LIVEdigitally

According to this article, for only $350 you can buy a pair of shoes with GPS built-in.  Sounds like a steal, except there’s also a $19.95 monthly fee. 

For shoes.

With GPS.

Hmmm.

So, part of the reason to do this?  Find someone you think is lost, say an elderly relative or a child.  Only catch is, the only way to activate the “find them” feature is by the wearer pushing a button on the shoe.  That’s just not going to work very well is it?

There’s a lot of attention toward GPS these days.  I love the technology, and I love my GPS unit, but I totally believe it’s a dying device category.  A lot of next-generation mobile phones have GPS chips embedded, and that’s really the most logical place for it to exist, especially when you consider the incredibly poor in-dash receivers built-into the higher end cars.  Funny how you can pay an extra $3000 for a badly built ‘option’ or save a lot of your money and buy a standalone unit.

If you really want some GPS in your life (and I don’t blame you), for about $450, you can buy my favorite GPS unit, the Nuvi 350 (amazon link), and give it to your kids.  Probably more useful this way anyway. 

I love my Nuvi.

I don’t want a Nuvi Shoe, but I definitely want a Nuvi phone (long before I want my Zune phone).

Back in December, Netgear tried an experiment in which they invited anyone who was interested to become their “blogger in residence” for CES.  The winner was ushered off to Monte Carlo Las Vegas on a private jet coach seat where a 30-foot stretch limo picked them up they grabbed a cab to the penthouse suite at the Bellagio Marriott.  They selected Dave Zatz as their guest blogger, and I thought he did a pretty bang-up job for them.  Looks like I’m the next one up to bat for them.

Ready to hear how small a world this is?  If you hadn’t heard, Dave recently joined Sling Media. Guess what he’s doing there…  Blogging, community relations, interaction with the blogosphere, etc.  In honor of this interesting confluence, I am going to recommend to Dave that we relaunch both our blogs – I’ll be ToesNotFunny, and he’ll become ZATZdigitally.

I’m looking forward to the blogging with Netgear, as I’ll have pretty open access to their executive team for the next few weeks (of course, I will have to drive all the way down to Santa Clara, which ain’t pretty).  One topic definitely on my mind is to see how the company’s doing with regards to revenue-per-employee (back in 2003 they were making $1.4 million per employee), and hear about how that scales (or if it does).  I’m also looking forward to catching up with CTO Mark Merrill (who I knew from when I worked for Mediabolic a few years back) and CMO Debbie Williams (we met at CES).

So, I hope you get the chance to follow the action over at the Netgear blog (it won’t be all-interviews, I have some other stuff to talk about too!).  I think the company’s approach to bringing in external voices is a very interesting (and very welcome) approach to corporate blogging.  Finally, in the spirit of open disclosure, I will say I have a strategic consulting relationship in place with the company, and I’m being given a lifetime supply of routers.