Gasoline is expensive but it’s nothing compared to the cost of printer ink. If you do the math, you’ll discover that the liquid ink inside those cartridges you buy for your ink jet printer can cost more than $13,000 a gallon.

That’s not a typo. A Hewlett Packard 22 Tricolor Ink Cartridge holds only 5 milliliter of ink – one 757th of a gallon. Multiply that $17.99 price tag by 757 and you’re paying $13,619.91 a gallon for ink.

That particular cartridge, according to HP, yields 140 color graphic pages at a cost of nearly 13 cents a page, which actually isn’t that bad by printer industry standards. Some cartridges from HP and other companies cost less per page and some more, but the cartridge you get to buy and the cost per page depends on what printer you own.

For years, printer manufacturers have been offering low cost printers only to make it up on ink but that’s starting to change now that consumers are becoming a bit savvier about how much printers actually cost to use. Finally, the industry is starting to listen.

Kodak has recently introduced a line of multi-function printers that they claim “save up to 50% on everything you print compared to similar consumer ink jet printers.” For example, a black ink cartridge for its new 5000 series of multi-function printers costs $9.99 and, according to Kodak, yields 490 pages at a cost of just over 2 cents a page. (more…)

Frequent flyer miles are nice, but how about getting those airline tickets wholesale?

Often, it can be done, and if cFares.com has its way, it might be done a good deal more often.

The company, which has been selling cheap airline seats since 2005, has just updated its user interface after securing a new round of venture funding. Newly capitalized at about $4.5 million, cFares hopes to disrupt travel pricing by turning business relationships in the travel industry upside down.

CEO Vajid Jafri says the firm is following the lead of Costco by charging customers a fee - in this case, $50 a year - for the privilege of buying travel wholesale. Wholesale fares, says Jafri, “represent about 20 percent of the market in the U.S.”

One reason they can get lower fares, he says, is because in some cases, the company is kicking back a portion of its customer membership fees to participating airlines. He says it’s appealing to the airlines because it’s the opposite of the typical business model in which airlines pay travel agencies (including online agencies such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity) for selling tickets. (more…)

News has recently surfaced about an unpublished government study that suggests that 85 percent of offenders imprisoned for trafficking in online child pornography may have also sexually molested minors. Thursday, the New York Times reported that psychologists from Federal Bureau of Prisons based their findings on interviews with 155 male inmates who were undergoing voluntary treatment.

It’s important to point out that this is a small study of imprisoned convicts and not necessarily representative of all people who look at child porn. But even if these numbers turn out to be a bit fuzzy, the implications are astounding. (more…)

 THE man in the Verizon Wireless commercials wearing thick-rimmed glasses may be constantly asking, Can you hear me now? But the most commonly asked question over mobile phones might actually be, Where are you now?

Global Positioning by Cellphone - New York Times

I’m writing this column on a computer that looks and acts pretty much like most other notebook PCs running Microsoft Windows. It has a typical screen and keyboard, it’s running Microsoft Office and other standard Windows applications and it’s equipped with an Intel processor.

But there is one thing missing. The machine I’m using doesn’t have a hard drive. Where the drive would normally be located, there is a 32 gigabyte solid state flash drive. The machine, from a non-disclosed PC vendor, is a prototype that isn’t yet on the market.

Samsung, which makes the memory but not the PC, says it will soon offer 64 gigabyte drives. Dell already offers a 32 gigabyte solid state drive as an option, albeit an expensive one, on some of its Latitude notebook PCs.

While even 64 GB is far below the capacity of the hard drives used in many of today’s notebook PCs, it’s an adequate amount of storage for Windows XP or Vista, numerous applications and typical storage requirements for many business users.

The 32 gigabyte PC I tested had enough room for Windows XP, Microsoft Office and several applications with 12 gigabytes left over for data storage. I wouldn’t recommend a drive like this for someone with a lot of video and audio files, but for a road warrior who’s interested in web surfing, email and a few gigabytes of data files, it’s more than enough capacity. (more…)

More than a year before he announced the iPhone, Steve Jobs told an audience at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference, “we’re not very good going through orifices to get to the end users.” By “orifices” Jobs meant cell phone companies. Of course, he ultimately did make an exclusive deal with AT&T to provide both voice and data service for the phone Apple released June 29.

But AT&T isn’t the only orifice between end users and the phone. Apple is as well. That’s because the phone is largely closed to software developers.

True, there is a way to develop Web applications inside the phone’s Safari Web browser, but it’s not the same as offering native applications that run on the phone, which is certainly possible. The iPhone runs OS X - the same operating system used on Macs - which would make it pretty easy for developers to create custom applications.

It’s not as if there aren’t examples of phones that run plenty of programs. People with smart-phones that run under the Windows Mobile, Palm or Symbian operating systems already enjoy access to numerous applications from a variety of developers.

Of course, smart-phones make up only about 10 percent of the market, but as it turns out, most cell phone users can choose among hundreds of available programs. (more…)

by Larry Magid

A famous cartoon from the New Yorker shows a dog sitting in front of a computer telling another dog, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But now, thanks to the Internet, everyone knows everything about you. Or at least they might be able to find out.

Online reputations are increasingly important in the workplace, in school, and even in social life. Search engines make it easy to find information about most anyone, especially if that person has been active online. With the rise of social networking sites, more information is available than ever before. Whether it’s someone you want to date, a potential employer, or a college admissions counselor, if there’s information out there about you and they want to find it, chances are that they can. (more…)

My daughter Katherine recently returned from teaching English in Spain for a few months. About two months into her trip, her digital camera was stolen. She replaced the camera, but she can never replace the couple of hundred photos she had stored on her camera’s two gigabyte memory card. Her intention was to copy them to her PC as soon as she returned home but, sadly, that never happened.

But if Katherine were carrying the new Nikon Coolpix S50c, all of her photos might have been automatically uploaded to a server in the United States, safe and sound and available to share with others.

That’s because the new Nikon is equipped with WiFi. If you have a WiFi signal, the camera allows you to send photos to friends by e-mail or upload them to a Flickr account. Also, it can automatically back up everything from the camera to a Nikon Web site whenever you plug in the AC adapter. That’s my favorite feature. When you plug the camera in to recharge the batteries overnight, it will automatically back up all the photos you took during the day. If you have a lot of photos, it can take some time to do an online backup since the camera sends the full 7.2 megapixel photo. This is why it makes sense to do it overnight. (more…)

Dear Mr. Jobs (About That iPhone…)
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 3, 2007

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Dear Steve,Thanks for letting me try out one of your new iPhones. Not only has it been fun to play with but having it over the weekend sure made me the center of attention. Were I young and single, I have no doubt the iPhone would have gotten me a date or two.

I feel sorry for all those people who waited in line and spent $500 or $600 on Friday but couldn’t activate it because of AT&Ts glitches. They missed out on showing it off during the weekend and impressing their friends.

Seriously, it’s a breakthrough product and Apple is to be congratulated for raising the bar not only for future cell phones but future media players. I sure hope you incorporate the touch screen and “multi-touch” interface on future iPods and maybe even future Macs. Once again, your genius for user interface has paid off. (more…)