If you are an elderly person in the UK, and you have stayed away from computers due to your fear of them, a new computer has launched that may be just what you are looking for.

The BBC had a report today about a new line of computers called SimplicITy that is directed squarely at the elderly.  According a recent survey, 6 million residents of the UK over the age of 65 have never used the Internet, and that are the people SimplicITy is going to try to help.

Using a simplified navigation screen that has only 6 buttons, a person can browse the Web, email, chat with friends and family and more, and there is no extraneous items on the computer that might confuse someone.  The computer also comes loaded with 17 videos hosted by UK television presenter Valerie Singleton (sample video at the bottom of the post) that will explain everything you need to know about your computer in simple terms.

Some critics have said that these new computers are patronizing to the elderly, but we say exactly the opposite.  My 89-year-old grandmother has never used the Internet, and is frightened to even try it with me sitting right next to her, but this she could understand.  I also would love it as her grandson because I wouldn’t have to worry about her accidentally deleting anything of importance, or possibly downloading all of the usual viruses.

This is exactly the type of product we had in mind when we started this site, and we think this is the type of product whose time has come.  With the baby boomers aging rapidly, there are still many of them who don’t understand computers, and this is going to be a huge segment of the population not online.  We hope it’s a huge success, and maybe they’ll think about expanding to the USA.

It would seem that numerous major technology companies want to give you the gift of free Wi-Fi for this holiday season.

Travelling through airports is never fun, and since you never know exactly how long you will be stuck in some of them due to delays, there is always a temptation to pay the excessive fees for a few hours of Wi-Fi to pass the time.  Well, Google has heard your cries, and now through Jan. 15th, 2010, the search giant will be providing free Wi-Fi for the taking in 47 major airports across the United States.

Google announced today that it is partnering up with airport Wi-Fi providers Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, Airport Marketing Income and others to provide free Wi-Fi in airports such as Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte.

Also, while using any of these free airport connections, you will be asked if you would like to make a donation to the charities Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.  Google will match donations made up to $250,000.  As an added incentive, the airport with the highest per passenger donation rate by Jan. 1st, 2010 will be awarded $15,000 from Google to be donated to the non-profit charity of their choosing.

If you happen to be flying on Virgin America this holiday season, Google will also be providing free in-flight Wi-Fi on their routes.  You can read details on all of the airports, flights, charity donations and more at FreeHolidayWiFi.com.

So, great, all of those people in airports are getting all of that free Wi-Fi, but what are you going to do if you’re in Times Square in New York City?  Well, that’s where Yahoo comes in!  According to paidContent, starting today, Yahoo will provide free Wi-Fi in Times Square for one year.  While this may seem like an odd place to whip out your laptop, think of the tourist factor as they get out their iPhones, iPod Touches and other Wi-Fi enabled devices to make dinner reservations, try to find tickets to Broadway shows and so on.  And New Year’s Eve?  Forget about it.  More pictures than ever will probably be uploaded live from the celebration.

As for Microsoft, it has partnered with mobile advertising firm JiWire according to MediaPost to offer users free Wi-Fi in exchange for doing one search on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  This will be done at selected hotspots in places such as hotels and airports.

It seems the air is going to be filled with free Wi-Fi for some time to come, why not take advantage of it?

In case you’ve ever wondered if your favorite game on Facebook is making any money … it is.

Electronic Arts (EA), a major gaming company for game consoles, computers and mobile devices, has decided to enter the social media gaming space in a major way. It was announced today that EA would purchase Playfish, the company behind games such as Restaurant City, Pet Society and more, For $400 million.  The deal is structured as $275 million in cash, $25 million in stock options to help retain current employees and $100 million in earnout bonuses for company targets through Dec. 31st, 2011.

It is estimated that Playfish is currently earning around $75 million a year from traditional advertising, in-game sales of digital items and through offer advertising.

So, the next time you fire up one of those addictive games on Facebook, believe us, you’re helping someone make money.  Sure it looks like you’re not doing anything, but click an add … buy something for your farm … click on one of those offer ads that will give you game items in exchange for doing something, and well that suddenly turns into a multi-million dollar business.  This isn’t to say this is a bad thing, it’s just shocking to see how much all of that really adds up to.

