Mpowered Luci Review

By George Harding

Luci is a solar lantern. It looks sort like a cylinder that has been collapsed, but it inflates to a regular cylinder.

It has a set of solar cells on one end of the cylinder, along with a recessed button for selecting the options: Off, On, Flashing.

In the collapsed form, you must inflate it by blowing into a valve on one end of the cylinder. Once inflated, you can turn it on, if it has sufficient charge

The solar cells need about 6 hours for a full charge, but the company says that Luci will retain its charge for up to 3 months.

The lantern is water-resistant, which makes it suitable for picnics, vacations and rainy days.

It provides light over a 15 square foot area and provides the light for 6-12 hours.

It’s very compact when collapsed, being 5 inches in diameter, but only 1 inch high. When inflated, tis 5 inches high.

It does not generate any significant heat when light and is eco-friendly.

Mpowerd, the Luci developer, helps those in underdeveloped nations by donating one Luci unit for each one you buy.

Luci by Mpowerd       

www.mpowerd.com              

Price about $16 for buy one donate one

MSFT Windows Sales

MSFT can’t get people to “upgrade” their existing PCs to the latest Win8. Buyers aren’t spending hard earned money on new computers when WinXp does all they ned a computer for. Here are some details:

Starting April 8, 2014, there will be no more patches or updates -- including security ones -- issued for Windows XP. This is despite the fact that Windows XP still had an estimated 37 percent share of all desktop operating systems as of June 2013.

Microsoft and its partners have a lot of work to do between now and then to try to get more businesses off Windows XP. During the first day of the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, officials reminded resellers and systems integrators of their marching orders around the 11-year-old operating system.

Microsoft's top Windows priorities for its fiscal year 2014 (which began on July 1, 2013) are to move all businesses off XP and to become the number one business tablet in the market, said Erwin visser, General Manager of Windows Commercial, during a breakout session at the show.

Microsoft and its partners would need to migrate 586,000 PCs per day over the next 273 days in order to get rid of all PCs running Windows XP, Visser said. Microsoft's actual goal is to get the XP base below 10 percent of the total Windows installed base by that time, he said.

Visser told partners that there's an estimated $32 billion service opportunity for them in moving users off XP, given that companies are spending an average of $200 per PC to move off XP to Windows 7 or Windows 8.

Microsoft is making available new programs, offers, tools and partnerships to help encourage more users to abandon XP, Visser said. He noted that Microsoft will be spending $40 million in fiscal 2014 to continue its Windows Accelerate Program, which is its pre-sales program for moving more of its customers to a "modern environment." As part of Accelerate, Microsoft pays some of its reseller and integrator partners to create "proof of concept" Metro-Style apps to show customers what's possible if they move to Windows 8.

Samsung Pays the iFruit company 20 billion Nickles

Samsung sent 30 trucks filled with 5-cent coins to  Apple’s headquarters in California. Initially, the security company that protects the facility said the trucks were in the wrong place, but minutes later, Tim Cook (Apple CEO) received a call from Samsung CEO explaining that they will pay $1 billion dollars for the fine recently ruled against the South Korean company in this way.

The funny part is that the signed document does not specify a single payment method, so Samsung is entitled to send the creators of the iPhone their billion dollars in the way they deem best.

This dirty but genius geek troll play is a new headache to Apple executives as they will need to put in long hours counting all that money, to check if it is all there and to try to deposit it crossing fingers to hope a bank will accept all the coins.

Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of Samsung Electronics, told the media that his company is not going to be intimidated by a group of “geeks with style” and that if they want to play dirty, they also know how to do it.

You can use your coins to buy refreshments at the little machine for life or melt the coins to make computers, that’s not my problem, I already paid them and fulfilled the law.

A total of 20 billion coins, delivery hope to finish this week.

Let’s see how Apple will respond to this.

"I Won"

Many, many years ago I first saw this Gahan Wilson cartoon in a magazine. The caption was: I won.

I was reminded of this old cartoon today when I read the report that Lenovo has passed HP as the number one seller of PCs. Wonderful, they are now the leader on an ever dwindling market. Someday in the not too distant future the company that sells one PC in a quarter will be the “winner” because no one else sold one!!

