lukeM|V.com

I recently was invited to partake in a Beta launch of Google’s newest acquisition GrandCentral. The product allows you to take several of your phone numbers, and route them to 1 phone….beyond that, however, is its on-line interface that allows you to screen calls easier, be alerted by SMS and Email when you have a message, listen to and download your voice messages online, and even make calls from the web site—this is currently how I am filter freelance phone calls.

The perfect thing about this product is the fact that you are able to, from the web interface, see a detailed listing of your messages, who they are from, how long they are, and able to click to listen to them or download them as an MP3. In my opinion, this is truly going to be the future of telephone services. We currently have a flavor of it with apple’s iPhone messages, but in the years to come, we will certainly be able to go one step further.

Thoughts? Is this good or bad?

After months of speculation and debate, News Corp. has announced its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co Inc. (who’s co-founder, Edward Davis Jones, was a Worcester Academy alumni) for $5.6 billion.

Rupert Murdoch has been acclaimed for his understanding of the role of new media within today’s society. As newspapers have been in debate in this blog (here, here, and here), and as Google has expanded it’s advertising model to include print ads (here) it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s forward thinking will affect the print industry—specifically the newspaper industry. Thoughts?

I heard a statement a few years ago that went along these lines, “Every single medium that exists today is in existence because of the drive of pornography.” Whether it be films (one of the first “new media” outlets to watch porn), video cassettes (created to distribute porn more easily than film reels), or the Internet (used to check e-mail, IM, and watch porn). Thanks to MIT’s Media Lab the new not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child program—where schoolchildren in Nigerian where given a free laptop to be given “new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves”—these children were able to do what comes naturally to any male with technology: find porn.

Reuters Africa,

“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials.”

OLPC News dubs the program one pornographic image per child now. But, like all good things that come to an end, changes to the next round of laptops will include filters to prevent these children from doing what every child in developed worlds do—look at porn.

Won’t somebody think of the children??

More:
ShortNews.com
Tech.co.uk
TechShout

Advertising in the 50s…smoke anywhere, women expected to be treated like girls, the famed 3-martini lunch…ah “those were the days.” Matthew Weiner’s (producer of The Sopranos) Mad Men is finally premiering tonight on AMC at 10:00pm.

At the beginning of the month Google acquired GrandCentral. The service can be used to manage all of your phone numbers (cell, work, home) and consolidate them into a single number. On the web site, you are able to manage your numbers, forward them to specific umber, forward callers to voicemail (and listen to them while they leave a message, or even record them).

This is a great service, and with Google now running with it, we will see some amazing integration with gTalk or gMail. Throw in Apple’s iPhone’s voice mail technology, and we will no longer have to spend 20minutes waiting to hear our voicemail operator give us prompts and tell us how many message we have that are new, that are saved, and are marked to expire.