Technology and Money

Can You Unlock Car Doors Remotely using a Mobile Phone?

I was watching a gadget show on TV this week (the channel was either NDTV or IBN) where this  gentleman demonstrated how to unlock the door of your car using just a mobile phone and a spare set of car keys that are lying at your home.

Here’s what they did to unlock the car with a cell phone and the remote key:

1. Man gets out of the car, closes the door but then realizes that he left the keys inside.

2. He calls his wife at home using a cell phone and asks her to hold that duplicate set of car keys near her cell phone.

3. He then held his own cell phone near the car door while her wife pressed the unlock button at home. The car door gets unlocked immediately.

I may have treated this as a hoax had I read this trick on some web forum but since this procedure was shown on national TV by a reputed channel (with a real video), it may not be completely baseless.

Did you ever try this? Does it work.

Can You Unlock Car Doors Remotely using a Mobile Phone? - Digital Inspiration

Hitwise Says Growth of Social Networking Sites is Slowing

Facebook is the second most popular website in UK after Google but closely followed by Windows Live Hotmail and eBay.

Now a r report published in Hitwise UK says that Facebook continues to grow in UK but the rate of growth has slowed and the average time that people spend on Facebook too has flattened out.

• Traffic to the site increased by 4% between August and September this year, down from 50% over the same period last year.
• The average session time has declined at MySpace & Bebo while remaining still at around 20 minutes on Facebook.

Growth in traffic on social websites

Hitwise Says Growth of Social Networking Sites is Slowing - Digital Inspiration

Screen Sharing With Google Talk & GMail Friends Gets Simple with Yuuguu

Yuuguu is a free desktop screen sharing application that is available for all platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux.

Their USP is a browser based Flash client that enables participants to join screen sharing sessions or request remote access without downloading any software. And now Yuuguu works with your Google Talk or Gmail contacts as well.

You download the Yuuguu client and then associate your Google account with the Yuuguu service. I guess this works with Google Apps accounts as well.

Yuuguu will then automatically show you a list of GTalk friends who’re currently online and you can easily initiate a screen sharing session with anyone by selecting "Show" in the chat window.

Instead of receiving the screen-share request in Yuuguu, your Gmail and Google Talk contacts will receive the screen-share link just like a regular chat message. They can click the link and will be able to instantly see your screen in a Flash enabled web browser. Very cool.

 

When in screen sharing mode, the person on the other side may even request control of your machine through the browser itself.

And since Yuuguu is a browser based app, it doesn’t matter if you’re on Windows and your friends are on Mac or Linux.

Related: Set a Virtual Office with Free Web Tools

Also read reviews of some other Screen Sharing apps including Microsoft SharedView, Team Viewer, CrossLoop and Adobe Brio.

Screen Sharing With Google Talk & GMail Friends Gets Simple with Yuuguu - Digital Inspiration

Microsoft Web: Tech News Aggregator

Microsoft has soft launched /web – it’s an online aggregator of tech news related to all-things web.

Though a majority of content posted on Microsoft/web can be connected to Microsoft technologies in some way or the other, it is not 100% Microsoft-centric site as they do prominently feature stories from other areas as well. Thanks Dave and Lauren.

Microsoft Web: Tech News Aggregator - Digital Inspiration

Get Orkut on your iPhone

Google today introduced an iPhone optimized version of Orkut that is available at the same address m.orkut.com as the regular mobile version of Orkut.

Orkut on iPhone

The iPhone version of Orkut is more feature-rich than the older mobile version in the sense that you now read friend updates, delete scraps and even view photo albums right from the iPhone.

Orkut on iPhone – Was it even required?

Orkut is mostly popular in India among teens & college students and only a very small portion of them may be actually carrying the pricey iPhone. The next popular base of Orkut is Brazil where too iPhone has just launched.

Am therefore surprised that Google launched a product for such a small user base when they could have easily spent  that development time on improving or adding more features to regular mobile version of Orkut. Thoughts ?

Get Orkut on your iPhone - Digital Inspiration