Tag: children
Fool your grandchildren into thinking you were at Obama's inauguration
Unfortunately, the children of the future will be born with a filter in their brain that detects Photoshop tomfoolery, so it might only be your kids that you’re able to fool with this one. FotoFlexer has built a site that’ll let you moosh your face into Obama’s inauguration event.
Okay, you aren’t really going to be fooling anyone seriously with this, but it’s fun for five minutes, and a good marketing stunt by FotoFlexer. Go shop yourself into the inauguration here.
My Inaugural Photo (via TechCrunch)
Related posts: Inauguration 2.0 – Presidents’ speeches broken down into tag clouds
| Spammers take advantage of Obama’s inauguration
Microsoft launches 'Time for a Story' – bedtime stories via Windows Live Messenger
There are many families who have to cope with the pain of separation – if Daddy has to fly away on business trips a lot, for example. Well, now Daddy (or Mummy, we’re a politically correct organisation here) can read a bedtime story to his (or her) little sprog over MSN Messenger, wherever they are.
The website – timeforastory.com – is currently populated with three Noddy stories. ‘Rocket Ship’, ‘Rainbow Chaser’, and the intriguingly titled ‘Bounce Alert!’ The stories are interactive – as Mummy or Daddy reads, their kid can click on images to trigger animations.
All you need to get it going is a PC, a copy of MSN Messenger on each PC, a microphone and a webcam. Modern laptops generally have all those things inbuilt. So if you’re in Japan, thousands of miles away from your poor son or daughter, and it’s their bedtime, then stop reading Tech Digest and go read them a bedtime story.
Time for a Story
Related posts: Nine out of ten kids want videogames for Christmas | SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Swinxs – 21st century party games
PayPal offers pocket money for the 21st Century
PayPal has long dominated the market for online payments, but the company has just announced a new initiative that it’s calling ‘PayPal Student Account’. It lets you add up to four sub-accounts to your PayPal account and allocate money to those accounts as you wish – in a single chunk or as a recurring transfer.
There are no fees to pay, and the parent can also give their kid a real-world debit card, linked to the account, which the kid can use to buy stuff in bricks-and-mortar shops. Parents can sign up for alerts for unwanted spending – asking them to approve any transaction over $100, for example. Also, if the kid needs cash unexpectedly, they can text PayPal, who’ll notify the parent and ask them to approve or deny the request.
At the moment, the feature is in an invite-only beta period, and there’s no word when it’ll open up wider. I suspect it might be a little while before we see it in the UK too, so for the moment, you’ll have to stick with the old ‘hand-them-cash’ approach. Sorry.
How much pocket money did you get as a kid? Let us know in the comments. I got £3.50 a week in the mid-90s. Paltry compared to my friends.
Paypal (via New York Times)
Related posts: Wadja wants to save mobile users money by offering free text messages | Web 2.0 companies aren’t making money, say investors
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Swinxs – 21st century party games
Occasionally we actually get to see some sunlight here at Tech Digest. The video above chronicles the results – we all get a bit giddy and descend to the intellectual level of 8-year-olds. Lucky Swinxs was around to save the day…
Nine out of ten kids want videogames for Christmas
If there was ever doubt that gaming had become well and truly mainstream, it must now be officially extinguished. Nine out of ten kids aged between eight and eleven want something game-related for Christmas – a game, console, or peripheral of some sort…
Swinxs brings out the kid in you and feeds him microchips
This is Swinxs, and it’s sort-of like a games console, but not really. I suppose it’s the logical extension of the Wii’s “getting people active” push. It’s a brightly coloured box, with armbands containing RFID chips, that lets you play a bunch of traditional party games, but with actually-quite-awesome technological extras…
Swedish kids embarrassed by dirty dads' online habits… mums too
Children in Sweden are embarrassed and concerned about what their parents get up to on the Internet, according to a report from the Barnens Rätt i Samhället (Children’s Rights in Society) organisation.
A common concern is that of dads who spend their time on porn sites, or who flirt (or worse) in chat rooms.
“I read his MSN conversation log. I was just curious. And then I saw that he was talking to, like, young girls. And the disgusting part is that he’s 53!” said one teenage boy…
Porsche's bobsled for whippersnippers is affordable even for the poor(sche)
Porsche has joined luxury car manufacturer Ferrari in an attempt to take over the world by branding every tenuous product with their colours and logos. We’ve seen everything from coffee makers to gym machines, but bobsleds are something I never would’ve considered they’d lend their name to.
Designed for the discerning…
One Laptop Per Child kicks off November 12th, two XO laptops for $399
We haven’t heard much from the One Laptop Per Child program recently, so I was fairly shocked to discover on my internet trawls that the program will kick off officially on November 12th.
The previously quoted cost per laptop of $100 has obviously been thrown out the window, with a more realistic price-tag of $399 being attached to each pair of Linux-based laptop. The idea is that customers purchase two laptops for $399, and one will be given to a child in a developing country. The XO laptops,…
YouTube Video of the Day – Child prodigy scratch DJs
DJ Sara – 8 years old. DJ Ryusei – 5 years old. They make me sick.
