When a new billboard in San Francisco scrolls the message “Motor On Vera!” it’s a good bet that someone named Vera is driving her Mini Cooper at that moment.

Or that her car is nicknamed Vera.

A billboard using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology started “talking” Monday. In a new twist on tech-savvy marketing, the board flashes a personalized message as the driver cruises by with a Mini-provided key fob that sends a signal to activate the billboard. It’s all part of the flippant, quirky attitude of Mini and its loyal following.

This is the coolest/scariest new use of RFID tags and advertising. Does this remind any one else of the scene from Minority report where Tom Cruises’s character walks by the billboards that try and sell him things based on what he has purchased recently? Yet somehow this seems more cool.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Twas the night before MacWorld
And all through the hall
Not a vendor was stirring
No, not at all

The attendees lay snuggled
asleep in their beds
While visions of iPhones
danced in their heads

The iPhone is here!
It’s coming right quick
We’d been told this before
(A marketing trick)

The rumor sites spewed
complete information
Its color was puce
It had teleportation

It holds all your podcasts
All of them fit!
Like Amateur Traveler,
MacCast and TWiT

The screen is quit large
But small in its case
Through SETI it picks up
strange signals from space

The battery life
is well more than an hour
It keeps running for years
on nuclear power

And what of the iTV
promised last fall
will that debut
in this hallowed hall?

We saw that box
was sleek and quite skinny
Comfortably fitting
atop of my mini

The rumor sites claim
that it now has a drive
and streams from location
unedited, live!

It hold all my movies,
my songs and my shows
An plays them at random
as only Steve knows

Its picture are cleared
by well applied science
I hear that doubles
as a kitchen appliance

The rumors say iLife
is set to reprise
with a new holographic
ui a surprise

The video iPod
surely we’ll see
which unfolds to reveal
a flat screen TV

When all of a sudden
There arose such a din
My alarm clock is ringing
And I have slept in

I sprang from my bed
And jumped in the shower
The keynote of Steve Jobs
Begins in an hour

Popularity: 4% [?]

When you received your new Mac it included iChat which you could use to connect to AOL’s Instant Messenger service. iChat is a fine application and particularly useful for video chats, but in this article I am going to try and talk you out of using it for normal text based chats and talk you into switching to the free application Adium.

Friend’s List

If you have a number of people that you chat with (I have around 100 people in my buddy list) then I find the Adium a more efficient display. You do give up seeing the current icon for people but most people I know have the same icon day after day. iChat supports groups as does Adium but if you only want to see the people who are online and use groups in iChat you can have all of the friends who are offline moved to a Offline friends group. Adium allows you to group your buddies and also show or not show offline buddies completely independently. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

This is a great example of what you can do with ImageWell and a sarcastic sense of humor. This is a collection of pictures from the Podcast and Portable Media Expo in September.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Some tasks like getting a man to the moon are complicated and the systems needed to accomplish them are complicated. But some things, like keeping track of the things you need to do, are not complicated and the software you need to manage them should also be uncomplicated. ToDo from Omicron Software Systems is just that kind of software, uncomplicated.

The basic functionality of ToDo is simple. Create multiple lists of items. Each item can have a priority from 1-10 or can be marked as done. Lists are kept sorted by priority with different color priority numbers marking high, medium and low priorities. You can quickly re-prioritize or select items using keyboard shortcuts. You can also drag items from one list to another in this clean Cocoa interface. If it did nothing else ToDo would be useful.

But ToDo has just a few more tricks up its sleeve. If you want to see what your top priorities are across all your projects you can click on the ToDo icon on the dock which will display a list. You can use that menu to navigate to the todo items. The menu can be displayed in one of 5 different formats.

You can import your existing todo items from iCal to get started. Registered users (the program is $15 as shareware) can also download “ToDo X to iPod Notes” to synchronize their todo list with their iPod and a script called “Mail to ToDo X” that will allow you to turn an email into a todo item.

Popularity: 3% [?]