SocialShield wants to protect your child from the "new Wild West of the Internet" that is social networking. With dangerous elements including cyberbullies and sexual predators, the San Mateo-based activity monitoring system for parents offers tools to keep children safe from others, and from their own sharing decisions. The service provides live support and reputation management assistance.

The setup process begins with a subscription fee, or the free trial, and then directly connecting to childrens’ Facebook, MySpace and Twitter accounts by using their passwords. If a parent does not know or would prefer not to use a child’s passwords, SocialShield can instead send an invite email to the child with directions so that he or she can verify the parent, but they recommend knowing passwords. As their FAQ explains, "It is good parenting practice to know your kids’ passwords, even if you don’t use them to connect with us. Many parents actually set the passwords for their kids in every instance one is required so that they (their kids) cannot change them. In the unlikely event that something happens to your kids, having their passwords will dramatically help authorities expedite their investigations."

Once these steps have been completed, SocialShield watches out for any potentially problematic events. Flags are raised when a variety of actions take place:

• An adult befriends the child
• A new friend is added that has no friends in common with the child’s other friends
• A new friend is found to have an account on other sites that children typically do not become a member of - for example, a professional site like LinkedIn
• Other determinations based on patent-pending techniques and other heuristic analyses

These flags only notify the parent, and do not block or remove the suspicious individual. It is still up to the parent to talk to the child or delete people from the child’s account.

The site can also aid in cyberbullying identification, as well as notify a parent of inappropriate images or other material that a child puts up himself. These include offensive comments, as well as media that could potentially damage a child’s future - job or college acceptance, etc.

The best companies leverage their  employees’ creativity and capacity to generate development strategies. Google, Pixar, Ideo: three California giants that strongly encourage and listen to the ideas that come from the trenches. And technology plays a large role in that process.

As Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, explained at the last TEDxSoMa conference: “Don’t wait for the big idea!” Process, workshops and analysis grids help to find new and consistent ideas. His 3-step program (1. brainstorm, 2. map/reduce, 3. matrix) is an efficient way to generate a lot of ideas and determine better ones.

Jonathan Mann, musician and troubadour who writes a song a day – a fresh and funny look at technology (listen to “Cloud Computing for Beginners” or “Bing goes the Internet“) - since January 1st, 2009, shares this point of view: inspiration is rare, even for the most creative people. You have to force it to make ideas happen.

Mindmapping tools, to-do lists and note-sharing utilities like Evernote are useful but what makes innovative ideas happen is mainly interaction and personal development. David Pescovitz (co-editor or BoingBoing and co-organizer of Maker Faire), during his vibrant speech on “the world as wunderkammer” invited companies to rethink the way they activate employees’ curiosity by encouraging maker culture. Two examples of great creativity involve the iPad, LEGOs and typewriters.

The third step: make your employees happy by having a playful and efficient workplace. Colors matter. Desks and how they fit in the workspace, noise limitation, shared spaces, screen sizes and wireless devices … every aspect of a workers’ daily life – and how they use technologies at work – has to be evaluated and improved. Alexander Kjerulf, the “Chief Happiness Officer” blogger who specializes in making the workplace better, shares a few examples of workplaces that link technology, spaces and workers’ creative needs — ideas that will help companies follow Google, Pixar and Ideo’s lead.

Community Clash is an online card game designed to teach people about their communities. It’s a poker-like game that pulls community health data from various organizations.

The game pits two cities against each other, and the goal is to bet on which city is more healthy. Categories are broken down into things like percentage of people who exercise regularly, who are depressed, homicides and motor-vehicle deaths, unemployment rates or the number of uninsured residents.

Community Clash was created by MeYou Health and its parent company, Healthways, along with Innovations Studios and Tom Zeng. The game was created in response to a White House led challenge, the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI).

“We hope to create an ecosystem of learning around these community-health metrics,” says Trapper Markelz, Head of Product at MeYou Health.

It will be interesting to see if the decision to turn community data into a game will help educate people who wouldn’t normally be interested in looking at a wall of data. Game mechanics are all the rage, but we’re still waiting for the metrics that will tell us how effective serious games are.

But even if you only play Community Clash once just to test it, you come away from it having learned.

“If we can get people to walk away knowing what the obesity rate of their city is and knowing what the drug-use rate of their city is, or the unemployment rate of their city, we consider that the win,” Markelz says.

With federal government incentives to move medical records to electronic systems, doctors are looking for inexpensive and reliable options to update their businesses. San Francisco-based Practice Fusion, a free, Web-based electronic health record management startup has bundled a hardware system based on Dell products to make the transition easier to their EMR (electronic medical record) cloud.

Doctors can qualify for $44,000 or $66,000 in federal stimulus dollars from the government for migrating to electronic system within the next several years, explains ReadWriteWeb. Though the parameters for EMR solutions are clearly delineated, the process for every office is different. Practice Fusion discovered that the average office has lass than nine doctors, and CEO Ryan Howard tailored their transition package to these small clinics’ needs.

