LIVEdigitally

The Hyatt Regency, a beautiful hotel located south of San Francisco kicked off the 9th Annual Connections Conference today. Companies from around the world came together in order to share their different home connection innovations. A woman by the name of Tina Sharkey from AOL stood before us for the keynote speech. She started off with a few numbers pertaining to a day in the life for AOL:

53% of all people who are on the internet manage to make their way to the AOL network.
1.83 billion Instant Messages are sent. (heck, I can allot for half of that)
392 million emails
560,000 blogs posted
20 million photos shared
AOL holds exclusive music sessions, similar to an MTV unplugged session (but they are plugged), and rapper 50 Cent generated 6.1 million streams from that the first day.
(more…)

Today marked day one of three, for the 9th annual Connections Conference. Parks Associates and CEA have pulled together to host this fine event. The Digital Home Conference and Showcase promised a few exciting things to me this evening. We are looking forward to streaming lots of information from a central location of the house, using the existing power sockets to control devices in your household, viewing your home surveillance camera via your mobile phone, and networking all of your home computers without hours and hours of headaches. All of these great new tools plan to be delivered in the near future.

The conference spans Wed to Fri with speakers from companies such as Intel, Motorola, Cisco, and Yahoo! to name a few (and to name drop). I’ll be there, and not so square. Stay tuned for the next four or five days while LIVEdigitally brings you the new technology that just may end up in your home.

be happy =)

You may have seen these on an episode of MTV cribs yesterday. But Oakley has some nifty sunglasses out. The Thump, a line of sunglasses with ear buds on the bars where it overlaps your ears, (if my terminology is incorrect, it is because I do not wear glasses). Remarkably, it’s an mp3 player built into your sunglasses. The price is steep, $545 for the below…

“256 megabytes of solid-state NAND flash memory for storing up to 60 songs
The best polarized lenses on the planet
Absolute music freedom with no wires or cords to dangle or tangle
Up to 6 hours of playback time
75MHz DSP with 18-bit Sigma Delta DAC for state-of-the-art audio fidelity
Acoustic expansion speakers with forward/back booming and sideways pivoting
Flip-up lenses with raked-back contours for maximum protection against sun, wind and side impact
Patented XYZ Optics® for razor sharp clarity at all angles of vision, even at lens periphery
Plutonite lens material blocks 100% of all UVA, UVB, UVC and harmful blue light
Durable O Matter® frame with less than 1.8-ounce total weight for all-day comfort
Supports storage of data files along with song files
Includes high-speed USB cable for transferring song files from Mac or Windows PC”

It’s a great start to a very unique idea for an industry that probably has not had a lot of digital technology infused into it. I”m waiting to have camera’s built in with cell phones as well. Listen to some tunes, while you are driving, and you can even tape an accident while it happens, or record a robbery in progress.