And remember, Playfish isn’t the biggest company in the market, that would be Zynga … anyone want to guess how much they are making per year?

There is no question that the higher you rank in Google the better, but there are times when you can take that importance a bit too seriously.

The other day, my friend Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins shared an item on Google Reader from a site named Business Pundit that literally took my breath away.

It is actually difficult to tell if this was someone’s lame attempt at a joke, or if someone actually thought they could use intimidation to get what they wanted, but either way it is shocking.  The short version is that someone received an email telling them they needed to remove their site from Google’s search engine because the other party felt they didn’t belong, and they were outranking them.  They needed to remove their site or face legal action.  Here is the email as it was posted (I did edit the Google Chat window to hide the names of this person’s contacts):

After I picked up my jaw and stopped laughing at the absurdity of this email, I had to wonder if someone would ever actually fall for something like this.

The higher you rank in a search engine the better, but to threaten someone with lawsuits is a new one on me.  Most people work on their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase their ranking, but perhaps it would be easier to just threaten those with better SEO than you off the search engine so you don’t actually have to work on it?  True, this person says they have optimized their site, but you can always do a bit more tweaking.

In short, no, someone can not sue you for being ranked higher than them in a search engine no matter if they say you don’t belong on that keyword or not.  I would hope no one else would ever attempt using this tactic, but if one person did it, it is almost certain that someone somewhere else has tried it, or may try it.  Don’t fall for this, and if you ever do get an email like this, merely laugh it off, go about your day … oh, and share it for the world to get a laugh.

It’s only a rumor at this point, but it is quite possible that Apple is preparing to break its exclusivity with AT&T in 2010.

According to rumors reported by AppleInsider, Apple has contracted for a version of its popular iPhone to be built with both UMTS/CDMA bandwidths, meaning that it would work with every carrier in the world. This would reduce the cost to Apple of having to produce different handsets for different markets, and it would also open up the possibility of the iPhone coming to Verizon in the USA.

Does this mean that Apple is for sure severing its exclusivity ties with AT&T in the USA?  No, of course it doesn’t.  While the new iPhone is scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2010, and that is close to when the AT&T contract ends, that doesn’t mean anything is written in stone.

Would it be smart for Apple to get away from AT&T?  Yes, it would be considering the numerous complaints users have had with the carrier, it has reflected badly on Apple in turn.  But, just because a phone has the capability to do something doesn’t mean it necessarily will.  This change to the iPhone’s construction solves a lot of problems for Apple in numerous markets, not just in the USA.

Another portion of the rumor is that Apple is looking at reducing the screen size from 3.5″ to 2.8″.  I find it difficult to believe that Apple would do this across the board, it sounds more to me like the oft-rumored “iPhone Nano”.  People have speculated for years now that Apple would come out with some smaller, cheaper version of the phone to capture more of the market.  A screen reduction of that magnitude would be very odd if it was an “all or nothing” scenario.

What I find most amusing is that we are already in rumor mode for iPhone 2010 … I bet the 2011 rumors will start fairly soon too …

With all of the hoopla made over every time Apple denies an application access to the App Store, you have to wonder how ones that illegally harvest cell phone numbers make it through.

An iPhone user in Washington state named Michael Turner is looking to start a class action lawsuit against iPhone app developer Storm8 according to MediaPost.

The company is the maker of popular game apps such as “Vampires Live” and “Zombies Live”, and it is now known that their applications have been sending user’s phone numbers back to their central office.  The company claims that this was a bug in their games and that it has now been fixed.

Mr. Turner claims that this action actually violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and that is what he is seeking to sue the company under.  Unfortunately Mr. Turner may have a long road ahead of him due to the fact that particular act states that the act must have “impaired the integrity of the data stored on a protected computer.”  Also, legal experts are saying that the collection of the phone number is not that sensitive as other data.