The process has several steps to consider. “The business of health care these days requires that a lot of paper is generated - a lot of it by fax,” all of which must be protected by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. With other hurdles such as old tech, software or no Internet connection, investments must be efficient and economical.

With these challenges in mind, the Dell-based hardware system comes in tiered collections. The “Solo Practice” has one of each of the following: Latitude XT2 tablet PC, Vostro 230 desktop computer, laser printer, scanner, firewall, wireless router, and suggested Lumix digital camera. The 2 Provider and 4 Provider Practices scale up with laptops, desktops and an additional laser printer. The equipment is business-grade and efficient - the Latitude tablet has a reported 11-hour battery life, the desktop towers are inexpensive.

The software itself is used for records, scheduling, and all necessary aspects of medical administration. Security focuses on data infrastructure, virus and spam prevention, as well as encryption, all of which meets or exceeds HIPAA requirements.

“This is the beginning of a revolution,” said Tom Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, about the WIRED Reader for the iPad, released yesterday. While readers of the technology culture magazine have long been familiar with sleek design and innovative formats in the print version of the magazine, the digital version will offer much more.

The subject of a year-long collaboration between Adobe and publisher Condé Nast, the project represents what can be done with added functionality to InDesign, the publishing program most often known for graphic and layout design for print. With its expanded domain, the magazine can embody what its parent company refers to in the New York Times’ Media Coder blog as “author once, publish everywhere.”

For the June issue, featuring “Toy Story 3″ on the cover, the digital version’s price is the same as the newsstand version: $4.99, and readers will experience new material for every section of the magazine - more images as well as illustrative video, audio and interactive graphics. Even the advertisements are enhanced - for brands who want to pay extra to be a “premium advertiser,” they can also offer the same types of multimedia and interaction that the articles can.

This immersive content is a preview for other forms that advertisement can take. As an Adobe blog post explains, with “this new digital magazine medium, publishers can expand their ad inventory offerings, offer advertisers exciting new advertising possibilities and establish value for immersive digital ads.”

Presently dubbed the “Digital Magazine Solution,” the software tightly interacts with Adobe’s Creative Suite 5. Because of this, Adobe expects that designers and content creators currently familiar with CS programs can easily incorporate these enhanced capabilities with minimum learning investment. Omniture analytics will be integrated into the toolkit to give publishers data on how consumers interact with content and advertising within the app.

Toyota will invest fifty million dollars in electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Tesla. With this win-win partnership, Toyota will gain access to Tesla’s technology expertise, and Tesla will produce and sell their cars in the mass market.

Tesla is a Californian company founded in 2003 and managed by Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal). This startup launched the first pure electric vehicle in 2006: the Tesla Roadster. Going from 0 to 60 MPH in 4 seconds, this high performance electric sports car is able to compete with famous sports brands such as Lamborghini or Ferrari. That’s why Tesla is recognized as the first startup to legitimize the electric engine in automotive world. This technology also delivers 100 miles per gallon.

It seems that all of these innovative solutions interested Toyota. After being the first manufacturer of a hybrid vehicle, the Japanese brand wants to focus its strategy on electric vehicles. Akio Toyoda, Toyota President, said he was very “impressed by Tesla’s technology.” Indeed, Tesla is currently the only company which produces and sells only electric vehicles able to drive highway speeds.

Thanks to this alliance, these companies will produce EVs on a large scale. The first will be the Model S, a family car which is scheduled to go on sale in 2012. The Model S is designed to travel as far as 300 miles with about a three to five hour charge. Production will occur in a California factory, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Built in 1960, the NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc) was GM’s property. But because of the economic crisis, the giant Detroit brand sold it two years ago to Toyota.

By joining forces with Tesla, Toyota highlights two different ideas. First of all, hybrid technology is not enough to solve problems caused by automobiles. The next step will be electric vehicles, even if methods of general implementation are not clearly obvious. Secondly, it is proactive to control technology within a competitive market. With Tesla, Toyota hopes to be back in the EV market.

Google announced its foray into television today at its annual I/O conference in San Francisco. The search and Internet media mega-brand will be launching Google TV on Sony television sets equipped with Intel processing chips. Traditional programming will be augmented on the service by an Internet connection, an application marketplace and Web browser all by the grace of the Android operating system that each set will be equipped with.

Differentiating Google TV from previous Web-TV projects such as TiVo, Roku, Vudu and Apple TV, this new project has various advantages. Android, another Google product, is popularly used for smartphones from various US mobile carriers. Data from Millennial Media shows the number of ad impressions from Android devices to be the fastest growing among smartphones, as reports Digital Daily. In addition, some television manufacturers currently also make some Android-powered smartphones, such as LG and Samsung. Because of this healthy adoption rate, and some brands’ preceding familiarity with the OS that Google TV will run, the adoption risks may be lower, or at least seem that way to these device producers.

