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If you want to get people's attention (and your product doesn't have an Apple logo stamped on it), one of the best ways to do that is to release a convertible tablet laptop. Although, while these devices offer something different from your run-of-the-mill laptop, and everyone loves reading about them, we've never met anyone who actually uses one on a regular basis.

Still, we were intrigued when Dell made a tablet play late last year with its Latitude XT, and it seems as if this business-oriented system was popular enough to warrant a sequel. Engadget has some leaked specifications and photographs … Read more

2View, one of my favorite tools for adding notes to digital photos recently ceased to exist, and since then I've been wondering if any other services would pop up in its void. Today I've been playing around with Picbite, a wonderfully simple (and slightly similar) way to add small speech bubbles or annotations to photos from your hard drive or from a Web link.

You can add small, yellow notes of any size to images then share them with others. The service provides a direct link as well as embed codes for use on popular social networking sites, … Read more

Maybe it's the proverbial exception that doesn't prove the rule. But the publication of new statistics pointing to a slowdown in venture funding for Web 2.0 companies comes at a particularly antsy time in Silicon Valley.

Earlier Tuesday, Dow Jones VentureSource issued a good news-bad news status report on Web 2.0 companies. While funding in Silicon Valley last year grew 25 percent, the numbers don't look so hot when you consider that Web 2.0 deal flow doubled every year between 2002 and 2006. What's more, you need to subtract the $300 million that … Read more

Silicon Valley remains the hotbed of Web 2.0 activity, but the hipness of start-ups with goofy names is starting to cool in the face of economic reality.

Dow Jones VentureSource on Tuesday released numbers of venture capital activity in Web 2.0 companies and declared that the "investment boom may be peaking."

Venture capitalists put $1.34 billion into 178 deals in 2007, an 88 percent jump over 2006. But once you strip out the $300 million that Facebook raised from Microsoft and others, the numbers don't look as bullish.

The pace of deal flow, or … Read more

With this morning's announcement from Asus and its EN9800GX2 graphics card, we get the first glimpse of what Nvidia's GeForce 7950GX2 should have been. That card, if you'll recall from the summer of 2006, was the first SLI-on-a-single-card design from Nvidia. Effectively, it put two 3D chips on a single two-slot card. What that means is you didn't need a specialized, SLI-compatible motherboard to enjoy superfast game performance, because all of the necessary circuitry was built into the card.

The problem with the GeForce 7950 GX2 was that it was expensive, and it hit the market … Read more

This whole workstation fitness thing is getting out of hand. It's bad enough that some employers would have us working out at the desk, but now a monitoring equipment is being developed so that they can keep track of our physical state at all times.

Exmocare's "BT2" system monitors heart rate, body temperature, and other vitals with Bluetooth devices strapped to the wrist that send regular reports wirelessly for supervisors to peruse, according to Gadget Venue. Although it's sure to be touted as a safety mechanism in workplaces where employee health might be compromised, it'… Read more

TiVo has added the ability to view downloadable Web videos on the company's DVRs, making good on its announcement at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The update will allow Web videos such as video podcasts to be downloaded with the same Season Pass functionality used by TiVo viewers to record their favorite TV shows. But don't expect to just punch in a URL or an RSS feed into the TiVo remote. Videos must first be downloaded to your PC's hard drive, after which they'll be transferred to your TiVo via your home network. That's a … Read more

Allergy season has already arrived in many places, as you might have sensed from the preponderance of red-eyed colleagues even before St. Patrick's Day arrived. And the onslaught of killer pollen might leave many wishing that they had their own oxygen supply.

O2 Innovations, however, is making this purported state of bliss a bit more accessible with the "O2B," which Chip Chick describes as a portable oxygen bar. The device still isn't cheap at $659 on Amazon, but that's still nearly half the cost of the "O2hi Personal Oxygen Machine" we saw last … Read more

A Seattle man has been sentenced to more than four years in prison in what prosecutors say was the first federal case against someone using file-sharing software to steal identities.

Gregory Kopiloff, 35, was sentenced Monday to 51 months in prison, according to a report in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Kopiloff pleaded guilty in November to mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud. Kopiloff used programs such as LimeWire to gain access to personal information in tax returns, credit reports, bank statements, and student financial-aid applications of more than 50 people, according … Read more