So here’s the rundown: Gartner shows Lenovo selling slightly less than 12.7 million PCs, just a few hundred thousand more than HP at 12.4 million, giving them both a share of about 16 percent and change, meaning they divided up about a third of the total of 76 million between them during the quarter. HP saw its shipments fall by almost five percent versus the year-ago quarter. Lenovo’s shipments declined fractionally.

For its part, Dell was in third place globally, shipping slightly fewer than 9 million, down about four percent. Acer and Asus were fourth and fifth, declining by 35 percent and 20 percent respectively.

The global market declined by about 11 percent, which isn’t nearly as bad as the year-on-year decline seen in Q1, which was the worst since records have been kept. But it marks the fifth quarter in a row of market declines, which makes for the worst such trend seen in the PC industry’s history.

LensPen Photo Products

“Every day more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera.”

Those are the only words spoken during a 60-second TV ad for the iPhone in their current campaign. One minute of people touching their iPhone screen as they take photos of everyday life. What the ad doesn’t say is that taking all those photos – along with editing, texting and Tweeting – will cover the screen with fingerprints. That’s where LensPen steps in.

“LensPen has the products to keep smartphone touchscreens and lenses clean,” said Ryan Keating, vice president of marketing for the LensPen Group. “Our carbon technology that has been used to clean lenses and filters for more than 20 years is also great for removing fingerprints from smartphone touchscreens and lenses.”

SmartKlear™ is designed to remove fingerprints from iPhone and Android phone touchscreens. Its cleaning pad is impregnated with the same carbon compound used in other LensPen products. No liquids, cloths or sprays. Replaceable cleaning pads give 300 cleanings per pad.

While an idle DSLR camera lens is usually covered, the lens on a phone sits unprotected in a pocket or purse, and sooner or later, it will be covered by fingerprints. CellKlear features the same carbon-impregnated cleaning tip as other LensPen models, and is sized perfectly to clean a smartphone lens.

iPads and tablets are also very popular cameras. SideKick, the original LensPen touchscreen cleaner, has a cleaning pad twice the size of SmartKlear’s, and it is perfect for removing fingerprints from larger-sized touchscreens.

SmartKlear, SideKick and CellKlear are available at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and other fine retailers. For more information on LensPen products, go to www.lenspen.com.

MSFT Restructuring

MSFT is trying to restructure itself yet again. Past efforts have had mixed results and they need to do something soon on order to keep their stock price propped up. Here’s more on the story:

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is poised to unveil his plan to drastically restructure the tech giant this week. And, while timing might change, sources said that the current plan is to make it public on Thursday.

A number of issues are still up in the air, due to the close-to-the-vest planning by Ballmer over the major reorg — which has caused a not inconsiderable amount of nervousness on the part of top execs at Microsoft.

As has been much reported here and elsewhere, he is expected to organize the Redmond, Wash.-based company around services — or software — and devices, both in the consumer and business sectors. Ballmer had telegraphed this intent in his shareholder letter last fall.

The effort, said many insiders who have talked to Ballmer and others involved, is to create something that is being called “functional coherence” at the company, although it is not among Microsoft’s talking points when the restructuring will be made public. That also includes putting more wood behind fewer efforts and eliminating overlapping functions.

In theory, it also presumably means things going where they belong in the product cycle. In practice, which is a lot messier, that means moving a lot of important people around.

Another MSFT Failure

Just after celebrating the service's sweet 16th, Microsoft has announced it will be shutting down MSN TV on September 30th. To help ease the transition, Redmond is offering current subscribers free access to MSN Premium through December 31st. After that, customers will have to pay the standard rate of $10 per month or $90 per year.

Users will have to switch their email addresses to Outlook accounts and copy any saved content (bookmarks, Scrapbook photos, et cetera) to SkyDrive before September if they want to access it in the future. Of course, folks that miss the WebTV experience still have other equally unwieldy options. The shut-down was inevitable, but we can't help feeling at least a little nostalgic for the service's 640 x 480 view of the web.