Sony will be adopting the service in its Internet-enabled, high-definition Bravia televisions, some Blu-ray players, and one ventures to guess it could also be included in future Playstation consoles. Intel also has much to gain from the venture, with billions spent developing the Atom processors that will be in these TV sets, the chips representing its “high-stakes push to crack the market for consumer electronics,” as The New York Times puts it.

In addition to these brands, Logitech is developing “the Buddy Box,” a Google TV set-top box. Seen as a more premium product than the Roku, a sub-$100 device, the device could still provide easier entry without purchasing a new television set. Also included with the on-demand video service will be products from Amazon.com, Netflix and Hulu, according to Business Week.

Many Facebook users are having difficulty navigating all the changes the site has made to its privacy settings in the past months. The positive that’s come of that is that for the first time many users are paying attention to managing their privacy settings.

Which is indeed a difficult thing to do.

ReclaimPrivacy makes it easy to keep your data private by scanning your profile and rating your settings.

ReclaimPrivacy scans your Facebook settings to ensure that your data is limited to your friends. It also changes settings so that your friends and Facebook partner sites like Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp don’t make your data freely available on the web, either.

Users drag a bookmarklet from ReclaimPrivacy’s site to their bookmark toolbar, then go to their Facebook page and hit the bookmarklet. The scanner works entirely inside your own browser, so ReclaimPrivacy never sees your private data.

The bookmarklet analyzes your privacy settings in six categories, rating your security level for each.

If some of your settings are not optimal (assuming you want to keep your data private), ReclaimPrivacy will attempt to fix them automatically. If this doesn’t work (and it didn’t work when we tried it), it takes you exactly where you need to go in your account settings.

ReclaimPrivacy is open source and its source code is published on the site’s homepage, so that the code and its development “always remain open and transparent.”

Definitely recommended.

Google Maps on Mozilla’s Firefox or Google’s own web browser Chrome have been issued increased functionality that can read where a computer is physically via a small white circle in the map view window. The little button is between the navigation circle and the zoom line in the upper left corner, and when clicked accesses the user’s location. As CNET reports today, the browser feature was extended from its first appearance in Firefox to Chrome (the developer version only) in the following issue tracker post on Thursday: "The Geolocation feature is now available in chrome 5.0.375.25 (Official Build 45690)." Support has not yet been extended to consumer-level stable or beta versions of Chrome.

After asking for permission, the component can map or include location on certain services that can take advantage of location-based information. The location button turns blue, and an indicator appears with an accurate location reading, at least in this writer’s case. The info is gathered through various ways: Google uses wireless access points or a computer Internet Protocol address.

Firefox’s Geolocation works much the same way, sending the data to Google Location Services, then sharing it with the requesting Web site. Firefox can remember which Web sites are allowed location information, and the default setting is to keep sharing off. Additionally, Firefox encrypts the location information to protect privacy. The name or location of the Web site, as well as cookies, are not shared with Google Location Services.

While CNET does not give further examples of sites or services taking advantage of this added functionality of select browsers, the feature runs parallel with the growing trend of location-enabled support for Web and mobile devices. After the geolocation explosion at SXSW this year, we can look forward to seeing advanced application of Foursquare- and GoWalla-inspired concepts paying ever closer attention to where we are.

It’s beginning to look like the netbook moment really was just that, a moment.

CNet is reporting that IDC will later this week reveal numbers showing that the netbook phenomenon has “peaked,” noting that sales of Atom chips, which power many netbooks, have declined significantly.

The market share of Atom processors among Intel mobile processors fell to 20 percent in Q1 2010, after being in the 23 percent to 25 percent range in 2009.

“Atom in Netbooks is plateauing,” Shane Rau, an analyst at IDC, told CNET. “With the market recovery, I think end users are going to be looking for more value than just low-cost devices. This is an opportunity for higher-end mobile PCs, for example, that have better performance, bigger screens, bigger hard drives.”

Netbooks seemed the perfect answer for budget-conscious consumers during the recession. And you have to admit, they are pretty cute. Their long term effect, though, while great for consumers, is not so great for the mini-computers themselves. The emergence of both the smartphone and netbook markets and their overall effect on the PC market between Q2 2008 and Q2 2009 led us to believe that full-sized was dead.

While there is convenience beyond the price – the weight is fantastic – after the initial buying wave, consumers began to notice the limitations. For example they come fully loaded with carpal tunnel syndrome. When you’re carrying a full-sized keyboard and mouse with you everywhere you go, the netbook’s portability is effectively offset.

At the same time, their incredible penetration drive down the prices of competing markets. Full-sized was no longer dead, it was affordable.

The iPad also hurt the netbook’s reputation, and probably affects sales as well. There are people who take Steve Jobs’ words as Gospel, so his high profile dismissal of netbooks hurt the device, and so does the fact that Apple’s tablet, which fits into the same space, has the perceived hipness that, for many consumers, justifies paying a few hundred dollars more for.