Either way, win or lose, Mr. Turner is correct to have at least brought this to everyone’s attention.  Sure what Storm8 did was improper, but not necessarily that harmful.  What is harmful is when you start to wonder that if this got past Apple, what else is lurking in those other 100,000 applications they are so proud of?

Are you a heavy user of Google products? If you are, more than likely you are going to love Dashboard.

As Google is slowly taking over our lives with its numerous free offerings, it would be nice to see just how many of its services you are using, and also get quick access to all of them.  The new Dashboard feature was announced this morning, and it does exactly that.  With this new tool it lets you quickly see at a glance which services you are using, statistics on their uses and easy access to the controls of each so you can quickly change settings without having to hunt for the right page.

One nice thing about Google is they make extremely straight forward videos to explain their new tools, and so we leave you with the newest one which explains everything you need to know in a matter of minutes.

Apple has announced the the iTunes App Store has now passed 100,000 available apps, but we have to wonder why this is seen as a good thing.

All of us who work around mobile news have known this day was coming, the day that the iTunes App Store passes 100,000 available apps, but it leaves me to wonder why this should be something that should be celebrated.

Have you ever looked through the App Store in-depth?  As someone who has written more articles about the marketplace than I care to remember, I have, and I can’t say that I always walk away impressed.  Sure there are some monumentally fantastic apps out there (the app for online music site Pandora springs to mind), but there are also a ton of really horrible applications.

The App Store is becoming a victim of its own success.  As people have heard all of these stories of people making tons of money from producing an app, people that have no business even trying to build an app have gotten involved.  As the number of apps has grown, it has become impossible to secrete the wheat from the chaff, and the good apps, the ones deserving of success, are becoming fewer and further between because you simply can’t find them.

A lot of the problem stems from the overly broad categories inside of the store.  While sections such as games, probably the most popular category,  has sub-categories, other sections are just too generic.  Take music for instance, anything even barely related to music gets lumped into one gelatinous group.  Why aren’t there sub-categories like “Streaming Music”, “Radio Stations”, “Music Games”, etc?  No, it’s just all “Music”.  There are currently 182 pages in the Music category with 20 apps per page … do you want to browse 3,640 apps without any additional guidance beyond … “Music”?  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The only problem is just good old greed.  The Weather category has 22 pages of applications … 22 PAGES!!  Does anyone really need more than one or two weather apps?  Well, here is part of the problem in a category such as this, you have people that release specific apps for cities.  On the front page of this section alone you have “iWeather Oklahoma City”, “iWeather Seattle”, “iWeather Phoenix”, “iWeather Philadelphia”, “iWeather St. Louis”, “iWeather San Antonio” and so on, with each of these apps selling for $.99.  Or you could, you know, download the Weather.com app for free, enter multiple zip codes for it to install and be done.

You have app developers cranking out silly specific apps, choking the store to the point of being unusable, and Apple just seems to sit back and not care.  No, no, instead lets just keep approving app after app after app after app …

Part of the problem is that Apple does have to approve every app, and every time they deny one, there is a huge stink in the tech blogosphere with people decrying how unfair this is, and Apple shouldn’t be the gate keepers and yada yada yada.  So they keep approving the vast majority of apps that come in, no matter how lame they are, and end up choking the store so that customers can never find what they are looking for, and this results in reduced sales for the developers.  It is a vicious cycle that seems to have only Apple coming out a winner in the end.

I know it’s not an easy predicament to get out of.  Who is to say which apps are worthy, and which aren’t?  Perhaps a limit on the number of apps any one developer can release in a certain time?  I.E. “You get to release 2 apps a month”  I am sure people would complain, but something has to be done.

In the meanwhile, could we please get some more sub-categories?  Please?  Pretty please?

The first Nook e-reader hasn’t even shipped from Barnes & Noble yet, and already there is a lawsuit in the books over it.

