Making a Buck on an Old Phone

Apple will send you a gift card when you send them your old Apple products. The company determines whether or not your equipment is reusable. If it can be reused, they’ll send you a gift card good for any purchase at an Apple Store if your phone makes the grade; if not, they’ll recycle it on the company’s dime.

A similar, private site is Gazelle, which emphasizes making money for your recycling efforts. Gazelle will pay up to $100 for the iPhone 3G models and $200 for 3GS models if the devices are in good condition. BuyMyTronics.com is a similar site, where both broken and working iPhones are bought and then either resold or used for parts. RadioShack will also pay between $100 and $200 for used iPhones.

Bartering

At TradeStuff you can trade your old phone for something else that you really need. Ditto for Freecycle, a locally based swap club where you trade your stuff for theirs.

For Greener Good

The folks at Green Recycling promise to take your phone off your hands, working or not. The company encourages fundraising through recycling cellphones. Enter your zip code into Earth 911.  A list of recyclers in your area appears.

For Charitable Donations

Don’t underestimate the power of the individual to do good things with old iPhones. Steve Glinberg, developer of educational apps like KidCalc Math Fun, runs a recycling program and collects old iPhones and iPod Touches to donate to schools. Glinberg wipes the data, restores the factory settings, installs educational apps, and ships the devices to teachers who have requested them.

Where do you stand in the norm? In a poll conducted on ZDNet, 40% of users said that they recycled their used phones; 35% said they donated them to charity. Final word of advice? Before you send your old phone to any sort of recycling program wipe it clean.

For years the counterarguments have been:

1. Pornography is too hard to define since it’s based on local culture.
2. Many of the largest pornography sites are located offshore, making it hard to have jurisdiction.
3. Porn sites would not voluntarily comply.

I applaud ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers, for fast-tracking the creation of a .XXX domain. The next step is for the ICM group to assess that there’s sufficient interest from the adult community. I know that they’ll do the right thing. What’s amazing to me is how long it’s taken to reach this sensible decision.

For more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10412765.stm.

And in the Internet safety world, products are appearing to keep kids safe, in a dialog with their parents, and still let them enjoy the benefits of social networking.

A couple of new products make it easier than ever to encourage this sort of behavior. Some are more traditional than others, but each deals with online reputation management. SafetyWeb could just be considered a new monitoring product. It’s a service that lets you enter your child’s email and then does a search for them on the major social networks and photosharing sites. You’ll be able to see their public comments on Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, and more. A quick search found my son on five networks, but missed his Facebook profile. The service costs $10 a month.

Similarly, a service called ReputationDefender will, for $14.95 a month, produce a report of your kid’s activities, including everything from photos they post to chats they have. ReputationDefender also works for business people and adults who want the less desirable things in their online history to show up at the bottom, rather than the top, of a Google search.

Webroot.com created a summer list to help parents in need of laying down the law on rules and best practices. Included are the basics like urging parents to become web savvy and know what’s on the web. Sounds like common sense, but it’s nice to see web software companies take action beside their core competency of blocking and filtering.

TrendMicro figured that, if kids were going to be a bit frightened about the consequences of inappropriate Internet behavior, then they might as well have their tutelage come from other kids. A contest where kids produced their own PSAs resulted in “Overexposed,” produced by Nicholas Chen and Edan Freiberger, which gets its slightly funny, slightly scary message across in under two minutes (watch it here). Contestants submitted 120 videos over six weeks; 40% of them were under age 18.

One of my favorite new approaches is not Internet safety at all; it’s an online community that’s been likened to Facebook on training wheels. Togetherville allows parents with Facebook accounts to create a kids’ safe area where they can stay in touch with family and friends that parents approve. Messages are confined to those you can select from a pick list. There are art games, photosharing, and mom and dad help pick your friends.

As tools get better, as education continues to be a focus, and as kids witness their own peers falling prey to Internet shenanigans, you can bet we’ll see more and more new answers emerging.

