The Lance J. Technoweb

I'm really quite tired of the Spam that looks a lot like advertisements from Saks Fifth Avenue. Here's the story: I have an email address that I only use with my friends. I don't hand it out to retailers, and I don't reply to anyone I don't know very well with my email address. However, somehow I got on a mailing list that is sending out "Saks Fifth Avenue" related advertisements on an almost DAILY basis. I've never shopped or purchased anything from a Sak's store of any kind, yet someone has decided that I deserve an inordinate amount of information about stuff I'm not interested in. Did someone steal my email address off of one of my friend's address book? Was my address published on-line and scraped from somewhere? Did someone somehow get ahold of my email address and sell it to some "bulk email" agency? I certainly don't know, and these spams don't even make a claim on where they got their list. All I know is th...

Yes, you read the headline. Apple's next big event, to be held on September 9th, is called "Let's Rock". And the image included within their invite seems to show a silhouette of an iPod listener jumping off of a rock. So what's this all about? Clearly it is about an iPod with new GPS capabilities. Take an iPod, add a GPS receiver chip (like the iPhone), and install a few hundred megabytes of map data (like most handheld GPS units have) and you have a fully capable Apple-branded handheld GPS. The GPS market has quickly turned into a HUGE market, and it would be silly for Apple to ignore this market. And there is no doubt that Jobs thinks that he can do a much better job than Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. Couple that with the fact that virtually all of the GPS devices out there leave much to be desired in terms of usability, extensibility, and update-ability. An iPod-style device will address all these issues, and can undoubtably be priced to radically change ...