I'm not sure why, but beaming business cards between PDAs never caught on as much as I would have liked. Of course Palm and Wince PDAs don't speak the same beaming language (of course) and I never saw it much in Windows anyway.

With my new fancy scanner, I can scan a stack of 60 business cards in a minute, so it's not going to take me long to do the physical scanning. Business card scanning has been around for a while, but it still presents challenges.

There's a lot of equipment you don't need to have for long. And in some cases, the answer is to rent that equipment, but only a small subset of stuff is available for rental, especially at a good price.

So one alternative is what I would call a "ReBay" -- buy something used, typically via eBay, and then after done with it, sell it there again. In an efficient market, this costs only the depreciation on the unit, along with shipping and transaction fees. Unlike a rental, there is little time cost other than depreciation.

A lot of people want to catalog their extensive libraries, to be able to know what they have, to find books and even to join social sites which match you with people with similar book tastes, or even trade books with folks.

As workers search for trapped miners in Utah, having drilled a 9" hole down to what is hoped to be their area, they plan to use things like sound and detecting CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to find the miners.

The radio had a tribute to Bob Barker, who retires today after 35 years hosting The Price is Right. I always admired the genius of that show in making product placement an essential part of the show -- the show was about the advertisers and made the audience think about how much the product was worth and remember it. I'm surprised we didn't see more copycat game shows. There's plenty of product placement today, but it's largely gratuitous, not integral as this was. The fans on the radio said that while the show was gone, they could always watch reruns.

Everybody's been discovering things in Google Street View. While Microsoft and Amazon did this sort of thing much earlier, there's been a lot more publicity about Google doing it because it's Google, and it's much more high resolution among other things.

But now that it's out, I expect we'll see web sites pop up where people spot the Google camera-car and report on its location in real time. Allowing people to prepare for its passage.

I expect we'll see:

At our new favourite Indian buffet (Cafe Bombay) they run Bollywood videos on big screens all the time. In Bollywood, as you probably know, everybody is dancing all the time, in wonderful synchronization, like Broadway but far more. I've never been to an Indian dance club to see if people try to do that in real life, but I suspect they want to.

I started musing about a future where brain implants let you give a computer control of your limbs so you could participate in such types of dance, but I realized we might be able to do something much sooner.

Many people accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles they will never use. Some of the airlines allow you to donate miles to a very limited set of charities. I can see why they limit it -- they would much rather have you not use the miles than have the charity use them. Though it's possible that while the donor does not get any tax credit for donated miles, the airline does.

My father was famously a preacher turned agnostic. We used to argue all the time about the difference between an agnostic and an athiest. I felt the difference was inconsequential, he felt it was important. And I've had the same argument with other proclaimed agnostics. I found an amusing way to sum up my view of it in one answer.

What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?

The difference is the atheist says she's an atheist, while the agnostic says she's an agnostic.

When I watch the boundless energy of young children, and their parents' frustration over it, I wonder how high-tech will alter how children are raised in the next few decades. Of course already TV, and now computers play a large role, and it seems very few toys don't talk or move on their own.

But I've also realized that children, both from a sense of play and due to youthful simplicity, will tolerate some technologies far before adults will. For example, making an AI to pass the Turing Test for children may be much, much simpler than making one that can fool an adult. As such, we may start to see simple AIs meant for interacting with, occupying the minds of and educating children long before we find them usable as adults.

Another technology that young children might well tolerate sooner is virtual reality. We might hate the cartoonish graphics and un-natural interfaces of today's VRs but children don't know the interfaces aren't natural -- they will learn any interface -- and they love cartoon worlds.

Lots of people love model airplanes, and I bet they would love to simulate dogfights. They can't fire actual projectiles, as that would be dangerous, expensive, unworkable due to the weight and actually damage planes.

I wrote earlier about the bluetooth vibrator watch. I pushed this in part to promote the idea that phones should (almost) never ring. That ringing is rude to others and violates your own privacy, too.

Most of us, when we travel, put appointments we will have while on the road into our calendars. And we usually enter them in local time. ie. if I have a 1pm appointment in New York, I set it for 1pm not 10am in my Pacific home time zone. While some calendar programs let you specify the time zone for an event, most people don't, and many people also don't change the time zone when they cross a border, at least not right away.

At various times I have been part of dinner groups that meet once a month or once a week at either the same restaurant or a different restaurant every time. There's usually no special arrangement, but it's usually good for the restaurant since they get a big crowd on a slow night.

Last week, I wrote about new ideas for finding the lost. One I've done some follow-up on is the cell phone approach. While it's not hard to design a good emergency rescue radio if you are going to explicitly carry a rescue device when you get lost, the key to cell phones is that people are already carrying them without thinking about it -- even when going places with no cell reception since they want the phone with them when they return to reception.

There is a story that Ikonos is going to redirect a satellite to do a high-res shot of the area where CNet editor James Kim is missing in Oregon. That's good, though sadly, too late, but they also report not knowing what to do with the data.

Ok, this is a silly idea, but it would make a great baby shower gift. Crib sheets -- which is to say sheets to go on a baby's bed -- printed with small notes on your favourite subjects of choice -- math, physics, history, as you would need for taking an exam. And who knows, maybe you can pretend if the baby sleeps surrounded by Maxwell's equations she'll become a genius.

I go to many conferences, and most of them seem to want to give me a nice canvas bag, and often a shirt as well. Truth is though, I now have a stack of about 20 bags in my closet. I've used some of the bags, typically the backpacks, but when I have so many other bags I don't feel a strong motivation to walk around with a briefcase or laptop bag with a giant sponsor's logo on it, or worse, a collection of 10 logos. No matter how nice the bag is. In addition, even if I got logo-free bags I have no need for 20 of them, but I can't really give away logo covered bags as gifts.

In furtherance of my prior ideas on smart power, I wanted to add another one -- the concept of backup power.

As I wrote before, I want power plugs and jacks to be smart, so they can negotiate how much power the device needs and how much the supply can provide, and then deliver it.

Trade show booths are always searching for branded items to hand out to prospects. Until they fix the airport bans, how about putting your brand on a tube of toothpaste and/or other travel liquids now banned from carry-on bags?

(Yeah, most hotels will now give you these, but it's the thought that counts and this one would be remembered longer than most T-shirts.)