By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

OpenOffice Premium is a modified version of the popular, open-source OpenOffice.org software suite. The original OpenOffice suite aims to compete with Microsoft Office, and I believe it does a pretty good job for most home users and students.

What is Premium?

Premium aims to give OpenOffice a further edge in its competition with MS Office by adding additional fonts, clip art, and document templates to the standard program. The changes are by no means revolutionary, but they do help the OpenOffice suite to appear more polished.
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By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Living in the SF Bay Area as I do, I love it when I get a chance to telec0mmute, because the commutes can be horrible. On the other hand, I can’t telecommute all the time … and I should be happy because a study has shown that average commute times have gone down … but only by 24 seconds.

The average daily commute to work has shrunk from 25.5 minutes in 2000 to 25.1 minutes last year, according to data released this week by the Census Bureau.

“We all should hold a celebration,” said Alan Pisarski, author of “Commuting in America.” “We’re saving 0.4 minutes!” Source: CNN

We Say: Boy, that Census Bureau. This week they’ve released data I just find hard to believe. But anyway, try not to spend your 0.4 minutes too quickly … but remember it’s 0.4 minutes both ways so you really get 48 seconds. R-i-g-h-t.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

We normally applaud vehicular innovation - from a flying jet pack, to the latest breakthrough in any technology that can get us from A to B in an interesting way. Until today, that is. The Hipster is a personal trailer you strap to your body and essentially transform yourself into a human mule cart. As Hipster designer Joel Hoag puts it: More

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Despite the fact that the New York Times felt they not only had valid, but legal reasons to exclude a story from British online readers, legal and media experts are concerned there are new questions being raised by this action. While the Times blocked the story from their site, British newspapers the Times and the Daily Mail published details in print from the Times article.

Media lawyer Mark Stephens of Finer, Stephens, Innocent said he could not see anything wrong with the blocked New York Times article and the decision by British papers to print similar details showed the contempt of court law may be the problem.

“It’s probably unhelpful to have an area of law which is so uncertain where one set of lawyers is saying censor everything while another says there’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. Source: Yahoo! News

We Say: There’s another comment in the story which indicates that blocking the story may actually heighten interest in it … and I agree. It’s not like someone who tried hard enough couldn’t find details from the Times story online somewhere else.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Looks like Amazon.com is going to let you build your own store of their products. This is actually not a new concept and comes about a week after dot-bomb survivor Vstore.com annouced it was folding. I always liked the Vstore model - you build a store that has your logo and merchandise (that really just comes from VStore) and then launch it and when people buy you get a cut. Pretty much like being a storefront for Amazon. Which you now can.

Earlier this month Amazon also lanched contextual ad units, called Omakase. The ad units are not compatible with Google or Yahoo’s contextual ad programs and will not appear here. The Google police are too tough to mess with after being dropped once already!

We Say: Prepare for thousands of mini Amazons all over the place. VStore, I feel for you. You were truly ahead of your time. And for the contextual ad units - Amazon, what took you so long???

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

I wrote earlier about a UK worker being fired by text message. It was a body piercing studio, not necessarily a big company, so I might be able to forgive (somethat) that offense. But a company as large as Radio Shack delivering pink slips in email?

Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters received an e-mail Tuesday morning telling them they were being dismissed immediately. “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress,” the notice stated. “Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.” Source: ABC News

We Say: According to the article, employees were told to expect layoff notification electronically, but please … can you be more impersonal? At least take the time to talk to the employee face-to-face and try to soften the blow.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Like most people, I hated the compact fluorescent bulb or CFL when it first came out, and to be honest, for some time after that. They were priced high but packaged in a gimmicky way that made me suspicious. Most hotels uesd them and it felt like it took five minutes for the light to come on and when it did, there was not much light, and it was not a warm looking lighting color. And then the price - at double or even three times the cost, who would take the chance on a bulb that would last years when there was little known about them? So I stayed away.

How wrong I was. Here is a great round-up of facts from FastCompany that may change the way you think of these bulbs.

1. If every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people.

2. Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.

3. A $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months.
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By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

They had a good reason to exclude British readers, though. The New York Times used targeted advertising technology, tweaked of course, to prevent British readers from reading information that technically would be prejudicial in the trial of the airline terror suspects in that country.

“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,” is the message they would have seen. “This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”

Richard J. Meislin, the paper’s associate managing editor for Internet publishing, said the technological hurdle was surmounted by using some of The Times’s Web advertising technology. The paper could already discern the Internet address of users connecting to the site to deliver targeted marketing, and could therefore deliver targeted editorial content as well. That took several hours of programming. Source: The New York Times

We Say: Huh, advertising tech being used for something other than just putting banner ads into my browser. Cool!