Back on Oct. 19th we received a press release from a company we had never heard of named Spring Design.  The release was about an e-reader they were developing named Alex which looked quite interesting.  We wrote up the story, but found it a tad odd that the company couldn’t give us anything close to a firm release date or suggested retail price even after we contacted them with follow-up questions.  To be honest, I have been a writer long enough, and read enough press releases to choke a horse, that I could tell something felt a bit rushed about the whole thing.

On Oct. 20th it became rather obvious to me why it felt rushed when I saw the first pictures of the Barnes & Noble Nook: both devices shared an e-ink display at the top and a color display at the bottom.  My first reaction upon seeing the Nook was, “start the countdown clock to one of these companies suing the other.”

Well, sure enough, very late last night I received another press release from Spring Design announcing its lawsuit against Barnes & Noble for violating their intellectual property.

In the new release, Spring Design claims that they have been working on the Alex since 2006, and at the beginning of 2009 they entered into talks with Barnes & Noble about the device protected under non-disclosure agreements.  Here is the most relevant portion of the release:

Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.

What strikes me as odd, yet again from reading thousands of press releases over the years, is that the release is lacking in some pertinent information.  There is no mention of which court this was filed with which makes fact checking the case a nightmare, and there is also no mention of the amount of monetary damages that Spring Design is seeking.  Perhaps it is just an oversight by a possibly inexperienced PR crew, but they are significant piece of information.

We have posted a picture of both devices side-by-side for you to examine below (not to scale), and you can be the judge … well, that is until this goes to court.

Our totally uneducated conclusion? Yes, the color screen is where the biggest hiccup is, but the Alex is using it deliver media from various Internet sources, while the Nook is using it for an on-board store.  There is also a problem that both devices are running on the Android operating system, but seeing as Android is open source and free, it is difficult to make a case there.  One other sticking point on the Android front … Android is only 1 year old as of this past week, so it was definitely not running on the Alex prior to the fourth quarter of 2008, what was the Alex running prior to that?

This isn’t going to be an easy case to prove for Spring Design, and I honestly have no opinion on which company is in the right, but it sure is going to be messy and expensive.

Let me just state up front that if you purchase the TwitterPeek, someone from StarterTech will come to your house and punch you squarely in the face and then take your lunch money for good measure.

We see a lot of stupid ideas in the world of technology, there seems to be no bounds to which people will go to cash in on a fad, but even we are blown away by the TwitterPeek.

Peek is a mobile device company that seems to specialize in devices for people that have never explored the capabilities of their cell phones.  The first device from the company, simply called Peek, was a device dedicated to delivering only emails to you.  They branded it as a way to save $100′s over buying a smart phone, lower monthly plans, etc, etc.  The problem is that it is another device to carry around with you, and even non-smartphone options are beginning to offer email capabilities.  It was pretty much of a joke device, but yet it must have had some success because it has now spawned the TwitterPeek.

The TwitterPeek uses the exact same body as the original Peek (i.e. massive cost cutting), but all this device does is Twitter.  Look, we love Twitter around here, but the idea of a device that does nothing but Twitter just makes us scratch our heads.  Yes, it does offer all of the Twitter features you want such as ReTweeting, direct messages, replies and so on, but, again, Twitter is all this device does … nothing else.

To get your Tweet on with the TwitterPeek you’ll need to head over to Amazon (it is exclusive to them at least for now) and buy it in either black or Twitter blue (can we say ‘ugly as sin’?  I knew you could) and pay either $99.95 plus $7.95 a month for the pay as you go option, or $199.95 for the lifetime of service option.  Or you could, you know, buy a Motorla RAZR phone for next to nothing and pay a few bucks a month for a data plan … we’re just sayin’.

All kidding aside, we here at StarterTech try to guide the less tech savvy people as best as we can without being judgmental, but this really is one of those times where we have to highly suggest you stay away from this device.  Our fear is that a lot of teenagers will be putting this on their wishlist for the holiday shopping season, and we would strongly encourage you to look at other solutions for your kid.  The newness of this device will wear off with any child in a matter of days, if not hours, when they see how truly limited it is in functionality.

Trust us, avoid this device, get yourself a nice phone instead … and save me from having to come to your house to take your lunch money.