“My-iButton” is a small display you wear on a lanyard around your neck or pinned to your jacket. It can display a slideshow or video, along with titles, on a two-inch diagonal screen

Think of it as an $80 running advertisement for yourself or some product. Wear it at a singles party and you don’t have to tell people who you are, it can literally all be hanging out there, complete with stats and pictures. Wear it to a trade show, and your product slide show is out there as you walk around. It comes with a small round frame, which My-iButton will make with your company or personal logo for no extra charge.

Set up was something of a problem: Menu choices appeared on screen for just a second, so if you’re not quick on the trigger, you missed it. Pictures and video can be loaded into the My-iButton from a Windows 98 or XP computer, using a standard USB cord of the type that fits most digital cameras. The device has 256 megabytes of memory, which is enough to hold a lot of pictures, and the contents can be changed.                                                                                                                

The My-iButton is kind of a cute idea and cute product. It could be used as a jazzy name tag by setting your videos or slideshows to automatically repeat. There are several language choices built into the memory chip and you can display messages in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and most European languages. The product is clever but techy. You can have music with your pictures but only through ear plugs and the sound quality is dreadful. Transferring video to the device was as easy as dragging files to a flash drive but getting it to play was confusing; we used their free tech support. To play videos on the iButton you have to convert them to “AMV,” the letters standing for “anime music video,” a Chinese format that's easier on battery life. The conversion tool was difficult to find and you have to download a special program to extract it. We got an error message when we tried this. The company re-sent the conversion tool and it worked the second time.  

A similar display could be made using a video iPod or similar device hanging around your neck. The screen would be about twice the size of the My-iButton and the device much easier to handle, but the price would be two to five times as much. We base that on pricing searches at Amazon.com  and eBay.com  for Apple, Sony and Samsung products.  My-iButton is at My-iButton.com.

Product Spin 

For a professional product display for the web, businesses could turn to “PhotoCapture 360.” This is a software-controlled turntable that uses a digital camera to take continuous shots of a rotating product. We found that it worked perfectly and was easy to handle, but unfortunately costs a bundle. 

Pricing starts at $1,000 at the maker’s web site, Ortery.com, and then moves up to $2,000 if you add a box that provides diffused lighting for the rotating stage. This is what professional photographers use to eliminate shadows on a subject. 

Setup was easy and operation simple. The turntable platform is about 15 inches across. You connect this to an XP or Windows 2000 computer and a Canon or Olympus digital still camera. Put your product on the turntable platform and choose how fast you want the object to rotate. You can choose to take 4 to 64 camera shots per rotation. 

Everything went smoothly and we had the choice of posting our product display to the web or emailing it; we could even post a still image to eBay, if we were that kind of power seller. 

At this point you might ask, as we did, why not just use a phonograph turntable and a video camera to accomplish the same kind of product video at a much lower cost? The company response was this wouldn’t work with their software and so you wouldn’t be able to time the speed and number of shots. 

From the Silly File 

n  We have a Cubicle Doorbell for our office now. It comes with a Velcro or sticky backing and a button on the front. Push the button to announce your presence and desire to enter. There’s a choice of sounds, from the classic “ding dong” to a foghorn, birds twittering and a dozen others. There are three volume levels; price is $12 from CubiCaller.com.

Saitek is offering a mouse with a clear plastic body that can display a photo inside. You cut out a picture, insert it into the mouse case, and be reminded of something or other every minute of your computer day. We found it for $20 at Amazon.com. Works with Windows and Mac.

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