For LeapFrog, the answer is the newly announced $69 Leapster Explorer. For the price, the features are awesome. It has a nice color screen (3.2 inches and 320×320 pixels – which makes it a bit grainer than the iPhone, but a big improvement for LeapFrog) and 512MB of memory. It runs Flash (take that, iPad), will do 3D, and play video. A webcam attachment, due out later this fall, will cost $25. Both games and LeapFrog applets that are similar to apps on the iPhone will be available (in a proprietary format). The device is aimed squarely at 4-9 year-olds.

Underneath the device lies a decision point in parenting philosophy. The Leapster Explorer has a vast network of educational apps that reside on LeapWorld. LeapWorld allows for avatars and personal customization – though no social networking. There’s a Learning Path online component that lets parents monitor activities, get suggestions for additional activities, and quickly find products that address a particular skill.

Unlike earlier versions of LeapFrog apps, their new games and apps are much more fun, exploratory, and open-ended. Gone are the right vs. wrong answers and the whiny voices telling you “Good move” or “Try again.” The music is hipper and there’s a bit of a new edge. The underpinnings of what we used to call “drill and kill software” are eroding.

LeapFrog’s apps are proprietary in format. There are both games - similar to Nintendo’s DS - and learning activities – more like the Apple Apps store. Launch titles include kid faves like Toy Story 3, Disney Fairies, The Penguins of Madagascar, X-Men, Disney Princesses, and Dora the Explorer. Pop culture at its best.

While the $69 hardware is attractive, apps are actually more expensive than on the iPhone. While the Apple Store has no shortage of handsome 99-cent apps, the Leapster Explorer apps will be priced at $15 for two learning apps and for $25 a game. On the other hand, there’s a lot going on beneath the hood, tracking kids’ progress, and unveiling new games that make the additional price reasonable.

Can LeapFrog’s earnest and right-priced approach to reaching kids from 4-9 work in a world where parents are handing over $500 iPads, iPhone Touches, and DS machines to four year olds? The alternative devices are much more facile and able to satisfy the whole family at once. LeapFrog’s Explorer is a platform built explicitly for young kids.

At the moment, unfortunately, there’s no room for crossover. You can’t play LeapFrog games on an i-machine and you can’t play iPhone apps on your LeapFrog device. Sad.

My bottom line? More price-sensitive, more traditional parents and those who believe that kids belong in a finite kids’ educational world will flock to LeapFrog. It’s also a fabulous solution for the less affluent who want a sustainable system through the primary school years. Parents who are less hierarchical and believe in a cross-generational approach will choose the iPad.

Which are you? Think of it this way: When my kids were little, they had a toy vacuum. Playing with the real thing was not an option. The Leapster Explorer is an educational toy, albeit a powerful one. The i-machines are tools for grownups, with occasional kid uses. The Nintendo DS will always fare better at games than learning.

Color display, Barnes and Noble partner and a great price

Pandigital, a company best known for creating wireless digital photo frames, took a novel step forward with the introduction of a $200 full-color e-book reader with multimedia capabilities and a Barnes & Noble affiliation. In addition to the unit’s e-reader functionality, you can store photos, music, and movies, and use the device as a photo frame when you’re not reading.

The Down Low

The first version of the Pandigital Novel is a 7-inch eReader with an integrated and very fulfilling Barnes & Noble eBook Store experience. The comparatively large screen is a full-color LCD touch-screen display. It has Wi-Fi connectivity and a full set of reading enhancements, like a dictionary and notetakers. You can run a browser or play music while you read, since it’s multitasking capable, but the Internet search is not integrated into the book experience itself.

One of the cooler things on my list is a night reading mode where the text inverts from black-on-white to white-on-black. (If your spouse complains about your nocturnal reading habits this is a great answer.) It’ll also take advantage of the cutting edge Barnes & Noble LendMe technology, making it one of the first e-readers to work like a 14-day lending library.

