plan for the iPhone 5 (and other smartphone handsets) as having unlimited data for $45 per month. However, many customers are beginning to find that the plan is not really unlimited, and the blazing fast iPhone 5 download speeds bumps them up against a cap that the plan has put in place of 2GB per month.
Users have been complaining for nearly a year that they have been misled by Walmart’s marketing strategies into thinking that Straight Talk accounts were truly set up with unlimited data. Once most users reach a data download point of 2GB per billing cycle, their data transfer rates slow to a crawl. In come cases, data plans have ceased working entirely.
Although a limit of 2GB per month is a standard practice with the regular carriers like AT&T And Verizon, many Straight Talk users expected things to work differently under that plan. Still, the low $45 price means that the service is still a fairly good deal when compared to traditional cellphone plans.
More at [Straight Talk Data Usage Limit Cap] and [Prepaid Cell Phones