Dash, a GPS company with an eye on connectivity has updated their hardware and software for the beta testers. The product should be ready for shipping some time early 2008. The updated model includes a bigger screen, better speaker, and increased battery life. Here’s the new design, pretty slick…

What sets the dash apart from the other GPS units on the market is connectivity, it has a built in Wi-Fi and cellular for two way connectivity. Dash automatically updates software and will let you know if there are traffic jams or just slow downs by tracking other Dash users locations and speeds. All this data from all Dash users is stored, minus any identifying characteristics, and is used to help you find the fastest way to where you are going based on both current and historical traffic patterns, you’re not going to get that with any other GPS unit on the market. Add integration with Yahoo! search and the ability for you or anyone else to instantly send directions to your car over the net and you have an amazing little unit, a little slice of Web 2.0 to carry around with you wherever you go! The estimated price for the Dash Express is going to be around $650 give or take $100. Subscription for the connectivity will be around $15, maybe worth it in a major city but they’ll need to lower prices to get acceptance in large and medium sized cities.

At first glance, Perfspot.com looks like a souped-up ad for the Iphone. The welcome page has a prominent spot in the center of the viewing area for their “Featured Business,” and as a result, the Iphone is right in your face (as though it wasn’t already). Other than that, you are presented with a list of “Channels,” as well as a selection of featured music, videos, news, and blogs that relate to the current page. The channels are just another excuse for more ads and don’t really present anything different from the main page to grab your attention. Just a lot of nothing as far as I was concerned.

After clicking through the channels for a while, I finally noticed the link for “myPerfLife” and clicked on it. Now I was finally able to understand where the hits were coming from. my PerfLife is an almost picture perfect mySpace clone. As a matter of fact, the individual profile pages were almost cookie cutter copies of a mySpace page (the biggest difference I could notice was the presence of photo albums directly on the profile page rather than on a separate link).

Like mySpace, Perfspot has made sure to market itself as a launching pad for musical acts (are there any bands out there nowadays that don’t have a mySpace presence?). As far as I could tell there’s no option to download mp3s if the artist allows it, but there is an advantage in that bands aren’t limited to only posting four songs (though why would you post the entire album for free if you want people to actually buy it?). The problem was that I couldn’t find any bands of note. Perhaps this was due to the relative infancy of the site, but I can’t believe that’s the real reason.

In all honesty, I can’t see how this site can realistically hope to compete with mySpace as a networking hub. Sure, someone will eventually be able to do that (see Facebook), but they’ll have something original to offer, some new wrinkle that mySpace never considered, and they’ll do it in a way that’s so unique that people will rush to take advantage (and effectively join the bandwagon). Perfspot is just a weak copy of an already established formula, not the next big thing. The only thing it has over mySpace is three friends (Ashley, Rob, and Carmen) for your new account instead of just Tom on mySpace, and that just doesn’t cut it. Given that the majority of the hits come from South America, perhaps Perfspot is being more agressively marketed there, and perhaps it will become a viable product for that region of the world, but in my opinion it’s much ado about nothing. If you’re on mySpace already, don’t waste your time, and if you aren’t already on mySpace- you probably don’t care about a site like this anyway.

I’ve been thinking more and more about running the Knetwork as a business. There should be some pretty large advantages especially right now where I’m not making a profit and keep buying more and more domain names (I bought another one last week so watch out). I see two main ways to run the sites, the first is as a “hobby” which has it’s own set of tax rules, the second is a business of some sort. I’ll write more on this later.

To get a better grasp on taxes and tax savings in general I borrowed a book written by Stephen Fishman titled “Lower Taxes in 7 Easy Steps” and it’s something that I would suggest to anyone not just someone wanting to start a business. I’m sure that, like me, you’re already following some of these steps but there may be some things that you can do better or start doing that will really help out your bottom line and inflate that rebate check. Here are Fishman’s 7 Steps:

1. Maximize Tax-Free Income – This includes home sales, retirement and college savings accounts, and health savings accounts.
2. Take Advantage of Tax Credits
3. Defer Taxes
4. Maximize Your Tax Deductions
5. Reduce your tax rate
6. Shift Income to Others
7. Take Advantage of Your Filing Status and Tax Exemptions

Some of the information is redundant and some only helpful in certain situations but it’s a good read, an amazing read for a book about taxes, so check it out.

With recent world events and the general paranoia that comes with being a new parents, we were worried about how we might escape from our cars if we were to ever get trapped in them. A little searching revealed that makers of the first Life Hammer are now making a key chain version called the ResQMe.  I ordered a two pack and they have just arrived.  If you click that link you can see that it’s a small, tubular plastic device with a blade for slicing through seat belts and an enclosed spring mounted steel spike for breaking windows.  The blade is semi-exposed and THERE’S A SPRING MOUNTED STEEL SPIKE so there’s no way I’m putting this thing on my keys and then putting them in my pocket, but it’ll be good to have in the car.  The blade looks fine for cutting seat belts but I had my doubts about the spike so I decided to to a test… continue reading »

I’ve added the travel toolkit to the list of toolkits available.  I welcome comments on the toolkits and requests for additions.  There is a bias towards software and web-pages but I don’t mean to fill the toolkits with these exclusively, so keep that in mind if you have any suggestions!