When was the last time you saw someone spray camera cleaner into their mouths?

We were cruising the exhibit aisles at the DV Expo in the Los Angeles Convention Center and spied hawkers selling the Purosol optical cleaner – a cleaner so safe that you can use it as mouthwash. Ok, so we made up the mouthwash part, but the company reps were so sure of the safety of their product that they sprayed it into their mouths and washed it down with soda.

According to distribution company, International Supplies, Purosol is used by the U.S. military and NASA to clean expensive lenses that “cost more than what some people make in a year.” The cleaner doesn’t contain harsh chemicals like alcohol, ammonia or detergent that can, according to the reps, strip away protective coatings on expensive electronics. Instead, Purosol uses plant extracts that are non-toxic and completely biodegradable.

How non-toxic is Purosol? While talking about the product, Steven D’Antonio, an International Supplies’ employee, spontaneously sprayed the cleaner into his mouth a few times and then chased it with a swig of cold soda. Now that’s some serious salesmanship right there.

“The soda is probably 100 times more toxic than this cleaner,” D’Antonio exclaimed.

Despite the non-toxic nature of the cleaner, it seems to do a pretty good job. We were given a small sample bottle and have successfully cleaned several eyeglasses along with two very expensive Canon “L” lenses costing more than $1300 each.

Electronics retailer Best Buy has joined Target in creating unique giftcards this holiday season.

A while back Target started selling gift cards that double as low-end digital cameras. With 1.2 megapixels and no flash, they’re not so spectacular as cameras, but it does come with 40 free prints at target. It’s a pretty cool idea and it seems to be one that’s catching on.

According to Gizmodo, Best Buy will this year sell gift cards that double as a mini-speaker. Each gift card comes with a 3.5mm jack to plug into whatever audio player you happen to have lying around the house. We don’t have much details yet so we’re not sure about how loud these things actually are. We’d imagine not very, making them pretty much useless for anything you might use a portable speaker like driving, jogging or cooking.

There are two kinds of people, those who love getting giftcards as presents because it means their loved onese aren’t spending money on something useless they’ll never use and those hate getting giftcards because it means their loved ones put little or no thought into the gift itself. While the former will no doubt be pleased at what appears to be becoming a new trend, we doubt the latter will think they’re as thoughtless as ever.

Target’s Digital Camera giftcards can be bought in store or online from anywhere between $50-$1,000. They’re already appearing on eBay so if you want one, you should probably get one before word really gets out.

One of the worst things about the Autumn and Winter months is the fact that you’re more than likely to pick up a case of the sniffles between September and April than you are during the summer.

It seems that most of us at the first sign of an ache or pain or a bout of sneezing keys in some kind of flu related search to Google. The search company found that there was a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms and while it comes right out and says not everyone who searches flu is ill, there is a pattern that emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

The company then compared its query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and discovered that certain search queries tend to be popular right when flu season kicks in. By counting how often Google sees these search queries, it can tell us how much flu is circulating in our state. Neat.

Traditional flu surveillance systems (you know, doctors diagnosing sick people) take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

Get your flu shots and wrap up warm, people. Flu season is upon us.

Check out Google’s official blog post about Google Flu Trends or Flu Trends itself to see how the flu season is shaping up this year.

Late last week former IBM Executive Mark Papermaster was ordered to stop working at Apple until further notice. News emerged yesterday that Papermaster may be about to seek financial compensation.

While New York Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas last week blocked IBM’s former vice president of microprocessor technology development from taking up his new position as at Apple, the parties will this week focus on the setting of a bond by IBM. According to InternetNews, this procedure is typical in the early stages of an injunction and is designed to make sure either party can be compensated if the injunction is found to be unjust.

The whole situation is still up in the air, depending on who you ask. IBM is convinced Mr. Papermaster’s post as Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering at Apple is a violation of a non-compete agreement the employee signed in 2006. The company believes that should Papermaster go ahead with his move to Apple he will be "providing to Apple technical and strategic advice on a variety of issues" according to IBM’s complaint.

However, while Papermaster’s non-compete agreement states he can’t work for a competitor for a full year following his departure from the company, he said IBM’s decision to allow him to continue working for a fortnight after he told the company he was moving to Apple (with unfettered access to all of his files and to the company’s entire computer network) meant the company’s claim that it would suffer irreparable harm or hardship due to ’inevitable disclosure’ of ’trade secrets’ was absurd.

Further, Papermaster insists, nothing about his new role will implicate any trade secrets of IBM. In his court filings, Mr Papermaster said, “Apple and IBM are not even competitors; IBM’s business is focused on large ’enterprise’ applications for businesses, whereas Apple’s is based on consumer electronics."

The court has set Nov. 18 as a status conference date for potential trial and discovery action.

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Google today announced the addition of voice and video chat to Gmail. Just like the recent additions of Google Calendars and Google Docs to the left nav panel, users can use the voice and video chat options from inside Gmail.

Announced via Google’s official Gmail blog, the plugin is available by clicking here (http://mail.google.com/videochat). Once you’ve installed the plugin, you can start a video chat by clicking on “Video & more” menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window and select start video chate. Similar to GTalk you can click the "pop-out" icon to make the video larger, or click the fullscreen icon in the upper left-hand corner to make things really, really big.

One of the cooler things about this is that Google is even helping you to get yourself a webcam at a discounted price. In an effort to get everyone using the feature, Google has teamed up with Buy.com and peripherals manufacturer Logitech to offer people up to 30 percent off certain models.

