Last year, 5,870 people died in car crashes caused by some kind of distraction, according to a report issued in September by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Today, 19 states and the District of Columbia either have or plan to have a ban on texting while driving. Other states are jumping on the bandwagon.
Don’t [...]

Now that school is back in session, kids will be spending inordinate amounts of time staring at their usual screens, but parents typically have no idea whether the kids are looking for homework help or looking for trouble. Some of the newest products available for kids give them a chance to do some really cool [...]

Before File-Open-Save and Lacoste were the standard for applications and their developers, there was Kai Krause. Kai’s Power Tools, or KPT, were a collection of psychedelic digital effects that extended the capabilities of PhotoShop. Goo and PowerGoo were consumerized versions of these effects. You could take a photo and apply a few creative stretches and [...]

Apple has more than 50,000 of them. RIM’s, Verizon’s, and Palm’s are gaining momentum. We’re talking mobile apps, and at the recent CEA Lineshows, Peter Rojas, founder of Engadget and soon Gdgt.com, and Michael Gartenberg, vice president of analysis at Interpret, presided over the event which was sponsored by the Mobile Entertainment Forum. Ten mobile apps [...]

Would you use your cellphone to broadcast the answers to the exam? Send a provocative photo? The Internet is a great place for learning about the consequences of your actions through simulation. Web Wise Kids uses a simulated interactive soap opera-like series of vignettes that asks viewers to make decisions about what they would do [...]

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas just ended. One of newest focuses of this huge electronics show is looking at the next generation of digital consumers—kids. According to toy industry data, the fastest, and almost the only, growing segment of the kids’ toy market is for digital toys.
We’ll be looking at some of [...]

Any parent who’s tried to manage a texting teen, an IM’ing middle schooler, or a chatting tweener knows how difficult it is to teach them to moderate their phone time. This week T-Mobile gave parents another tool in the never-ending battle of cellphone-mania. The new service allows parents to monitor every aspect of phone life [...]

Talk about a conversation that gives parents gray hair! Parents love when their kids have phones because they can keep in touch, but they’re not too crazy about the thought of monitoring bad phone behavior. For Discover I looked at the panoply of phone choices and offered my two cents (or two minutes if you’re [...]

“And if you think computers are trouble,” I often say to parents, “wait until you see the new generation of cell phones.” Cell phones are tomorrow’s problem today because they really do put the Internet into kids’ pockets and make it their travel companion. Kids can take photos and post to the web, [...]

Over the past few years there have been a number of attempts to create the perfect kids’ phone. Firefly, Migo , Wherify, Tic Talk, and others come to mind. But you know the old rule of kids, don’t you? The kids don’t want the kids’ phone! They want the cool phone.