I called Ross Rubin, an NPD analyst who monitors e-books, for his opinion. He believes that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have an advantage (presumably over iTunes), since both have vast databases of avid readers. “Barnes & Noble is reaching out to be the default bookstore on such devices as this one, the Plastic Logic device, and the forthcoming RCA e-reader from Audiovox,” says Rubin.

One of the tradeoffs of using an LCD screen is a shorter battery life, significantly shorter than the Kindle’s e-paper screen. One of the other tradeoffs is using Wi-Fi (home and hotspots) versus the Kindle’s data connection that works anywhere.

On the plus side—let’s face it—the iPad, a device with many similar features, costs $500. The Pandigital Novel is $200. The new Pandigital Novel eReader is an Android-based system, though it does not yet support downloadable apps.

The end result? Affordable, handsome, and a welcome contender to the e-reader plus world. It’s on my list as the closest thing to an iPad at one-third the price. And I’m betting that future versions will take more advantage of the Android operating system.

 This presentation ts based on a talk I gave at INplay in Toronto this week.  Click to take yourself down Toyland memory lane.  inplay-presentation

I’m not an early diver.  I wait until the first round of comments are addressed.  But, this week I dove into two of Google’s more evolved features.  Google Goggles and YouTube’s auto captioning. 

Google Goggles (try typing that one three times fast)  was first shown to the public about 6 months ago. It lets you search the web with pictures and photos.  Using your Android SmartPhone (for now) you point your camera and snap a picture of a place … let’s say the Eiffel Tower. Immediately you are brought to the web for more information on the Tower.  Take a picture of the Mona Lisa provides you with a detailed art history.  Snap photos of logos, businesses, restaurants and more.  Each brings up a search that’s just as complete as any you’d conduct using words or typing.  

Alas, my photo of IronMan (a Marvel comics rendition) came up blank, but a photo of Ray Charles took me directly to the man’s life and works. My self portrait thankfully produced no results, but I was able to scan business cards and have them entered into Google Contacts. 

About a week ago Google announced that Goggles can work with the Google translate app, making it even more useful.  Can’t read the menu while dining in Tokyo?  Point your camera, click and you’ve got the translation.  It’s expected that Google Goggles will ultimately run on various smartphone systems, at this writing it’s for the Android.  Watch the tutorial.

My second favorite – though a bit less evolved find is auto captioning of video  on YouTube (owned by Google).  Think about  closed captioning for the deaf on TV but on steroids.  For instance, when you select a video to be auto captioned the captions can be “searched” by Google, the font size changed and most important it can be translated into other languages using the Google translation tools.  For a lucid explanation that’s reasonably timely, you can watch this closed caption video.
Not every video can be captioned.  You must be the owner of the video or choose a video that has consented to be captioned by everyone. 
The auto captioning is based on the same technology that initiates Google’s Voice Search on Android phones.  The results are mixed even though the process is automated, creating captioning files is not simple.  

Playing with Google toys today is like getting a sneak peak of tomorrow.

MySims Sky Heroes: launching by this Sept
 Most of you are familiar with The Sims, the closest thing to a do-it-yourself soap opera videogame.  You may be less familiar with the junior version, My Sims.  It’s a simpler, younger adventure that concentrates on cute Mii like characters.  There have been racing version of My Sims and well as others.
. The newest My Sims addition is called SkyHeroes and it will be available by September.  A better name would be My First Flight Simulator.  Instead of just navigating aimlessly from point to point, your mission is to battle Morcubus and his drone army . They’ve got nefarious plans to take over the skyways!  You earn your wings as your speed and reflexes are put to the test.  Whimsy is pervasive as you can fly everything from a prop plane to a UFO.  Available for Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox and Playstation.
Sky Captain by D3 Publishers, also jumps into the flight training craze with  a  much more structured adventure for young children where they can  pilot anything from a plane to a UFO 40 different tasks from stunt flying to shooting targets.  No killing, no crashing, and simple enough to pilot that even I managed. Sky Captain reports they’ll be available by this sumer.

To make sure that the apps garnered a public life, I, along with Reyne Rice from ToyTrends  gave the following presentation.

get-pr-at-app-camp