I'm Gina Smith

Zwaggle rocks!

Has anyone out there (especially parents) heard of Zwaggle?

It has a kind of Ebay look, but don't be fooled. It's a community site -- a community site in the sense of Linked In, etc., but with a plus -- it's for parents who can get together to swap kids' stuff. Don't think bartering, think clearing outgrown stuff our of your garage! And getting points to get stuff your kids now need.

It'll also let parents communicate, make new friends, you name it.

My prediction is this is going to get huge. (And no, it's not a public company. Still a small company in advanced startup mode.) Man, I love this Web 2.0 business of online communites. Especially when there's one I can use! (Sorry folks, but I'm soon to sign off general focus communities like facebook, orkut, etc. Only targeted sites (linked in, for example, or classmates.com) make sense for someone busy as I am.

I heard about it lately from flylady.net, and just had to pass it on. Let me know what you think?

gs

Bet you did.

Like you didn't see this one coming. BitTorrent goes official in a news story on Reuters today. Full article here. Excerpt below.

BOSTON (Reuters) - BitTorrent Inc., which was co-founded by the developer of a software program widely used to share pirated music and video over the Web, plans to start helping media companies stream videos over the Internet.

The company unveiled the service on Tuesday, six years after its chief executive, Bram Cohen, created the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.

BitTorrent is one of two key technologies used for trading files over the Web. The other, Gnutella, works using software programs including Limewire and MP3 Rocket.

Tech news (The Week Ahead with Gina Smith)

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Amazing (and almost accurate) view of 1999 (circa 1967)

Click here for predictions of 1999 home and work life from the vantage point of 1967. It's from the '67 film, 1999 AD. (It reminds me of the old Monsanto Tommorrow Land display at Disney World!)

Tech news (The Week Ahead with Gina Smith)

I do a weekly video gig (just 2 minutes long) for InfoWorld -- letting you know what's coming up in the week ahead.

Click here to see me in action and feel free to pass along comments and even criticism : ) Just be gentle.

The hottest tech news this week (The Week Ahead)

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Two new IBM nanotech discoveries.

Interesting story today. Excerpt below, full version here.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Imagine cramming 30,000 full-length movies into a gadget the size of an iPod.

Scientists at IBM said on Thursday they had moved closer to such a feat by learning how to steer single atoms in a way that could create building blocks for ultra-tiny storage devices.

Understanding and manipulating the behavior of atoms is critical to harnessing the power of nanotechnology, which deals with particles tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

"One of the most basic properties that every atom has is that it behaves like a little magnet," said Cyrus Hirjibehedin, a scientist at International Business Machines Corp.'s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

"If you can keep that magnetic orientation stable over time, then you can use that to store information. That is how your hard drive works," Hirjibehedin said in a telephone interview.

"What we are trying to understand is how this fundamental property works for a single atom."

Hirjibehedin and colleague Andreas Heinrich studied this property -- known as magnetic anisotropy -- in individual iron atoms using a special microscope developed at IBM.

"What we've been able to do is to look at an iron atom on a copper surface and to move that magnetic orientation around," Heinrich said.

Now they are looking for an atom that remains stable over a long time. "We have a couple of ideas but we don't really know which ones will work out," Hirjibehedin said.

The hottest tech news for next week (The Week Ahead with Gina Smith)

Check out the short video I do previewing Infoworld's upcoming news.

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The Week Ahead in Tech News (with me on video)

Here's the weekly two-minute lookahead I do for Infoworld.com every week. You can see the news that's happening next week, and weigh in on whether I need a haircut. In all seriousness, we've got some good dirt on what former PeopleSoft founder might announce on Monday.

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An amazing new invention. Buggy Rollin'.

A guy in a metal suit with wheels and, perhaps, a motor, flies down the Swiss Alps in this thing. You won't regret watching this bizarre and intriguing demo. Click here.