A link for the application should appear in your Gmail soon enough and everyone will be pleased to note that both Mac and PC users are being catered for – The Gmail team is rolling the service out for both. Check out the video below to see video and voice in action.

Dell and Samsung have launched new 23-inch monitors with an ultra-high 2,048 x 1,152 (QWXGA) resolution, ushering in a new era of monitors.

It was only a few days ago that Samsung announced the industry’s first 2,048 x 1,152 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio monitor. The new 23-inch Samsung SyncMaster 2343BWX can provide enough screen real-estate to view two A4-sized documents side-by-side, while still leaving enough room to display the Windows SideBar. Following Samsung’s lead it would seem, Dell has since also unveiled its own 23-inch monitor, the Dell SP2309, featuring the same awkward high-resolution.

While it might be easy to assume the two new monitors use the same LCD panel, according to the specifications for each monitor, there are some differences. The Samsung SyncMaster 2343BWX is stated to have a contrast ratio of 20,000:1 and a response time of 5 ms. Conversely, the new Dell SP2309 is stated to have a contrast ratio of 1000:1 and a response time of 2 ms.

While not much is still known about the Samsung SyncMaster 2343BWX, the Dell SP2309 did appear for a brief time on the Canadian Dell website revealing some added information. The Dell SP2309 has a brightness of 300 cd/m2, offers 160-degree viewing angles, includes an integrated 2.0-megapixel webcam, displays 98-percent of the NTSC color gamut, can be wall-mounted and offers HDMI, DVI-D and VGA video inputs. The Dell SP2309 was listed with a price of $419.99 CAD ($349 USD) and is expected in the US soon. The Samsung SyncMaster 2342BWX was announced in South Korea for ₩389,000 ($293 USD), with there being no mention of a U.S. release date.

While a resolution of 2,048 x 1,152 would seem extremely high, it does not actually offer significantly more pixels than current 1,920 x 1200 resolution displays; 236k-pixels versus 230k-pixels. The main difference instead appears to be in terms of aspect ratios, where the two new 23-inch monitors offer an aspect ratio of 16:9, while many traditional wide-screen LCD computer monitors offer an aspect ratio of 16:10. With high-definition video content often being offered in an aspect ratio of 16:9, the new monitors would help to eliminate black-bars, image stretching and image cropping that could occur when displaying such content.

The new 2,048 x 1,152 resolution monitors do introduce their own issues though. Full high-definition video content is presented at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, which means that to fill the screen completely, the image would need to be scaled up in resolution. Image scaling could potentially result in reduced image quality and it may have an adverse affect on system performance. As such, a powerful graphics solution would be recommended for such a monitor, especially for those wishing to do some gaming at native resolutions.

Another issue with these new monitors is that a 23-inch 16:9 display is actually smaller overall than a 23-inch 16:10 display. Mind you, it is not a noticeable difference, but it will result in a wider, yet smaller, screen. These two new 23-inch monitors also offer very high pixel-densities, because of their relatively small screen sizes and high resolutions. Such high pixel-densities often results with everything on the display appearing very small, including fonts. For those who are okay with reading tiny fonts, high pixel-densities may not be a problem. For others though, the eye strain of trying to read such tiny fonts can often lead an individual to lowering the screen resolution, resulting in blurry text.

Microsoft is aware of this high pixel-density issue however, offering a feature in its Windows Vista operating system that attempts to solve this issue. The feature (DPI Scaling) allows users to increase the size of icons, interfaces and fonts to compensate for the high pixel-densities, keeping the display crisp and sharp. While this feature in Windows Vista is not quite yet perfect, or well known by many users, the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7 operating system is expected to make further improvements to this feature.

Samsung believes that by 2012, 67-percent of the LCD monitor market will be feature 16:9 aspect ratios. If future operating systems are also able to improve high DPI compatibilities, monitors such as these two new 23-inch monitors could be a glimpse of the future.

VMware, well known for their desktop and server virtualization software, are making steps towards the mobile device market with their Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

The Mobile Virtualization Platform is, in simple terms, a layer that interfaces between a mobile device’s hardware and software side – this approach, if it becomes widely supported and taken on by manufacturers, could be a benefit for both mobile developers and consumers.

MVP aims to somewhat ‘standardize’ the mobile platform for software development. The MVP would allow mobile software developers to write code based on the virtual abstraction layer without worry of the actual device hardware – thus allowing their code to run on multiple hardware platforms across many devices. Provided the idea catches on, of course.

For example, a mobile Web Browser could be written that would work on BlackBerry, HTC and Motorola devices without requiring specialized versions for each type of device. Developers would still need to pay attention to user interface differences of course, but could account for that within their code and allow users to select what type of device they are installing to initially – the rest is a breeze.

VMware’s MVP is kind of a play on an old idea, the Java Virtual machine. Devices that supported Java applications could all run the same Java applications no matter what type of device – but as we all know, Java processing is slow at most, even worse on mobile processors. VMware knows virtualization like nobody else’s business, so we trust in their abilities to make this idea work – the hard part is getting the manufacturers to onboard. Guess we will just have to wait and see about that.

According to VMware’s Euro product director, MVP could “make it possible for various mobile operating systems, such as Symbian, varieties of Linux and Windows Mobile, to ‘co-exist on the handset as well’.” Now that’s a pretty attractive statement. The underground hacking / modding community would be all over this like it is the holy grail.

Original story here.